The Great Ocean Walk - Day 1 (April 8, 2013) - Let the Adventure Begin!

First thing Monday morning we left our car outside of the Apollo Bay police station and met Mark from Walk91. He gave us a rundown of the hike, a map, an emergency beacon, loaded all of our food and gear into a trailer, and gave us a ride to the trail head.  He wished us good luck, and by 9am we were hiking!

Ryan's pants are tucked into his socks because before the hike his parents warned us about ticks.  I won't lie, after this picture he untucked his pants and I teased him about ticks for the rest of the trip (sorry guys).  I also have to say, these might be the only pictures where we're genuinely smiling.  All of the other pictures of us are when we're either exhausted or in pain.  And you'll notice our packs get smaller and smaller as the days go on. 

The first 2 hours of the hike were really nice.  We were excited, but it's also one of the only times that we were on a beach.  This was actually a blessing, because it's surprisingly difficult to hike on sand.  This particular beach had really cool rocks though (yes, my words, not Ryan's) and I picked up some pretty shells.

The next phase of the hike was 2 fairly tough hills (Shelly Beach and Elliot River), but we survived and we (naively) thought that based on our elevation map that was the toughest part of the entire week.  The hills went through really lush rainforest, so at least the scenery was worth it.  The maximum height of the day was 250m, so it wasn't really that high up anyway, but do that a few times and you get pretty tired.  At the top of the second hill, Elliot River, we rested and had a delicious lunch of salad, boiled eggs, leftover breakfast sausages, and nut balls. 

The rest of the day wasn't actually that hard, since it was on a relatively flat inland logging road.  It was just long, and got pretty boring after 4 hours.  We didn't see any koalas (to be fair we weren't looking that hard), but there were 2 swamp wallabies, a king parrot, and some black and yellow cockatoos.  Instead of unloading our packs, we found a nice black sweater on the trail.  We decided that no one would come back for it (that would just be crazy) so we kept it.  We didn't want it to get ruined, after all!

At 3:30 we reached our campsite an hour ahead of schedule.  We found the trailer with our stuff in it, setup our tent at the awesome campsite, and ate a delicious dinner of curry, rice, squash, and sausages.  By the time we finished eating and cleaning up it was getting dark, so we packed it in at 6:45pm.

After the first day the muscle ache started to set in, but overall we were extremely happy and optimistic about the rest of the hike.  We had anticipated the first day to be the most technically challenging, and since it was over we were proud and ready for the rest.  Boy were we wrong!