Monthly Guest Blog: Blue Sky Walkabout with Eco Vessel
19 May

Monthly Guest Blog: Blue Sky Walkabout with Eco Vessel

Punching in a Dream – Not your average honeymoon.

Meet this months Guest Blogger Nic Cuthbert. An Australian adventurer, accomplished marathon swimmer, champion surf lifesaver, paraglider pilot and international enduro-motorcyclist.  In 2009 he rode a bicycle 16,100km in 6 months to complete a full lap of Australia while raising awareness of suicide prevention initiatives and youth mental health issues. We were proud to support Nic’s amazing adventure by providing  Eco Vessel Big Foot Bottles to keep his drinks cold and hot as required on his long journey. These are serious water bottles, read more about Nic’s adventure see his testimonial here:

Testament to a great product

By Nic & Donna Cuthbert (Blue Sky Walkabout) Australia

Travelling by traditional means across Mongolia on horseback meant that all of our equipment was subjected to the well documented environmental extremes found on the Eurasian Steppe. Our 2,000km journey included the crossing of hot deserts and cold mountain passes and for the whole time our Big Foot Insulated Stainless Steel Water Bottles were with us. Water is not something to be taken for granted on a mission such as ours and for this we were grateful that our supply was protected with the top quality, stainless steel design of the Eco Vessel. Leaks weren’t a problem and for weeks on end we boiled water in the morning and stored in our Big Foot Bottles for use later on the in the day despite sub zero temperatures. After 5 months on horseback our Big Foot Bottles still looked new, testament to a great product.  

On a side note, on the way to Mongolia we spent days on the Trans Siberian where boiling water was available. Storing the water in the BIGFOOT Bottles with the lids off for drinking use was great but we were getting deadset frustrated with how long it was taking for the contents to cool. Haha!

In 2012 Nic rode a motorbike 35,000km from Singapore to London journeying through some 35 countries, over the world’s highest motorable passes in the Himalayas and across rebel held deserts in Pakistan and Iran.  Nic’s professional career as an HR Manager has seen him place a healthy diet, exercise and personal well-being central to a life lived in the fast lane.  A recent professional posting in Malaysia even saw him invited to take on in his spare time a position as Assistant Coach to the Malaysian Olympic team in the lead up to the London Games.

Meet Nic!

meet nic

Meet Donna!

Meet Donna3

The Expedition

Commencing June 2015 the Blue Sky Walkabout will see Nic and Donna cross Mongolia by horseback.  Tackling one of the World’s most remote and least populated landscapes from Russia in the East to China in the West, the journey represents some 3,500 km of daring equestrian overland adventure.  After hiking over the far West Russian/Mongolian border high in the towering Altai Mountain range they will obtain horses from Kazakh nomads.  Using celestial navigation techniques, Nic and Donna will then ride for 5 months past alpine glaciers, along desolate grasslands, over mountain passes and across scorching desert plains all the way to China.

In doing so they expect to face challenges such as negative twenty to plus forty degree temperatures, gruelling high altitudes, ferocious wolves, and horse thieving bandits.  Nic and Donna marry each other on the beach at Broome, northern WA one week before flying out for the commencement of the Blue Sky Walkabout.  Before moving to Albany in WA’s picturesque great southern nine months ago they had never ridden horses.

Blue Sky Walkabout

We had originally penned the plans for further adventure travel while living and working on remote Shelamar Station, 235km south of Broome on WA’s Kimberley Coast.  After the freedom and cultural immersion afforded to us by world travels in 2012 we both needed more than what city life offered and Shelamar gave Donna the chance like I had previously, to fall in love with the red ochre, white sands and turquoise waters of the pristine Kimberley wilderness.

Funnily enough it was during another first for Donna, a tropical cyclone that we hit on the specific idea for our next big adventure. Alone on the 11,000 Ha property, the wind raging around our small shack we were thinking about our love for overland travel and how in a not so recent age that would almost exclusively have been done on horseback.  Would it still be possible in the modern world?

Incidentally a couple of weeks earlier I had been talking to good mate about Conn Iggulden’s fictional history novel about the Genghis Kahn Empire.  Dots were rapidly connecting.  Mongolia, Land of Tengri and the Eternal Blue Sky, home to once the largest land based empire the world has ever seen, founded on horseback some 800 years ago with nomadic traditions that remain present to today.  The plan had synergy. A complete 16,100km circling of Australia by bicycle in 2010, a jaunt much of the way around the globe by motorbike in 2012 and now this, an ambitious plan to follow in the footsteps of the once mighty Genghis Khan and ride horses across one of the world’s most remote, unforgiving and least populated landscapes, 3,500km along the Eurasian Steppe from Russia in the West to China in the East.

There being just one small problem…we’d never before ridden horses.

Quote 1

Fast forward six months and Donna and I had just returned to Broome from a month or so paragliding in the Swiss Alps and attending a wedding on a Greek Island.  We had a decision to make, stay in the Kimberley where there are few horses or move south.  There we could learn to ride and potentially develop the specialist horsemanship skills required of us to safely undertake what would be an equine overland adventure of truly epic proportions.

Three days later we were packing the car…

Arriving in Albany on WA’s picturesque south coast we knew we had made the right decision, albeit with serious second thoughts about the southerly whipping off the Southern Ocean direct from Antarctica.  Though the weather was cold, the hospitality was warm and we very soon found ourselves enormously fortunate to be amongst family and friends.  Within days of arriving in Albany we set about organising our lives around the new adventure, setting up equestrian contacts and learning firstly to ride.  In those early days the influence of the local community was invaluable. It would however have been hard to view us as anything but peculiar, rocking up at Pony Club before being led around the park in front of a bunch of giggling nine year old girls.  Two silly adults with grand plans to ride thousands of kilometres across an open wilderness in a land far far away.

Although I quickly progressed to finding out how fast I could canter and how many hurdles I could jump, Donna took a more measured approach to lessons.  It was fairly obvious with her upright posture, tucked in elbows, correctly placed wrists and well positioned ankles that Donna looked a natural in the saddle.  Unfortunately for both of us, beyond the basics of riding we were going to need a different approach to working with horses in preparation for a 6 month expedition across Mongolia.

Nic quote 2

As we quickly became domestically organised with somewhere to live and jobs to boot we also graduated from pony school to working alongside the team at Ringwould Stud.  Ringwould had form, one if its prodigy Ringwould Jaguar had been ridden by local star Sonja Johnson to a silver medal at the Beijing Olympics.  What we found at Ringwould was the opportunity to work in and around green horses, some of which at one or two years old had yet to be broken in.  The learning curve was steep and though we had committed to making horses a priority we soon began to juggle that schedule with the early stages of project planning, studying equine endurance theory and a heaving work timetable that would commit us to a departure date in early May 2015.

Much of the focus in the last three months to date has shifted to expedition planning, including the ordering and testing of specialised pack saddling and survival equipment, logistical arrangements, visa provisions, route research and documenting emergency management procedures.  Although mundane at times the planning phase does have its moments and occasional exciting wins.

Donna has also been delving deep into language study marking solid progress with the perilously difficult to learn let alone understand Mongolian tongue.  It continues to fascinate me, the transition from taking a seemingly random idea or concept, a ‘something’ and taking it through to a ‘thing’ or as I see it punching in a dream.  Of course we see this in all facets of everyday life and many of us are employed to do it, moulding ideas and creating practical outcomes.  For me however, adventure is the dream-idea-concept-reality evolution that interests me the most.  The end result is always influenced by solid planning and sound execution but what of the unknown?

Nic & Donna quote

In adventure there is the biggest uncertainty of them all…the natural world.  Anything can and does happen but through character and will mountains do get scaled, rebel held deserts do get crossed, frigid glacial torrents do get forded and bureaucratic political hurdles do get resolved.  I believe it is my approach to these challenges that define me as a person and of which will also ensure success on the Mongolia Expedition and provide for the safety of Donna and myself.

Considering our journey over the last six months it is hard to not feel that half the adventure has already been run.  Although we remain amateurs we can now talk about horses to an insider.  We can also be somewhat confident that the skills learnt to date will be sufficient to at least see us set out across the steppe and tackle the towering Altai mountain range and our first desert crossing within the first few weeks.  We have been fortunate enough to attract profile equestrian sponsors to the project including Wintec Saddles and Raw Blend and have been humbled by not only the belief in us by these companies but also by individuals who have by various means found themselves involved in the Blue Sky Walkabout Project.  People do what they can, a meal here, a lending ear there or even an email full of advice and contacts in Mongolia to assist with the arduous task of obtaining long stay visas or constructing complex freight arrangements.

People are why Donna and I travel, the sum of our experience and our leading light in the search for adventure along the path less travelled.

Read more about their ambitious journey and subscribe to hear more about their adventures at www.blueskywalkabout.com

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