20 k's of Mountain hiking

Jono leads the way with his map and his long legs and the rest of us follow doggedly, along spectacular mountain ridges, down rocky snowgum slopes and up dense fire-regen where we have to push and scramble through young eucalypt branches all at face height.

When the walking is easy I talk. First to Luke and then to Christy. Luke is talking about ideas. He woke up burning with them and is inspired to write his own blog about physical theatre and what he is thinking. He says it would help him to articulate his thouths, if he is going to do public speaking about his work or if he does a masters which he wants to one day.

Christy is talking dates and money. If we go to New Zealand how will that impact on my masters and my writing? Do we want to come straight back to Melbourne and do Fringe? If we plan a touring schedule to work for in 2010-11, can we aim to earn enough money to live on for the three of us?

We are thinking about publicity because if we want to have publicity for the Melbourne Fringe in September we need to hire a publicist now which means we need to do a photoshoot, have an image, figure out who the best publicist is…and we are making those decisions without hearing if we have any funding for the creative development.

‘We should have a meeting,’ we say because now we are inspired, it would be useful to have diaries and numbers in front of us.

As it gets later, Jono starts to get worried. ‘We need to keep moving or we are going to be walking in the dark.’ The last 7 k’s of the walk is on a well marked fire trail so it’s not dangerous, just a bit slower and more difficult and we only have one head torch between the six of us...

We come out into the open and hit the fire trail on dusk. Again the light is stunning, the mountains getting more and more shadowy spread out around us and the pink, pink sunset sky slowly fading. We walk across the broad hill looking over the dark boggy moss with the pale road in front of us and the clouds move aside until the stars are brilliant.

The last kilometre of track is rough and rocky and we can’t do it without the light. Jono, by far the tallest walks in the middle and the rest of us negotiate space near him where we can see the track. “School of fish got nothin’ on this” Luke says and it makes us laugh. This would be a classic physical theatre trust game. We stumble into camp hungry and blistered and Jono cooks again and the rest of us kitchen-hand around him.