In the meantime, I am heading off next week to Cooper Pedy, where I have been privileged to be invited to  walk with a charity called Delhuntie, who focus on working with teenagers who have faced personal challenges in their home lives.  We will be walking from Cooper Pedy to William Creek, and back again – about 170km each way.  I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to simply go for a walk – all I have to do is carry my own gear every day!  Somebody else is cooking, setting up camp – now, THIS is the kind of walking I could get used to.

It is a wonderful thought to be only days away from sleeping in the Big Empty again, and this time in my own country.  Fantastic.

In the meantime, I am aware that life will start to move very quickly when I get back – I am working the ski season on Mt Buller again, and then going back to the UK when I finish the winter.  I have a lot of ideas in the pipeline, and yet again, as if I am at the beginning of my journey, the UK seems the best place to organise them all from.

When I post again, I hope I will have some photos to show you of the desert here in beautiful Australia, and some new stories to tell.  And in the meantime – I wish you all well, and hope you are having adventures of your own.

Thanks to all of you who have contacted me to wish me luck.  If I don’t answer my phone this evening it is because I am on the other one!

Cheers

Paula

Peter Thompson is the interviewer.  I’ve not yet seen the final product, but in essence the program covers my early life and family background (they’re game, aren’t they??) and on into the Sahara walk and where I am currently at.

I found out today that Niger is moving closer to democratic rule again.  Whilst things are highly dodgy in the North of the country, as they always were, it does look slightly more positive.  I hate these bits of news as much as I love them – just when I give up on the whole thing, news arrives that makes my heart jump again.  I can’t let it go, no matter how much I would sometimes like to.

Anyway, I hope you can all tune in.

Cheers

My major consideration is walking something that is good to write about.  From this perspective, it would seem to me that the Appalachian is a great one – offering lots of weird and wonderful characters along the way, and plenty of scope for writing.  But the Continental Divide Trail seems a truly beautiful walk, and challenging in other ways.

I guess I am more interested in encountering people than wildlife – I draw much of my fascination in travel from finding odd and intriguing characters, and although I love my time out walking in solitude, I love also the constant company of those I encounter.

Having never spent a long time in the States, I would love to hear from anyone who has walked either of these trails, and could give me a little insight into the relative merits.

Email me directly, paula@constanttrek.com, or just add a comment to this site.

Thanks…

Paula

ABC TV got in touch this week, and have invited me on to the Talking Heads program, which I am thoroughly over excited about.  I really do need to learn to be rather more cool about these things, but it’s not in my nature unfortunately; I just raced off last night to have a beer at the local pub and tell all the blokes about it.

You might get a laugh at the reaction, the discussion went something like this:

Paula: Guess what Dicko?  ABC want to interview me!

Dicko (local pub goer):  About what?

Paula (somewhat deflated):  You know, that walk I did.

Dicko:  What walk?

Paula: Um, the one I wrote the books about?

Dicko:  Did you write a book did you?  Huh.Yeah, well, that sounds good, doesn’t it.  Hey – by the way, I think your starter motor needs looking at, I could hear the vehicle labouring the other day….

Yep.

Let’s just say it is safe to assume that fame is not likely to bowl me over in my hometown any time soon.

Equally as exciting, the Melbourne Emerging Writers’ Festival also got in touch, and I am going to be a panelist for their Travel forum at the Festival later this year.  This is the first time I have been involved in a writers’ festival, and I am seriously looking forward to it.  I’m a little worried I will be thoroughly outclassed by a multitude of black clothes wearing, terribly serious intellectuals, who read Kant in the original whilst watching European arthouse films – this is Melbourne in winter, after all – but I shall endeavour to hold my own.

You can come and have a right good laugh at me if you want.

For something entirely different, this weekend there are two fabulous events on in my hometown.  On Saturday, the famous (infamous?) Merrijig Rodeo is set to have the district looking even more like an audition for Brokeback Mountain than it usually does; and on Sunday, everybody with a semblance of brain and tastebuds will head out to the base of Mt Buller for Picnic in the Park.  It is such a wonderful day – every food producer and winemaker in the district has a stall showcasing their wares, and one simply wanders through glorious surroundings eating beautiful things and tasting divine wine.

Tough call.

I guess I am shamelessly plugging Mansfield and Merrijig, but honestly, we are so lucky to live somewhere so magnificent.  Every day I look out the window at the mountains changing colour with the day, and listen to the river burbling at the bottom of the yard, and think that it is nigh on impossible to envisage a more stunning place to rest and relax.

Graeme comes up when he can, and I go to Melbourne often to see him and the kids – but even though the Dandenongs are beautiful in their own way, nothing is quite so peaceful and soothing than the place I grew up.  Not to mention all the wonderful people I love who live here.  No place like home, I guess.

For those who have ordered books from me this week – for some odd reason there has been a real rush on – there will be a slight delay whilst I wait for more books to be shipped from Melbourne.  I apologise for any inconvenience, and they will be delivered within the next ten days.

Have a great long weekend….

This post is a combination of a promise I made to a reader a while ago and have yet felt able to fulfil; and also by way of sharing the excitement of new ideas.

Some weeks ago, I received this email from Melissa Layton after she finished reading Sahara (here in part)

What I really wanted to read about, however, was how you fitted back into life after the trek. How you felt and feel now. I’m sure others would also be interested in reading about that as well. I’m sure that the trek completely changed who you are and made you interact with the world in a different way. Perhaps that internal change is still happening. Anyway, it would be interesting to read about if you would like to write about it.

I promised her a response and asked her permission to put the email on here, as I am frequently asked the same question.

It is one I have had great difficulty in answering; not least because sometimes it has had me close to tears!

Coming back was far harder than I ever thought it would be.  After the initial rush of relief that I could eat what I wanted, sleep when I wanted, and get my body well again, other things began to creep in.

It became clear after a couple of months that my walk would not continue that October as I had planned.  This was devastating; I didn’t want to start writing Sahara because I felt that if I did, I would somehow curse myself and not be able to finish – and yet I wanted very much to describe how it was out there.  I came home to the launch of ‘Slow Journey South’, and yet it felt like a lifetime ago.  I was doing interviews about a journey that was long over, not to mention a marriage that was long over.  I didn’t enjoy that experience a great deal.

My father became terminally ill only weeks after I came home, and I spent the following Christmas in the UK with him.  He died the following January; it was awful for all of us, and particularly for his wonderful wife, Ela, who did not get the time with him they so deserved to enjoy together.

I came back to Australia and moved into my partner (Graeme)’s house.  Suddenly I had two teenage children, Graeme’s mother, two dogs and a whole new life to contend with.  With the best will in the world, I reckon the Sahara was easier!

I settled in to write the book, and found it dreadfully difficult.  Slow Journey South had rolled onto the page effortlessly.  The start of Sahara really dragged, for me; I hated – and I really do mean hated – writing about my marriage break up.  It was traumatic, embarassing, worrying, and just plain hard work to do.  It was also very tough walking out of the study and coming downstairs to a life where nobody knew how it had been, except Graeme to some degree; I talked about the walk very little (outside of media) when I got back, and so not many people had much understanding of what I had really been doing for the last couple of years.

I also hadn’t really lived in Australia for nearly 8 years.  I had few close friends, and those I fell back in with, had not been at all close to the walk.  Sometimes it felt as if the whole thing had never happened, had been some kind of bizarre dream.

I had a lot of bad dreams.  Graeme, who has done some pretty hairy adventuring in his time, told me more than once that he thought I was suffering a bit of post traumatic style fall out.  Of course, I was dreadfully disparaging about such comments, and promptly told him I thought that all of that was a load of old bollocks (as I sucked heavily on another bottle of red).

But there was no getting around some of the stranger, and funnier things: I spent months falling out of bed in the middle of the night, being used to sleeping on the ground; Graeme woke up more than once with me poised over the top of him with an imaginary knife in hand, certain he was a bandit come to steal my camels; and I frequently had a weird, repetitive dream that simply involved terror, and flames.

It was only when I finally wrote my book that I realised that dream was about when I was unconscious, and sick.  In all that time – over a year by that point since the walk – I had never remembered that time.  I’d been asked so often when it was that I was most afraid, and found the question impossible to answer – I usually said that I wasn’t really.  The real answer is that it was then.  When I was sick.  I have never been so terrified in my life.

But there were other things that were strange, and sometimes sad.  I would walk down a city street and see a woman who I knew, from her features and dress, was from one of the cultures I had walked through.  I would feel a rush of recognition, and smile in anticipation, ready to greet as I would in the desert; only to find her turning away hastily from my approach, probably wondering who the weird white woman was – but for different reasons than before!  I felt alienated from both cultures – my own, and the ones that had welcomed me so kindly.

In the meantime, I was trying to work out how to financially survive.  I discovered that teaching wasn’t an option anymore without further training.  I began doing some speaking work; but I found (and still find) it hard to self promote.  I love the talking aspect, it is the sales pitch I struggle with!  And above all, I began to recognize that the Sahara simply may not ever be a real option for return.

My life was on hold, and I got pretty down.  I wondered what to do with this website, what to do if I had no walk, what the hell to do in general.

I finished writing Sahara in September 2008, and went to Broome straight away.  I needed to clear my head, and I had got into my mind that if I wasn’t walking with camels in Africa, then I could certainly do it here instead – something I had thought of often out in the Big Empty.

But several months later, I began to realise that something was missing for me with this walk; something didn’t really feel right.

Last year (as I have heard it was for a lot of people!) was a serious low point.  I found it hard to feel enthusiastic about the book coming out – I was terrified that people would judge me harshly, or that I had not described the walk well enough.  There was so much that I had to leave out of the book for sheer want of space, and in a journey which felt like every single day was a huge adventure, it seemed impossible to convey the whole.

In many ways, I felt that if I let go of the Saharan walk, that I was giving up on everything I had fought for.  Any other project seemed a real waste of time; all I wanted, I told myself, was my ending, the point when I KNEW the walk was really over, and could get on with life.

It had been so long since I finished the book until it came out, that I had stopped talking about it much at all.  As I said, for a lot of people – even those close to me – the walk was something I finished ages ago; not something that still lived, breathed, and me up inside.  By the time Sahara was released, my confidence was at rock bottom, and I really doubted that anybody would be very interested.

I can’t tell you what a difference the book has made.  For the first time, friends I haven’t heard from in years have phoned up, and laughed when they told me it was just like sitting in the pub and hearing me talk.  People I am close to finally understand how it was for me out there, and that is just the most enormous relief.  Every email I get from readers raises my spirits a bit more; every affirmation that the book is interesting boosts me up and encourages me to think forwards.

So, as to how do I feel now?  Well – right now, I feel better than I ever have since the walk finished.  I live half my time at Graeme’s and half up at my home town of Mansfield, which I completely love.  Graeme is completely supportive of anything (or any mad idea) I get in my head, and so I feel free to dream and scheme.

Right now, that dreaming has led me to begin researching and planning a walk along the Appalachian Trail in America.  I have heard about it often, and more than anything, I just want a simple walk that helps to clear the cobwebs away.  I don’t want a massive expedition, just a well planned, physically challenging, socially interesting walk that I can enjoy, and write about.  the trail including the Canadian section (IAP) runs just under 3000 miles, so it offers plenty of time for navel gazing, my favourite occupation.  I don’t want to stick my neck right out and say: yep, this is definitely what I will be doing next March; but right now, I feel pretty good about it.  I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I am planning on working back at Mt Buller during the ski season, mainly because my stepdaughter Chloe will never forgive me if I don’t get her free tickets to snowboard.  Oh, I should have added that – the kids have been one of the greatest joys about living back here.  Even if they do think I am barmy.

I finally feel as if things are beginning to take shape again, after what has felt a long time in the wilderness.  I just finished reading the audio version of Sahara out loud; it was far, far harder than I thought it would be, and to my utter mortification, more than once I had to leave the little recording room for a breath of fresh air when the emotion got to me.  I think it may well be the most cathartic thing I have done, and the reason I am feeling so light and unburdened.  Somehow reading it was far more powerful than writing it, and in doing so, I think I put a lot of demons to rest.  If you ever listen to it, do forgive me on the last page.  It took me about ten goes to get through those paragraphs.  I’d never been able to read it since I wrote it, and it was bloody hard reading it out loud.

So, after beginning my research, I came across this guy: Ray Jardine.  And became kind of obsessed!  I wish to hell I had stumbled across him before I set out from Trafalgar Square.  Without rabbiting on, he pioneered a system of trekking ‘ultralight’ – hiking with incredibly light, efficient equipment, that he has designed himself.  I am taking his approach right on board, and plan to use all his gear on the AT – which, incidentally, he is walking again (for the third or so time) next month.

I have that rolling feeling I get when ideas begin to really come together, and make me excited.

So I guess that – today, anyway – when you ask me how I am feeling, I would say:  fantastic.  And if you asked me what the next book will be, I would say: about nutty Yanks on the Appalachian Trail (please please don’t send me hate mail, lovely American folk, it is a bad Australian joke).

And in the meantime – thankyou, every single person, who has bothered to write or talk to me about Sahara, and how you enjoyed it.  It means so very much to me.

Cheers.

Firstly, a young man by the name of Christian Bodegren set out from Cairo with camels last October. He had planned to walk my route in reverse, and I was watching him keenly, not least because I felt that if he succeeded in getting into Niger, that I would be duty bound to follow! But as of this week, Christian has announced that he is halting his expedition, having walked from the Red Sea into Libya. He is facing all the same bureaucratic nightmares I did in that part of the world, and is unsure if he will be able to continue.

Another adventurer, Mikael Strandberg, has also put his planned expedition on hold. He had proposed a mammoth trip from The Middle East across into the Sahara of Northern Africa. After two solid years of planning and fundraising, he has been forced into reconsidering, as a result of funding and bureaucratic issues.

All of this may sound like I am gloating over the misfortune of others. But that is not even close. Both these gentlemen are wonderful people, with solid experience and generous spirits. My heart goes out to them both, as I know firsthand the dreadful, crushing disappointment that heralds the end of an expedition, or idea.

I have dealt with it a lot the last couple of years; trying to go back to the Sahara, and finding it impossible; trying to organise a walk through the Australian desert, and getting utterly fed up with the bureaucratic issues involved in that. Most of all, I guess, beginning to realise that I didn’t actually WANT to walk through the Australian desert – and nor did I want a big ‘expedition’.

At the moment, I just want another low key stroll. I am thinking about doing another Camino, or maybe the Appalachian trail. I am thinking about a lot of things that don’t involve big money, or big dramas. I just want some space to clear my head, and maybe to write another book.

I have been really thrilled with the great reviews and feedback for Sahara, and it also feels like time for me to let go of that experience, and that book, for a while. I need to redefine myself, and find what my next adventure is. I am beginning to realise that trying to fight the need inside me to walk, is like trying to hold back a tidal wave. I am stupidly independent. I have found a few online reviewers who have described me as ’selfish’, and I rather suspect they are right. Compromise is not my strong suit, and I like doing things my way, and doing what I know I need to. Those are selfish traits, and I am increasingly claiming them as my own. Oddly, I find, men are rarely accused of being selfish. They are ‘driven’, or ‘powerful’, or ’success oriented’. But women who chase what they want – well, we are ’selfish’.

I decided very recently that selfish it is. Being selfish cost me my marriage, and gained me a walk. No matter what the hurt, I would make the same decision again. And right now, it is time for me to be selfish again; for I have footsteps yet untread, both in my heart and on the earth.

I need to find a way to walk them again. And as soon as I do, I will let you know where….

I can also add a personal message to books if you would like – again, just email me.  I hope this helps out with all those overseas who have been asking how to get hold of a copy…

Cheers

Paula