TWALK

"What is a TWALK?" you may be wondering. It is a twenty-four-hour walk (get it?) where teams attempt to find checkpoints based on vague clues, a map, and their orienteering skills. Did I mention everyone gets dropped off in an unknown location? Yup. You've got no clue where you start. TWALK is an event put on by the tramping club, so I signed up with a few friends. Everyone dresses up for the first leg of the event (unicorns, clowns, Osama Bin Laden, Tron, you name it) and we did a Cat in the Hat theme.

The event started without a hitch, but my team quickly realized we weren’t nearly as competitive as we thought we’d be. We ran into a group of “ladies” (a team of 4 guys wearing dresses, wigs, purses, jewelry, nail polish, the whole deal) who were having a blast – one was drunk, the others hopelessly incapable of finding anything. These guys made us laugh for the rest of the leg, right until we pulled into the headquarters at around 6pm.

Hiking as the sun sets is pretty beautiful

After a break and some food, we headed out on Leg 2 at 7pm (the event consists of 5 legs with about 15 checkpoints each, ranging from 15-25km in distance), somehow still teamed up with those crazy guys. Orienteering is much more difficult in the dark (the event goes all night long and people continue tramping using flashlights), but with some rogaining champs on the team, I felt like we had nothing to worry about. 

“12 hours left! 8 hours till sunrise!” one of the guys said happily.

When it’s dark and you’re tired, you tend to listen to whatever someone says and if they sound convincing enough you’ll follow them. While looking for checkpoint 12 in Leg 2 we didn’t see any torches any more and didn’t recognize where we were. But we kept following the directions of whoever was holding a map and said “This is the way!”

Wishing we were back here!

Eventually it was 4 in the morning and we were aimlessly following farm tracks, not knowing where we were on the map and therefore having no idea which way to walk. The group desire was to head down, not up, but that got us nowhere … Dehydration was taking over and we made the decision to retrace our steps, hoping to end up back near checkpoint 12 (or at least somewhere we recognized). We wandered along tracks hoping to see a notable landmark or perhaps lights that looked like the hash house, but instead we just ended up on some cliffs.

Our eyes were barely staying open by 6am, so we got nice and cozy in a cow pasture; as soon as my head hit my backpack I was asleep and dreaming that I was not lost in the hills of New Zealand. I was awoken 30 minutes later to fat, cold raindrops landing on my face and the realization that we were still completely and utterly lost.

With a bit of light to aid us, things were looking better despite getting soaked through by the rain. We could see farms and walked down a track past herds of sheep toward them, miserably getting muddy and drenched. The first farm we got to was unoccupied, but as we walked along the road toward what we hoped would be another house, we saw a man walking in a field. Nearly simultaneously, Search & Rescue called and they said they’d radio the TWALK organizers and make sure someone would be along to pick us up.

We warmed up by the lovely farmer's fire, and soon enough we were all conked out in the back of a car on our way back to the TWALK HQ. It turns out that during the night we'd walked over 2km past where we'd originally been dropped off; that meant somehow we'd travelled so far off Leg 2 that we'd passed all of Leg 1. I have no idea how we did it, but I'm just glad we all ended up hypothermia-free and safe.

I slept like a baby that night, and am now proud to know that when I need to, I can push my body to its limits and walk for hours and hours on little food if I need to. Not sure if the girls are going to do TWALK again next year, but I'm kind of glad I'll have the excuse of living over 10 000kms away ...