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The recent lack in development of The Big Project, indeed of any posts to the blog has mainly been due to the remote locations we have been staying!

As mentioned in previous posts, for the past few days we have been staying in the Grampians National Park. The stay there consisted of a few days ‘bush camping’. Basically, we pitched our tent, lit a fire, cooked on it, ate and then slept. There is limited internet access in the bush. In fact, there is hardly any drinking water, no showers, and no electricity whatsoever. A fairly basic existence.

However, all of this back to basic living does allow the opportunity to reassess what is important. For example, as noted above, we had extremely limited resources at our disposal, and had only the food and water which we took into the hills to live off. So, what did I miss? Television? My computer? Conversation? No. We only missed two things, showering, and the opportunity to go to a toilet that wasn’t a hole in the ground, surrounded by ants (and ‘jumping jacks’, which are essentially large ants that can jump pretty high, and sting like hell if you get bitten by one – not what you want to expose your nether regions to on a daily basis!). That is all we missed.

Why I mention this is that a primary factor in my beginning the Big Project in the first place is largely because of the over consumption and number of ‘things’ that must be possessed in contemporary western society. We consume because we feel that we need things: big screen TVs; home cinemas; massive houses; etc etc etc. We don’t need them. We need food, water and shelter. I’ll go into this in more detail soon, as we have now got access to a couple of the home comforts (i.e. electricity) which allow me to write things onto a computer and get them into some form of coherent chain before posting them…

We have got a cottage for a couple of days, which, though basic, seems like the most luxurious place I’ve been in a while. It has no cooker but plenty of fresh water, fruit, cereal and milk. It has some electricity, which I’ll use to prepare some more interesting posts! We have got a few hundred photos to go through over the next day and hopefully we’ll get them online tomorrow.