Phew,
Frank here. It has been a busy few weeks around the Our Hiking Blog household. Over the last four weeks I have led a seven, three and four day trip along the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria, Australia for Raw Travel. Today I am doing the preparation for my next 7 day trip commencing tomorrow.
It has been a fascinating experience. Having grown up in the region and explored many areas of the Great Ocean Walk for 40 years I have still been surprised by it’s magnificence.
This is a very different form of walking to what we are used to doing, i.e. it is fully supported with accommodation “off track”. I have met some fantastic people and enjoyed …
It was “W” kind of week. Wild, wet and windy weather but the mission was planned. Lunches cancelled, families organised and spaces made in our calenders.
Deb and Frank were on a mission to traverse some of the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria and nothing was going to stop us.
We had planned this recky trip for months and finally were able to get away for a couple of days.
Why? Because we live so close to this fantastic coastal walk and have done most of it. It is brilliant. In this case, we thought it was time to produce a guide similar to our Overland Track one. You can’t write a guide without research, and a few photographs, …
Why take a supported walking tours rather than backpacking alone? In this article our guest author, Diane shares her experience of guided walks on the Overland Track, Six Foot Track, the Great Ocean Walk, the Grampians, Blue Mountains and the Flinders Ranges.
Continuing our series of interviews with interesting outdoor people, let us introduce Andy Reynolds.
Andy, is an Outdoor Educator with many years experience exploring some fantastic parts of Australia.
He walks, climbs and loves snow sports. His latest venture is Soulfree Adventures , a company that “specialise in providing high quality walking tours for the walking traveller”. While Andy is keen to promote his business (and who wouldn’t be), he also has a huge amount of experience in the outdoors and some fantastic yarns he has shared.
We hope you enjoy Andy Reynolds’ story.
O.K. Let ’s keep it simple. How about a bit of background on yourself. Where do you live? Where do you work?
I live in beautiful downtown Buninyong, a small rural village whose key claims to fame I suppose are being Victoria’s first proclaimed inland settlement (Wiki) and the home of the Scody Australian Road Cycling Championships, on our notoriously gruelling hilly course on the slopes of Mount Buninyong, an extinct volcano.
It’s also a pretty nice place to live. I run my own walking company Soulfree Adventures from my home office on Buninyong. This gives me the freedom to work as long as I want (!) and is a great base for work and play.
Let’s get into your early bushwalking experiences. How did you first get into bushwalking? Any particular mentor or group?
I first got into bushwalking as a student at a well known Melbourne private school. Back in the 70’s we still had 3 term school years and each school holidays our loosely described bushwalking group would head for Breakfast Creek, north of Licola in the heart of Victorian Alps.
