If you’re anything like me, you spend ages fretting and planning and making lists before heading out on holiday or travel. I’m perhaps at my most stressed in the hours before we leave.

To help me stress less, I have multiple lists.

There’s the Travel for Author Visits List, which includes plastic head, Tibetan bowl, scissors, oven mitt and stuffed quokka toy.

There’s the Car Camping List, for when you’re camping and have an entire car to carry stuff in.

And the Hiking Camping List, for when you need to carry everything you need on your back.

It’s this list I’m going to share with you today. We just gave it a good workout on the Cape to Cape track, and I thought it might serve as a double-check or maybe inspiration for What To Pack. I also find it useful for shorter overnight hikes 🙂 I hope you do too!

HIKING CAMPING LIST: What we packed

During the day

We hiked in quick-dry trousers, borrowed gaitors (thank you!), quick-dry shirts, wide-brim hats, sunglasses, shoes-of-choice, well worn in and socks-of-choice, as new as possible.

We also borrowed 65-litre packs and carried:

Gear

• Tent  and fly – we borrowed my sister’s which was around 2.5 kg
• Sleeping bags and self-inflating mattresses
• Rainbird rain jackets, in case of rain/wind
• Thermals top and bottom, for cold nights
• Spare underwear
• Warm jacket/s
• Thongs for wearing after you’ve taken your boots off at the end of the day
• Hand trowel and loo paper
• Rubbish bag/s
• Cape to Cape Track maps (we also had the guidebook, but read it before leaving – too heavy to carry both ;-))
• Cash and credit card (for all those flat whites and gourmet cafe meals!)
• Pen and paper, because I can’t live without them 🙂

Kitchen

• Plastic mugs/plastic bowls/plastic sporks
• Small chopping board/pocket knife
• Water bottles (we used leakproof On The Fly Nalgene for sipping along the way; and old PET bottles for storing extra water in our packs)
• Gas cooker, spare gas, matches, spare matches (we used my dad’s old gas cooker, which was way faster (and smaller and lighter) than our usual trangia)(the same cooker he used to cook for us when we were kids hiking in New Zealand!!)
• Pot and spondoolie from the trangia

Menu items

• Breakfast: Muesli/powdered milk premixed in ziplock bags
• Lunch: Flatbread, cheese and salami
• Dinner: Angelhair pasta with 2-minute noodle flavours mixed in (we loved laksa!)
• Instant coffee premixed with powdered milk and sugar in a ziplock bag
• Snacks: Loads of nuts, seeds, dried fruit, chocolate, Carmen’s muesli bars…more chocolate 🙂
• Soups: Freeze dried miso (super-light, from Coles)

Goop/s

• Sunscreen
• Mozzie stuff
• Toothbrushes/toothpaste/lip balm
• Fixomull and scissors (I think this was made by God)(Warning: it does wear off if you get your feet wet, so bring more than you think you need)
• Stripped back first aid kit: panadol/bandages/antiseptic cream
• Head torch and cute 9V battery torch
• Our phones, on aeroplane mode to save batteries (we used them as cameras, in case of emergency, and to coordinate food drops/pack swaps)

Reading material

Okay, so I didn’t actually carry a book, just a notebook and pen. But if you want to find an exciting read to hook your kids into hiking and adventure, check out Off The Track, a Bibbulmun Track adventure novel for kids aged 6 to 12 shortlisted for a Wilderness Society Environmental Award for Children’s Literature.

How much water to pack for a day’s hike?

We carried enough PET bottles to have 4.5 litres of water each, and we only filled these for the two nights we were rough camping on the side of the track: we didn’t want to run short of water for cooking, breakfasting, coffeeing, drinking, possibly spilling, possibly finding an empty water tank, etc. (All the on-track water tanks were full and delicious!)

I tend to drink a lot of water, but even I found 4.5 litres was more than required. Still, better safe than dehydrated and sick 🙂 And we were only carrying this much for a couple of hours at the end of the day.

With this much water on board, our packs weighed around 16 kilograms, so we were travelling pretty light, especially after we started eating some of that yummy food.

Our itinerary

Click here to see our itinerary for the Cape to Cape hike.

Any other questions?

If you have any other questions, feel free to get in touch and I’ll try to help. If you do give the track a go, I’d love to hear what you think 🙂

What do you pack?

What else do you pack? Do you have any life-changing breakthroughs or clever hiking hacks to share? Please do! We’d never hiked with Injinji socks or used Fixomull before this hike. I’m always up for having my mind blown by cool hiking gear ideas!

Please comment to share 🙂 And thank you!