Walking Through the Darkness: How One Father Found His Way Back on the Kokoda Track

7 Nov 2025 2:07 PM

Walking Through the Darkness: How One Father Found His Way Back on the Kokoda Track

There are moments in life that stop you cold, moments so heavy that breathing feels like a betrayal to the one you’ve lost.
For one man, that moment came when his son took his own life.

In the months that followed, his world fell silent. The laughter that once filled his home was gone, and even the smallest tasks felt pointless. He told me later that he had no interest in surviving, only existing. He’d lost his direction, his purpose, and with it, his hope.

When he first reached out about walking the Kokoda Track, it wasn’t about adventure or challenge. It was about distraction. He said, “If I’m walking, I can’t be thinking.”
And that was enough. That’s where we began.

We started slowly, physical training, yes, but also something far deeper. Each session became a chance to rebuild mental muscle, to find strength in small wins.
Through the physical work, we layered cognitive training, teaching him how to reprogram the voice in his head.

He learned that thoughts are not facts. That he could interrupt his self-talk, the guilt, the blame, the endless “what ifs.”
We used focus drills, breathing techniques, and simple reflection exercises to anchor his mind in the present. He started keeping a journal, not to escape his grief, but to understand it, to give it shape and language.

The pre-trek training gave him something he hadn’t felt in months, a goal.
It gave him a reason to get up, a direction to walk toward.

When he arrived in Papua New Guinea, the jungle was unforgiving. The heat, the mud, the steep climbs, all of it stripped life back to its essentials. There’s something profoundly honest about Kokoda in that it demands your full attention.

And somewhere between the exhaustion, the silence, and the stories of the soldiers who fought there, he began to shift.
He told me later, “For the first time since my boy died, I wasn’t thinking about dying. I was thinking about surviving.”

On the track, surrounded by history and hardship, he began to let go.
He cried when we stood at Brigade Hill. He cried when I sung Danny Boy.
He spoke softly about his son when we reached Isurava, a place where courage, endurance, mateship, and sacrifice aren’t just words carved into stone, but lived truths that echo through every step.

He said walking Kokoda was like walking with ghosts, not just of the soldiers who fought there, but of his own past.
And somewhere along the way, he made peace with them.

When we returned home, he was a different man. The pain was still there, it always would be but the difference was it no longer defined him.
He’d found something powerful…..a way to live alongside the grief instead of beneath it.

He told me, “The track didn’t take my pain away. It gave it meaning.”
And in that meaning, he found hope again.

The Kokoda Track is many things , a place of history, a place of challenge, a place of healing. For this man, it became a bridge between what was lost and what could still be found.

When people ask me why I still lead treks after all these years, I think of him.
Because sometimes, Kokoda isn’t just a walk through the jungle.
It’s a walk back to yourself.