2023 Cape to Cape Walk
Qantas planes at Airport
Sometimes the logistics of planning for a hike can be more difficult than the hike itself and with thee Cape to Cape walk in Western Australia the planning, at one point, got to a stage where I was seriously looking at alternative hikes. To set the context, we needed to add some extra time at the beginning of the Easter holiday period which was the easy part.
Where things started to get tricky was that we need to to be in Canberra by Easter Monday at the latest to cater for work commitments. So holidays booked I started to work backwards from Easter Monday on what I thought would be an easy task. This was when I discovered that the commercial transport options from our initial plan of Perth to Augusta and then hiking north wasn’t going to work. The campsite I was planning on using was booked up (weekend traffic) and this forced me to then look at an alternate day and surprise, surprise the transport doesn’t run on Saturdays. Plan B was starting from Dunsborough and I still had the same issues, no public transport on Saturdays!
This is where I started to go into a flat spin and looked at different trails around the country without much joy. I can remember from last year that this time of the year isn’t the easiest with many trails undergoing high levels of maintenance and burn offs that make things difficult. After a good night sleep I got up and spent a good part of the morning revisiting the whole process and discovered that there are direct flights from Canberra to Perth and surprisingly enough it was at the end of my last working day so didn’t require extra holiday time. This ended up being a good outcome because it will allow us to start the walk from Dunsborough and hike to Augusta. This is a day earlier than planned and means that not only do we have extra time up our sleeve, we also travel home earlier than we expected which takes the pressure off the whole walk. In addition, the accomodation options and distances travelled worked out better. North to south is a rarity given I like to walk home but in this case we’re heading the opposite direction than I would originally do.
The trip south at the start involves a train then bus so we really do have the whole concept of ‘planes, trains and automobiles’. Our trip back is just in reverse and actually takes longer as we have around a four hour layover before we catch the bus back to Perth.
Distance wise we are planning on completing this walk in six days with distance travelled ranging from 10.3km on the first day, first half day really as we get of the bus, pick up gas for our stove, and head off on the trail head then onto our first campsite. The travel days vary:
- Day 1 10.3km
- Day 2 22.8km
- Day 3 18.8km
- Day 4 27.4km
- Day 5 20.9km
- Day 6 24km
One really big day, one short day, and the rest longish but manageable days. All that remains is to look at the food we’ll carry and check where we can pick up the odd lunch or dinner along the way.
Sometimes the logistics of planning for a hike can be more difficult than the hike itself and with thee Cape to Cape walk in Western Australia the planning, at one point, got to a stage where I was seriously looking at alternative hikes. To set the context, we needed to add some extra time at […]