Before we start, one thing worth being honest about. We have walked two long-distance trails so far. There are people who have done dozens and can compare them from years of experience. We are not those people.
What we can tell you is what choosing your first multi-day hike feels like when you genuinely have no idea what you are doing. And because we only have two behind us, we still remember exactly which parts caught us out.
Why the Great Ocean Walk
In 2014 we were living in Abu Dhabi and had just been granted permanent residency for Australia, which came with a condition attached. We had to physically set foot in the country before a certain date for the visa to become valid.
So, there was a trip we had to make anyway. We had also been talking for years about doing a proper multi-day hike, and this suddenly gave us a reason to stop talking about it and pick one.
Jay did most of the research and came back with the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria: about 100 kilometers over eight days, following the coast from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles. On paper it ticked the boxes we thought mattered most: the dates worked, the daily distances looked manageable, we could get there without a car, and we could book the campsites.
What we looked at the first time
Looking back, our decision came down to four practical things.
1) When we could go. We had some flexibility because we only needed to enter Australia within the year after our visa was granted, so we could choose a time that suited the hike. We settled on March, after the worst of the summer heat and before the Victorian winter. We knew coastal Victoria could throw several kinds of weather at us in a single day, so we planned for warm, wet, windy and cold rather than one neat forecast.
2) The distance and the number of days. Around 100 kilometers over eight days sounded manageable to two people who had never done a multi-day hike before, and choosing something that felt achievable on paper gave us room to learn without making the whole thing intimidating before we even started.
3) Whether we could get there and home without a car. We could reach the start by public transport and take a bus back from the finish, which mattered because we had no intention of hiring a car just to leave it sitting for eight days. It is easy to focus entirely on the trail itself, but on a point-to-point hike the transport at both ends can decide whether the whole plan works.
4) Whether we could actually book it. The campsites on the Great Ocean Walk have to be reserved in advance and there are not many of them, so part of choosing the trail was confirming we could get the nights we needed on the dates we had. If a trail needs booking, the booking window is part of the trail.
What we got right, mostly by accident
Somehow, we got the basics right. We had gear that worked, almost all of it bought in Melbourne the day after we landed and only a few days before we started walking. We had enough food — far more than enough, as it turned out — and the daily distances were genuinely manageable even though neither of us had trained for a single day.
What we got wrong
Definitely our backpacks! Maud’s was about 16 kilos and Jay’s somewhere between 18 and 20. A commonly used rule of thumb in hiking is to keep a loaded backpack to around 20% of your body weight, although this is a guideline rather than a hard rule and what is manageable differs from person to person. Either way, ours were heavier than they needed to be: too much food, too many clothes, and a quantity of things that never came out of the bag.
We were also entirely untrained. We had done plenty of day walks, but we had never walked eight days in a row with weight on our backs, which puts a very different kind of strain on your body. It is something we would now test at home before committing to a longer route by walking several days in succession, wearing the shoes and carrying roughly the weight we expect to take.
The steps, and the photograph
The Great Ocean Walk follows the coastline, which sounds gentle and is not. It goes up and down, and up and down, and up again, and a great deal of the up is done on wooden steps built for legs longer than Maud’s.
On one of those days she was somewhere in the middle of a long flight of them, exhausted and getting nowhere, and Jay was already at the top. He had arrived well ahead of her, which almost never happened, and he decided this was a lovely moment for a photograph.
We had been together eleven years and had never once raised our voices at each other. That afternoon, halfway up those steps, a considerable amount of swearing came out of Maud’s mouth, along with several names for Jay that had not previously featured in the relationship. If there had been a bus waiting at the top of that hill, she would have been on it.
We still have the photograph. We have never had an argument like it before or since, and we were able to laugh about it not long after.
The number we should have looked at
Here is the thing about the Great Ocean Walk. There is no single big climb that makes the route look intimidating. On an elevation profile stretched across roughly 100 kilometers, it can look deceptively gentle.
What that profile does not show very well is how often you climb and descend. Short, steep rises repeat throughout the day, and over eight days they add up. That was the number we had not really understood: cumulative elevation, not maximum elevation.
Squashed onto one page, a hundred kilometers of coastal ups and downs looks like a gentle wobble. On the ground it is a wooden staircase, and then another one.
One simple way to sense-check a route is Naismith’s rule: allow roughly an hour for every five kilometers on relatively easy ground, then add around an hour for every 600 meters of climbing. It is only a rough planning tool. A heavy pack, difficult terrain, heat, altitude and tired legs can all change the result. But it forces you to look beyond distance alone, which is the useful part. Two twenty-kilometer days are not necessarily the same.
What changed by our second multi-day hike
Seven years later, when we chose the Larapinta Trail in 2021, our planning looked very different. The full route is around 230 kilometers and we gave ourselves fourteen days through the West MacDonnell Ranges. We were traveling around Australia at the time and both badly wanted to see the Red Centre.
That is a longer story we will tell properly another time, but Larapinta belongs here because it showed us what we had actually learned since the Great Ocean Walk.
The season chose the dates, not the other way around. Larapinta is a desert walk, so winter was the sensible window and everything else had to fit around that.
Back then a permit was all you needed. These days you book and pay — which is its own small lesson, because trail rules change and somebody’s trip report from a few years ago is not a reliable guide to how you arrange yours.
Our packs were much lighter, mainly because we could drop off resupplies along the route, so the most we ever carried was five days of food. Maud’s came in around 12 kilos and Jay’s around 16, the difference being the camera and the drone, which needed its own permit to fly.
We still took too much food. Maud is simply afraid of not having enough, and seven years had not fixed it.
And then, in the middle of an Australian winter, there was a heatwave. We walked several days far in the twenty degrees, including one thirty-kilometer day through a valley with almost no shade. Our sleeping bags were far too warm. We had chosen the season for exactly the right reasons and the weather simply ignored us.
That became another planning lesson: choose the right season, but pack for the realistic range of conditions rather than the average.
What we remember most, though, is how alive the desert was. Little birds everywhere, flowers, and views that stopped us both. Having lived in Abu Dhabi and camped in the desert there many times, we were used to desert nights becoming surprisingly cold. We had expected the same on the Larapinta, because that was also what we had read beforehand, but the heatwave meant the evenings stayed much warmer than we expected.
That trail is also where we learned that there is a kilometer, and then there is a Larapinta kilometer. It was beautifully marked the whole way. The last one before camp still went on forever, every single day.
What we would look at now
We still would not pretend there is one perfect formula for choosing a multi-day hike. But if we were choosing our next one tonight, these are the things we would check before booking anything.
- Elevation as well as distance. We used to look at kilometers first. Now we look at the elevation profile alongside them: total ascent, how that climbing is distributed, and whether the day contains one steady climb or constant short ups and downs. Distance tells you how far you are going; elevation tells you much more about how that distance may feel.
- What the ground is made of. Twenty kilometers on a smooth track is not the same as twenty kilometers of steps, scree, roots, sand or rough rock. Maps rarely communicate this particularly well, so look at route photographs and current trail information as well as the numbers.
- Posted times, checked against your own pace. Treat signposted times and app estimates as a reference, not a promise. Compare them with your usual pace on similar terrain and, if useful, run the day through a simple method such as Naismith’s rule. If the numbers are very different, work out why before you commit to the stage.
- What the difficulty rating actually means. “Moderate” is only useful if you understand the grading system behind it. Different countries, parks and route providers classify trails differently, so we look beyond the label at distance, elevation, exposure, terrain and any technical sections. The rating is a starting point, not the whole answer.
- Where you can get off. We would always check the exit points on a multi-day hike. How far apart are they? Can you reach a road, village or public transport partway through the route? You may never need them, but understanding your options matters if plans change, the weather turns, or there is an emergency.
- Season, weather and daylight. Check when the route is normally walkable, but also what conditions can realistically occur within that window. The season affects heat, snow, daylight, water availability and what you need to carry. We chose winter for Larapinta for exactly the right reasons and still walked several days in a heatwave. Plan for the plausible range, not just the average.
- Whether the trail is currently open. Closures, damaged sections, snow, fire, maintenance and seasonal facilities can all affect a route. Before you leave, check the organization that actually manages the trail rather than relying only on an older blog post or trip report.
- What the current rules are. Permits, camping rules, booking systems and fees change. What applied when somebody walked a trail several years ago may not apply now. Always check the current requirements with whoever manages the route before planning around an older trip report — including ours.
- Whether you can resupply. Food and water are usually among the heaviest things in your pack. Being able to buy food, collect a food drop or refill along the route can change your pack weight dramatically, so work out the resupply options before assuming you have to carry everything from day one.
- Camping, huts or something else. First find out what is actually possible along the trail. Some routes have a network of huts or refuges, some have designated campsites, some allow camping only in certain places, and others have no huts at all. Local rules can also determine whether wild camping is permitted. Once you know the options, you can decide what suits you: huts can mean a lighter pack, a bed and sometimes meals, while camping usually means carrying more but gives you a different kind of experience. Neither is more authentic than the other; what matters is choosing an option that is allowed on the trail and works for the experience you want.
- And the one we would still never skip: how do you get to the start and home from the finish? Transport has influenced how we plan both of our long-distance hikes. On the Larapinta Trail, it was one of the reasons we chose to start at Mount Sonder and walk towards Alice Springs. Finishing closer to town gave us more flexibility at the end of the hike, including the option to add an extra day if we needed it, without having to worry about missing pre-arranged transport from a remote trailhead.
- Technical sections. On a first multi-day hike, we would avoid learning a completely new technical skill at the same time. If the route includes exposed scrambling, via ferrata, glacier travel or anything else you have never done before, either choose a different route or learn that skill separately with appropriate instruction first.
Choosing the first one
Train close to home, carrying the pack you actually plan to use. Then choose somewhere that makes you want to go.
It does not need to be far away or famous. What matters is that the logistics work, the difficulty feels realistic, and the route excites you enough to keep walking when the weather changes or the next staircase appears.
The Dolomites are more or less on our doorstep now, and we intend to spend the next few years walking them properly, because living near a place and knowing it on foot are not the same thing at all.
Ours was a coastline on the other side of the world, picked mainly because the dates lined up. We would choose it again. The most important thing is to go out there and enjoy the great outdoors!
Happy Trails,
Jay & Maud