Rich Bowen talks about his camping trip and it reminded me of something my Father and I used to do a fair bit of – spider spotting. In Australia we have a huge range of different spiders and they are literally everywhere – much more common than most people would be comfortable with. Most of these spiders are really small so you don’t see them in the light of day but during the night spiders are much easier to spot because of their brilliant blue eye-shine. Spider spotting basically involves getting one of those “pencil” torches (2 AA batteries and you twist the end to turn them on/off and adjust how focussed the light is). Turn it on and adjust it so it has a single focussed beam, then hold it just below one eye and look straight down along the beam of light. When you see a spider its eyes will shine back a bright turquoise color. You’ll find them everywhere in the Australian bush, around the ground, on tree trunks, in trees – pretty much everywhere you look there’ll be a bright blue set of eyes looking back at you. Just don’t do it if you’re afraid of spiders or you may never feel safe again. One other thing, Rich writes:

The only problem I see so far is that I have a cheap Walmart sleeping bag which doesn’t compress very well, and so I have to hang it below. Perhaps this isn’t a big deal, but could get cumbersome for longer hikes. You’ll find that’s very annoying. Pack everything inside your pack and compress it all as much as you can with the straps on the side of your pack. There are two reasons for this:

1. Things hanging off your pack get caught on trees. This is extremely annoying and when it happens while trying to cross a creek you wind up very wet. Having everything inside your pack dramatically reduces how often this happens because the shape of your pack is so much more predictable.
2. The closer everything is to your back, the better balanced you are and the less energy you spend just trying to stand up (plus you’re back will thank you). Things tied on to the outside of your pack tend to throw out your balance because the pack is designed to sit in the ideal place on your back so anything outside of it obviously is in a less than ideal location. Things swinging off your pack are really bad because they constantly change your center of balance. The funniest example I saw of this in practice was a group walking Hinchinbrook Island. It’s a four day walk through complete wilderness so you carry everything you’re going to need and with a maximum of 40 people on the trail at a time don’t expect to run into people very often. This one group thought that they needed their entire set of pots and pans and so as we watched them walking off on the start of their hike (we were just finishing our hike going the other way) we took note that each of them had a pot or a frying pan tied to the underneath of their packs happily swinging away. We figured by the time they got to the other end of the track they’d have some serious blisters on their backsides from these pots constantly whacking into them. Four days later we were at the other end of the island for a picnic (we lived just off the southern end of the island) and sure enough this group comes trudging along the beach and there’s no sign of any pots or pans swinging behind them. They declined to sit down.