A Trip on the Trails

A Trip on the Trails

Josh and Anne are gearing up for another adventure in the great outdoors. For this trip, they will spend two weeks backpacking through New Zealand, which sounds like fun, don’t you think? However, this adventure will require getting some special gear before they head out. Anne and Josh decide to visit a store that sells a lot of backpacking supplies. Anne knows that the most important piece of equipment for when she’s about to do a lot of hiking, is strong boots.

She tries out a number of boots, walking up and down plastic mountains in the store to test how well they hold the ground. It looks like she has found some boots that are very light, waterproof, strong, and her favorite color─yellow! Josh, meanwhile, knows that the next most important purchase is poles. Scientists have recently discovered that walking downhill with a lot of weight is difficult for the knees to handle. In fact, a lot of people injure their knees by slipping downhill, but poles help the knees by providing extra support and balance.

So Josh chooses some poles that are lightweight but strong enough to support his weight and grip the ground. The last big purchase is a backpack. Backpacks come in all colors, sizes, and weights. Bags that hold over seven kilograms have a padded strap that goes around the waist to help lift the weight off the shoulders.

Josh picks a brown pack that will help him hide in the trees, and Anne picks a pack with her favorite color─yellow! There are a lot more pieces of equipment that Josh and Anne will need to go on their trip, such as headlamps, sleeping bags, a cookstove, food, hiking clothes, a first aid kit, and bug repellant. However, all of this can get expensive, so they borrow a lot of these things from their friends. “ In order to stay safe when you go backpacking, it’s important to have good gear, ” Josh says.

Their bags are packed, and they are on their way to New Zealand! New Zealand is a beautiful country with many kinds of landscapes. There are beaches, forests, jungles, plains, mountains, and volcanoes, just to name a few. The country is about the same size as Korea, just a tiny bit bigger. But there are seventy million people living in Korea and only four million living in New Zealand.