Josh, my boobs, and the best backpack
Custom fitting the Osprey Talon 11
Next year I have an adventure coming up. A long hike in the Japanese mountains. This should be a lot of fun, if for no other reason than a lot of the long days on the track will end with a nude soak in a public bathhouse.
That isn’t the only reason I want my body looking trim, taut, and terrific; I also need to gain a bit of fitness. My best idea of international travel involves sitting at my ease in luxury as the sights roll by for my entertainment while I raise a glass of champagne to my lips.
My days on this supposed holiday will be taken up with ten or fifteen kilometre treks with elevation changes of a thousand metres or more. The instructions recommend a 50-litre pack. I’ll have to live out of that for up to two days at a time, and I’ve got a few cameras I want to take with me. Layered clothes for the cool, rainy, hot, and/or dry conditions I might encounter, toiletries, lunch, first aid kit. And a bear bell, whatever that is.
I am quite sure that my current level of fitness is not going to be able to cope with a week of this. Not without a lot of pain and screaming, anyway, and I want to be the quiet, fit, self-assured one striding ahead to get the photographs of the rest of the group sweating up the mountainside paths.
