Our Hiking Blog

It all started simply enough, an email requesting some advice about hiking the Overland Track, that iconic Tasmanian trek from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair.

We often get requests for advice and happily share what information we have with our readers. We do this freely and give as many tips and ideas we can on a whole range of topics ranging from getting to Cradle Mountain, what  food to take, what clothes to wear, do you need hiking poles, tents and tent platforms or whatever.

So, to the email from Georgie  in late November:

Hello, we are a family of five from Queensland, and we are booked to walk  the Overland Track (so excited) on Sat 4th December. Our daughter is  bringing her car down from Wagga Wagga in NSW, to meet us at the start. This means we have to leave her car one end and somehow get back to it from  the other. I have made lots of phone calls about transport back, and the options are a $360 taxi or bus from Lake St Claire to Hobart, Launceston, or  Devonport one day then back to the start. Do you know of any other options,  please? I would certainly appreciate your help.

Also, can I ask, please, I have made up meals for us all and dried them in  our home drying machine. Someone has just told me I cannot take  non-professionally processed food into Tasmania, so will have to give them  up at the airport when we arrive. I have made 35 meals, so am in a bit of a  panic. Also, I have dried pineapple, mango etc for our snacks, and was told  I will have to surrender them too. If we can’t take our dried food, I will  need to buy Backcountry packs.

There followed an exchange of emails giving Georgie advice regarding her initial questions (and several other topics that came up in our email conversation)

In the end, Frank sent Georgie a free copy of our Hiking the Overland Track book as it answered all her questions.  It was just a  simpler option than writing emails.

In short, the initial reason we wrote the eBook  was that we wanted:

• people to be well prepared
• people to have a great time
• to make it easy for them to plan the walk from booking their flights to having clean clothes after the walk
• them to eat great food
• them to have a light (ish) pack
• them to understand it can be difficult, challenging and fantastic!

We also wanted to save our time by having all our knowledge stored in one document, a place we can build on whenever we have different questions or circumstances change on “The Track”, hence the downloadable eBook.

Georgie (who is a fabulous lady in her “mid” 50′s)  kindly agreed to sharing her feedback after she received the book.

• Frank, that was very kind of you to send me the eBook, it is brilliant.
• However, I would like to pay you for it, as you have obviously put so much into it. That was so very kind of you.
• Thanks again, and I will go on to your site and pay for the eBook.
• Your information is so useful, I have half a page of things written down for me to do today.We really appreciate your help.
• I am going to write such a glowing report about your ebook, and would love you to use it. I can’t believe how lucky we were to have ‘stumbled’ upon it
• I was literally flying blind with only the Chapman’s book to guide me, until my son found your site while looking for a scroggin recipe.
• My kind words should be something like “do not go on the trip until you have read this book from cover to cover”.
• I am on my 3rd or 4th going through and I am finding new stuff each time I go through it. We are doing our last drying meals tonight, Mexican beef and green curry chicken, and we are then all set.
• Thank you for the tip on not boiling rehydrated food, we did just that with the spag bog last weekend and the meat was pretty awful – a great tip, thanks. I will keep you posted on our positives and negatives!!

Georgie and her family return and she kindly emailed Frank again:

• Thanks for all your help with our Overland Track trip, we had a brilliant time and we most grateful for all the tips and advice in your ebook.  It made our trip not only happier, but safer
• It was all so good because, essentially your book told us exactly what to do.
• Please use anything I send you as endorsement
• I really can’t recommend your book highly enough, particularly for first timers, it took all the guesswork and worry out of preparing a 7 day hike for 5 adults – a huge responsibility if I had got it wrong.  So, many thanks for your help.
• Well, it is all done, thanks to your ebook! I am SO glad I have it, you have no idea how helpful it has been for this trip. Thank you so much. On page 14 you give all the details on travel from Devonport via Tassielink. I hadn’t noticed it at first, as it is under the heading From Launceston to Cradle Mountain, but I was going through the book with a fine tooth comb to see what bits I had missed, and there it was, the Tassielink bus details from Devonport Info Centre, Sheffield, and Cradle Mountain. Problem solved !!!!!!! A million thank you’s
• Just wanted to thank you both for all the good, sensible, appropriate advice in both your personal emails, and especially the ebook.  I am recommending it to everyone who talks OT.

Ok, it’s now over to you.  You can check out the sample pages here or the contents pages here and decide whether our Hiking the Overland Track eBook is for you.

Alternatively, for  the month of March, we are running an experiment to see if providing the whole book for free and then letting you decide to pay once you read it will generate some interest (and sales).

We did this with Georgie and you can see from her feedback she was very happy with the product.

To get your “try before you buy” copy:

• shoot us an email here requesting a  copy of our Hiking the Overland Track eBook
• We will send you a  ‘discount” code and step by step instructions on how to download the book for free
• You will then be able to download the whole book and read it at your leisure.
• If you decide to pay for it (like Georgie did, one hour after receiving it) , our Paypal or banking details will be in the email we send you.
• If we have not received payment or contact  within a couple of days we will send you a nice reminder email just saying hello, we hope you enjoyed the eBook etc (just a bit of a reminder asking how you liked the book)
• That will be the last contact you hear from us as we WON’T hassle or spam you after that.

So what have you got to lose? We hope you enjoy the book and remember, there is no obligation to buy…. (we just hope you see the value in it)