If travelling by car allow two hours for this tour, or six hours if walking. Walking is relatively easy, and is a mix of roads and dirt tracks.
The tour begins at the Anzac Commemoration area (11) (40.24079,26.28121) on North Beach, the site of the Anzac Day Dawn Service. This walk is designed to take the traveller over some of the beach areas that served as headquarters, hospitals, casualty clearing station, store areas, the Big Sap and the sites of the jetties and piers that brought stores ashore and allowed wounded to be evacuated. The route follows in the footsteps of the path taken by the two major columns for the attack on Sari Bair.
North Beach road was made during the campaign, involving night after night of work, performed by the ‘resting’ troops. In its own right this is a great feat of military engineering and amazing to think it was made in the dark in almost silence. With sniper, machine gun and shelling to respond to any movement during the daylight hours, the work in the dark was a little easier. Still, with the threat of attracting fire to any noise made, night in this area was owned by the scouts, of both sides, out on patrol. The dark and the fear of enemy fire took their toll on the men doing stressful work during the night, not made any easier by the physical strength needed to collect and position heavy stones to form the foundation of the road. The stones were set in with clay dug from the hillsides and mixed together with water poured over the surface to set the material. This was all performed in the dark, whilst harassed from enemy fire and performed when the men’s physical condition was already weakened by the heat of the day, the poor diet, lack of drinking water and poor sanitary conditions at that time, but the road consistently progressed north.