Jack Tame: The solitude of tramping in the bush

As I turned on my phone for the first time in three days, it lit up with text messages from my wife.

A photo. A tiny baby. Trussed up in a cotton wrap like a fresh, fleshy burrito with a little woolen hat for good measure.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“You’re a dad.”

I knew she was joking. I’m not denying there was an element of risk in going tramping through the backcountry of the Kahurangi National Park with a wife who was 32-weeks pregnant. I just knew that if she had had the baby while I was dragging myself up a distant ridgetop, her first words to me when I emerged from the bush would not have been ‘Congratulations!’

Solitude in the bush —the uncontactableness— is a big part of the attraction for me. I love the physical challenge of tramping. I love the birds, the piwakawaka flitting about when you're under the canopy, and the kea squawking over the valleys. I love how humbling it is, how insignificant you feel, when you stand on top of a mountain ridge and are confronted with your puniness. But maybe above all, I love that feeling when you can see nor hear no sign of human beings.

Realistically, that solitude is about to take a massive hit. When I was in the Kahurangi, it struck me that it’s only a matter of time —a couple of years at most— before satellite internet and communications technology mean we will all have internet and cell phone reception all the time. It won’t matter if you’re in downtown Auckland or halfway down the traverse from Yuletide Peak to the Anatoki Forks Hut, if you want comms you’ll have comms. That endless stream of notifications buzzing in your pocket.

I’m not going to deny the obvious upsides, especially in my family, where there is a history (thankfully not mine) of people going missing in the bush. In emergency situations it’s going to be hugely valuable. For trampers who want weather forecast updates or people in some rural parts of the country with connectivity holes, a gamechanger.

But with all that is gained with increased connectivity, that humbling sense of solitude is lost. It’ll be that much harder to escape the World, even for a couple of days. All I hope is that when our child is born and is old enough to go tramping, a voluntary code of sorts will have become the norm for all trampers when they head into the New Zealand bush: Fill out the intentions book, tell someone where you’re going. And for goodness’ sake, unless it’s an emergency, put your phone on airplane mode.

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