Here we are now, rehydrate us!

There are some outdoorsy types who enjoy the luxuries of fine dining whether they are dangling from a cliff or squatting in a snow cave. The thought of resorting to dehydrated mush is, certainly to those 'camembert and crackers' types, as abhorrent as pouring an aged shiraz into a fancy, flexible plastic bottle just to save weight on the trail.

Food is fuel. Energy. Simple as that. For most of the Archipaddlo expedition we'll be eating what the locals eat, sharing a mudcrab and some sago with some friendly PNG fishermen or biting into some barracuda around an Indonesian campfire. Part of the joy of travelling overseas is to experience the culinary delights of a different culture and we can't wait to gather new recipes.

For the period we are paddling up the QLD coast our food supplies need to be more planned. I know I have sung the praises of the dehydrator in the past, and even explained some of our menu, but to see our supplies laid out and ready was an impressive sight. The picture above is six weeks worth of food for the two of us. Each column of packages is a week with the last week packed into the yellow dry bag which is a 20L Sea To Summit Big River Dry Bag. To give an idea of scale, each vacuum sealed bag is about 25cm wide or roughly the size of a pack of Tim Tams (that has been crushed down and pressed into a flat-ish cylinder).

Each week we have 3 or 4 breakfasts of cereal mixed with dried fruit (mostly dried strawberries) and powdered milk and then bread (flour and yeast) for the remainder. Lunches are more snacky than normal - super bars (dehydrated high energy muesli bars), pumpernickel (which we still have to pick up) and some lollies for supercharged energy. Dinner is a dehydrated meal portion - mexican beef, thai chicken curry, spag bog etc. We have extra portions of carbs like a grain mix (rice, quinoa, buckwheat, chia and barley), cous cous with stock and Deb potato in case our fishing gear actually works and we need to bulk up a fishy meal. We have some spices ready to add flavour when we need it. Ultimately we have enough food in each week's bag to keep us alive for a lot longer than a week, or to keep our generators fully fuelled for a week of heavy exertion.

Forewarned id forearmed and so the elements of variety and texture missing from our menu are the very things I am making sure I stuff in at every opportunity before we leave.

For those keeping track, it looks like we'll be sliding away from Trinity Beach on Monday or Tuesday next week as long as the weather is on our side.