It has been twelve years since we did our first multi-day hike, and while Tell Your Trail was eventually born from this walk, we realized recently that we have never actually written about it properly. We have shared bits and pieces over the years, but never the full story or what the experience was really like.
Now, as you can imagine, after twelve years we definitely cannot remember the hike day by day. What we do remember are the moments, the emotions and all the little things that somehow stuck. It is still a hike we look back on incredibly fondly. We did so much wrong, we were young and naïve, and we had absolutely no idea what eight days of carrying everything on our backs was going to feel like.
So here it is, finally: our Great Ocean Walk.
How we ended up in Australia
Back in 2014 we were living in Abu Dhabi and had just been granted permanent residency for Australia. To activate it, we needed to physically enter the country within a certain period, so a trip to Australia was on the cards anyway.
We had also been talking for quite a while about doing our first proper multi-day hike, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally stop talking about it and actually go.
After some research, Jay came across the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria: just over 100 kilometers along the coast from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles, usually walked over around eight days.
Read more about how we chose our first multi-day hike here.
On our way to Australia we stopped in Singapore. We had lived there for a little while back in 2008 and could not resist the chance to go back and see our friends again before continuing on to Melbourne.
Shopping for a hike in Melbourne
We already had our backpacks, hiking boots and shoes, sleeping bags and most of the clothes we needed. Our backpacks certainly were not new; they had already followed us around the world by this point. But Abu Dhabi and Dubai did not have all the hiking and camping equipment we needed for eight days on the trail, so we flew to Melbourne with a very long shopping list.
Looking back, that was quite a gamble and after landing, we spent an entire day walking around Melbourne from one outdoor shop to the next with our list in hand. We needed things like a tent, sleeping mats, a stove and all the other bits and pieces required to be self-sufficient for eight days. If we could not find something important, there was not really a plan B.
Luckily, we managed to find everything we needed, and after that came the food: freeze-dried dinners, instant noodles, oats, crackers, peanut butter, muesli bars and an amount of chocolate we are not going to admit to here.
We laid everything out across the hotel bed and that was probably the first moment we started wondering whether we were actually going to be able to carry all of this for eight days. Once everything was packed, the backpacks were so heavy that getting them onto our backs was an exercise in itself. Maud's weighed around 16 kilos and Jay's somewhere between 18 and 20, and for the entire hike Maud needed Jay's help to get hers on and off, which somehow seemed perfectly acceptable to us at the time and is fairly hilarious looking back now.
Apollo Bay, an ice cream and a snake
The bus took us from Melbourne down to Apollo Bay, and the start of the hike was very relaxed. We went into the Visitor Centre to ask our last few questions and then sat outside in the sunshine eating an ice cream, which was not exactly how either of us had pictured the beginning of our first multi-day hike but turned out to be a very nice way to start.
At the trailhead there was a big sign reading GREAT OCEAN WALK, 91 KM, which confused us slightly because we knew perfectly well that the route we had planned was more than 100 kilometers. We had researched the walk, knew where we were finishing and knew roughly how far we were going, so seeing the old 91-kilometer sign came as a bit of a surprise.
Naturally, we took a photo next to it anyway, both of us grinning and very excited to finally get started.
We stepped onto the first boardwalk of the trail and almost immediately found a snake on our path, quickly making its way to safety as we approached. It was a very Australian way to start our first multi-day hike and certainly made sure we were paying attention from the very beginning.
Eight days along the coast
The Great Ocean Walk follows Victoria's coastline for much of the route, and for us it was the views from the cliffs across the ocean that made the walk so memorable.
We spent an enormous amount of those eight days simply stopping and looking. Clifftops, beaches, waves crashing below us and stretches of coastline with hardly anybody else around are still some of the images we remember most clearly twelve years later.
There was one section where the trail headed inland through gum forest. It was flatter, easier and probably should have been a welcome break for our legs, but we missed the coastal views and, if we are honest, found it a little bit boring compared with the sections closer to the ocean.
One thing that did become something of a recurring joke was our ability to choose the worst possible place to stop for lunch. Most days we would eventually get tired and hungry enough to drop the backpacks at some random spot beside the trail, sit on the ground and eat whatever we had brought for lunch. More than once we would then struggle back into our packs, walk another few hundred meters and discover a perfectly good bench or picnic table waiting just around the corner. It became one of those things we should probably have learned from after the first couple of times, but somehow never did.
Life at the campsites
The hike-in campsites were simple but incredibly welcome at the end of a day of walking. The ones we stayed at had a sheltered area with a table and benches, which meant we had somewhere to cook, get out of the rain or sun and sit for a while without carrying our backpacks.
There were only a handful of other people walking the same sections at roughly the same pace as us. Because everyone was covering similar distances each day, we would arrive at camp and see many of the same faces again, and by the third or fourth day it started to feel like a little traveling village. People would slowly appear during the afternoon, drop their packs and compare stories about how the day had gone.
One afternoon we arrived at a campsite on an inlet much earlier than usual. We pulled off our boots, took our books down to the jetty and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting there with our feet hanging over the water. If we could choose one afternoon from those eight days to live again, it would probably be that one.
The wildlife we weren't looking for
The wildlife mostly appeared when we were not looking for it. We had a koala and a wallaby around one of the campsites, and after a heavy rainstorm one day an echidna crossed the trail in front of us.
We also discovered a scorpion while packing up the tent one morning, which is probably one of the least reassuring times to realize that one has been somewhere around your campsite during the night. We would have been perfectly happy never knowing it was there.
Four seasons in one day
We had heard plenty about Victoria's famous four seasons in one day before starting the hike, and at some point the weather decided to demonstrate exactly what everyone meant.
One day started with the sun pounding down on us and very little shade, before the weather changed completely and the rain started. It continued for long enough that we ended up cold and soaked through, while parts of the trail turned into proper mudslides and resulted in a few thoroughly undignified slips and falls on the way down.
There was not much we could do other than keep going, and by the time we reached camp that evening, the simple covered table and bench waiting for us felt remarkably luxurious.
Day five, and the photograph we still talk about
By day five we had started to understand that following the coast did not mean walking on anything remotely flat. The trail was constantly going up and down, and a great deal of the climbing seemed to involve wooden staircases that were very clearly designed for legs longer than Maud's.
We were also starting to feel the combination of heavy packs and having done absolutely no training for eight consecutive days of hiking. Maud was particularly struggling with the steps, which seemed to get bigger and steeper the more tired she became.
At some point that day she was slowly making her way up one particularly long staircase with around 16 kilos on her back. Maud has always been the slower one going uphill and Jay would normally stay fairly close, but this time he had carried on and was already waiting at the top. For reasons that seemed perfectly sensible to him at the time, he decided to use the opportunity to take a photograph of Maud making her way up – Maud certainly did not share his enthusiasm.
We had been together for eleven years at that point and had never once raised our voices at each other, but halfway up those steps a truly impressive quantity of swearing came out of Maud's mouth. Had there been a bus waiting at the top of the hill, there is a very good chance she would have got straight on it.
We still have the photograph and have never had an argument quite like it before or since. Thankfully, we were able to laugh about it again fairly quickly.
The number we had underestimated
Part of the problem was that we had looked at the Great Ocean Walk and thought: coast.
Nothing on the trail is particularly high, so before we left it simply did not occur to us that the climbing would be something we needed to worry much about. What we had not really understood was cumulative elevation.
The trail constantly drops towards beaches, coves and river crossings before climbing back onto the cliffs again. None of those climbs seems particularly significant on its own, but repeat them throughout the day for eight days, often on stairs, and your legs certainly notice.
It was one of the bigger lessons from our first multi-day hike: distance alone tells you surprisingly little about how a trail is actually going to feel.
Finally reaching the Twelve Apostles
Towards the end of the walk, we could see the Twelve Apostles from a long way off. They sat there ahead of us in the ocean looking tantalisingly close, while somehow refusing to get much closer for what felt like hours.
By the time we finally reached them, the surroundings were a complete contrast to the relative quiet of the previous eight days. There were coaches, cars and crowds of people who had arrived looking considerably cleaner than we did, while we wandered in after roughly 104 kilometers of walking and eight days without a single shower.
Standing there among everyone else, it was slightly strange to realize that our first multi-day hike was actually finished. Despite the stairs, the rain, and the heavy backpacks, we had walked all the way from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles and absolutely loved it.
The shower we had been dreaming about
We stayed at a campsite nearby that night and finally had a shower, which remains one of the best showers of our lives.
The following morning we took the bus back to Melbourne. By then Maud had been dreaming about having a proper bath for roughly a week, so arriving at the hotel and discovering there was no bath was disappointing enough. To make matters worse, the shower did not work properly either, which is a disappointment she has not entirely recovered from.
Six years later, it became a poster
We certainly did not finish the Great Ocean Walk thinking we had just found a business idea. What happened instead was that we came home with a hike we could not stop talking about.
Years passed, and in 2020 we moved into a house with a big empty wall that needed something on it. We wanted something that reminded us of the Great Ocean Walk, and specifically a poster showing the trail we had walked.
We looked around but could not find anything we wanted to put on the wall, so eventually we decided to make one ourselves. There were several versions along the way that we definitely would not show anybody today, but eventually we had a design we were really proud of and hung it on the wall.
That got us wondering whether other people might want something similar for the hikes they had done. We created around ten trail designs, opened a little online shop and started receiving orders, followed by requests for trails we had never even heard of.
That is where Tell Your Trail came from: a big empty wall, a hike we could not stop talking about, and a poster that did not exist yet.
What our first multi-day hike taught us
Looking back twelve years later, there is plenty we would do differently.
We would carry a lot less. Maud's 16-kilo pack and Jay's 18-to-20-kilo pack were far heavier than they needed to be, and if you scroll back up to the photograph of everything spread across the hotel bed, you can probably see exactly where it all went wrong.
We would also train differently. We had done plenty of hiking before the Great Ocean Walk, but walking for eight consecutive days with a heavy backpack asks something different of your body than heading out for a single day.
And we would never again look at a coastal trail, see that nothing on it is particularly high and assume that means it will be easy on the legs.
We have learned plenty since then, and we have put those lessons into a separate Field Guide about what we now look at when choosing a multi-day hike.
But would we choose the Great Ocean Walk again as our first one? Absolutely. We got things wrong, carried too much, underestimated the stairs, fell over in the mud, and met a snake within minutes of starting. But, twelve years later, we still look back at the trail fondly – often sharing some great memories.
Happy Trails,
Jay & Maud
