Trekking an adventure off the beaten track

Press, 12 April 1984, Page 4

Trekking an adventure off the beaten track

By COLIN MONTEATH Touring New Zealand, presenting an audio-visual lecture series on Nepal, India, and Kashmir, is Warwick Deacock of Mosman, Sydney — the founder for Australians and New Zealanders of the now booming commercial trekking industry to off-beat places throughout Asia. Mr Deacock, aged 57, is a former major in the British Army. However, it was mountaineering and sailing that captured his imagination and brought him to Australia in the late 19505. He immediately joined the foundation committee of the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme and soon became the first executive secretary of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He set up the Australian Outward Bound School in 1958.

By 1965 though, Mr Deacock and his wife, Antonia, were ready to break out on their own. They established “Chakola," in Kangaroo Valley south of Sydney, a camp for children of all ages where they can enjoy the natural environment and tramp, go canoeing, paint, and most important, simply relax. The next year the Deacocks created their Ausventure travel business after the initiative of the legendary Jimmy Roberts who fostered the trekking industry as we know it today from his home base in Nepal. Ausventure has steadily, over the years, introduced thousands of Australians and New Zealanders to the joys of creating a personal mini-adventure by tramping and fossicking in a foreign country away from main roads.

Now firmly associated with Mountain Travel (U.S.A.) and using local expertise of such well-known companies as SITA in India and Mountain Travel (Nepal) the Deacocks, through their own experienced leaders, are able to offer a wide variety of graded treks. These range from walking round the Annapurna Himal, wildflower study tours in Kashmir, rafting down to wildlife sanctuaries in lowland Nepal, to climbing an “easy” 6000 m peak at the base of Mount Everest. Antonia Deacock does not stay at home to run the travel office. She is usually leading groups in Africa, rafting down the Colorado or pushing into remote parts of north-west India. It was in the Lahoul and Zanskar region of India that she first fell in love with the Himalayas. In 1958 she was a member of an all-women’s expedition to these areas, having driven overland from Britain. She wrote the delightful “No Purdah in Padam” as a result of this adventure.

Mr Deacock himself has been active in expeditionary mountaineering since the late 50s. After an exploratory military expedition to the Traleika glacier region near Alaska’s Mount McKinley, he went on the 1958 British-Pakistani Forces Himalayan Expedition to the 7900 m Mount Rakaposhi in the Karakoram Range. Six previous expeditions had failed on this difficult peak, including some by the British climber, Bill Tilman, in 1947. An Englishman, Mike Banks, and a Scotsman, Tom Patey, finally reached the summit after quite a struggle.

It was with Tilman though that Mr Deacock was to team up with next, in 1965, for a sailing expedition to the sub-Antarctic volcanic island in the South Indian Ocean called Heard Island. After an aborted attempt in 1963, on the island’s 2700 m “Big Ben,” while a member of an official Australian Government ANARE expedition, Mr Deacock was more determined than ever to crack the problem when they sailed from Sydney in the 20m steel schooner Patanela.

The first ascent of this remote and challenging peak that has only just received its second ascent by a similar Australian private yacht team, is recorded by the Christchurch author, Philip Temple, in his book on the expedition, “The Sea and the Snow.” Mr Deacock has broken his back rockclimbing in Wales, plummeted 20 metres down a crevasse in Alaska, and skidded for hundreds of metres down the side of a Himalayan mountain.

Warwick and Antonia Deacock will be in Christchurch tonight, but for the one night only.