Kokoda Trek: Day 4

To a beautiful moonlight, I woke up at 4 AM and got ready for the day. It was supposed to be a long and challenging day with two long climbs. Breakfast was at 5 AM and everybody started filing around with their tent packed and ready to leave by 5:30 AM.

The moon was full and bright. A local villager hut was playing a popular Tina Turner song at high volume as we started the hike.

As the sun was not out yet and it was dark we walked briskly and in a couple of hours reached a village by surrounded in fog. After a short break, we resumed.

Another hour of grueling climb brought us to the top of a beautiful ridge. It was very surprising to find a villager and his family at the remote ridge selling bananas, cucumbers, Galip nuts, chips, drinks and other snacks.

After refreshing break and snacks, we persisted and walked up and down many ridges until we came to a bridge. The porters had already setup a rope across it and we crossed one by one.

After long last, we arrived at the village, our lunch stop for the day. While walking to the village, we discovered that the village was very long from one end to the other, and we got to the rest spot with everybody except Travis and Matt. They had stopped at the starting part of the village and were enjoying a baby Cassowary dance for a long while, and met up with us only after the guides went looking for them. By then, we all had shopped for pineapples, galip nuts, bananas, and many of the ladies in the trek got souvenir purses hand woven by the many vendors in this biggest market of the villages we had seen so far. The 10 minutes stop had turned out to be more than an hour, making a big dent in our schedule for the day. To top it off, Hector started doing stretching exercises and inviting everybody else to join him. That added to the entertainment value, but also increased the time it would take to reach the camp today. However, the day was just beautiful, with bright sun, and the land was showing off the brightest green colors of Papua New Guinea, and we were all enjoying the moment. After this stop, we started walking and soon came to a bridge, which was supported by two big logs, and a rope tied from one end to the other. We all crossed it one by one, each closely followed by the guide to ensure nobody falls down in the deep river, which was moving with a pretty rapid current.

The next section of the climb was extremely steep. We kept going back-and-forth on switchbacks. I would take several steps and stop, out of breath. Jad, who was walking behind me, said at one of the stops, that if I walk at a constant pace, that might keep me from getting out of breath. I decided to give that a try. I started walking with my heartbeats controlling my feet and the slope controlling my stride length. What that meant was, when the slope was steep, I took short strides and when it was flat or downhill, my stride would lengthen. All the time, my heart rate was constant at about 152 bpm which allowed me to walk without stopping for 45 minutes straight. It also resulted in me not needing any push or pull from my porter as he walked constantly alongside. You can teach an old dog new tricks! We took a break at one of the flat portions after climbing the second hill of the day. Without warning, it started raining, and the pace of the rain became intense within seconds. I had brought along a rain cover for the backpack and I put it on, although I put it upside down mistakenly, and some rainwater did get through. The backpack that my porter was carrying for me was a bit away, and by the time he reached it, it was soaked, he then covered it with the rain cover and off we went. The Kokoda Trail rain had big droplets like crocodile tears and it was relentless. I am always traveling anywhere with my computer and try to use any free time to do some work, catch up on email our small tasks however, the Kokoda Trail has no cellular signal anywhere on the trail except for two points for a few minutes over the eight day span. Nevertheless, I had thought that I would still carry my laptop and work on tasks piled up over the past several weeks, those which needed no Internet signal. But when I saw the torrential rain, I was very happy that I was not getting my laptop, and the passport was safely tucked away in Port Moresby.

The nine page packing list we got from Adventure Kokoda for gear to purchase contained a hat has one item. I wondered whether to get a cap which I already had or a new Ranger hat. The Ranger hat looks very professional, but is bulkier. In the Papua New Guinea rainforest, when I experienced the heavy rain, I realized that I had made a good choice. The Ranger hat rim was a fantastic cover for the big droplets of rain and more parts of my body were safe from the rain which included my iPhone, which was in the front pocket. At the end of the the hike when are use my solar battery to charge the iPhone, I saw a message, indicating liquid was detected in the phone and charging is disabled. Anyhow, it did not destroy the phone. The dry pack had water seeped in which meant more wet and soaked clothes for the night.

Walking the trail had its multiple perils. River rocks are slippery, twigs and creepers entangled with your clothing causing falls, branches of trees overhead hit your head or forehead, huge fallen tree trunks have to be crossed carefully to avoid slipping and small shrubs act like spears, all adding to the high temperatures and humidity.

The drying area which had the fire going all night had smoke dried all of our clothes, shoes, gators, socks and sweat rags. One of the porters who was helping Amy, was so loyal that he slept next to the fire all night, and kept turning her clothes from one side to the other to ensure that in the morning, they are nice and dry for her.

I was carrying a solar powered battery which was very handy because there was a lot of patches of sun along the hike. It allowed me to charge my Apple Watch and my iPhone all the time every day from 0% to 100%, it also enabled me to take as many videos and pictures as I could for everybody. The added advantage of the Apple Watch that was that I could constantly get indications of how long we had walked and what my heart rate was. Usually when it was 176, I would stop, and when it came down to 160 or so I would start walking.

A trick I used was to count steps on flat surfaces. I can usually walk 100+ steps in the mucky areas but on hilly areas it’s sometimes 10 steps owed by a stop because the heartrate is already too high. At the start of the day the heart rate used to go up to 160 or so with 40 steps and that seemed like an excellent pace.

Other areas to save energy was to take smaller steps. There were many tree roots at different levels, and you could save a step by using the tree root on a higher level but then your net energy loss was higher. As I faltered and slipped multiple times, my really good porter was always behind me supporting when I was teetering off a tree root by gently pushing my backpack, or walking ahead of me ready with his hand outstretched when he anticipated I needed a pull up.

We heard many bird calls, some times of the bird of paradise. It was very hard to spot them through the dense foliage. Their calls to each other very melodious and I tried to capture them on the phone’s voice memo. Playing the memos back, all I could hear was my labored breathing.

Another benefit of my Apple Watch was its alarm when my blood sugar got very low. This was a very infrequent occurring for me. But it happened four times just in a few hours of walking. I guess the high humidity was to blame for it. Anyway, the alarm was an intimation for me to eat some energy bars.

Eventually the long day came to an end. We arrived at Efogi village where our tents were setup and that was a day well spent.