The Great Ocean Walk - Day 3 (April 10, 2013) - Halfway There!

That third night we had a terrible sleep.  We had been too lazy to bring the food back to the trailer, so there were little animals rustling around the bags the whole night.  When it was time to get up I could hardly walk, but after working out some muscles I was feeling much better than I had expected to feel so we decided to continue the hike.  The campsite was really beautiful in the morning and the birds were very friendly.  While I was filling up our water bottles some little birds kept hopping around and through my legs.  I kind of felt like Cinderella...in her early days.

We packed as light as possible for the day, and when we left at 9:20am we were feeling pretty good.  Day 3 was probably the most scenic, but it was also the least eventful.  There was lots of up and down, a few lizards, and one really nice forest. 

This was one of the few times we met up with the road, and someone at the lookout offered to take our picture.  It was awesome knowing that we had walked what they had driven to get the same view.

One of our last views of "Naked Man Point".  It's super cool to think we hiked that entire coastline and beyond - most of it that day!

The rest was scrub land which was pretty boring, and then it ended with a 2km trudge over a beautiful sandy beach.  The descent from the cliff to the beach was quite steep, and in retrospect that was the first time I remember Ryan mentioning a sore knee.  The walk on the beach was a nice change of scenery, but it was quite difficult to walk on.  I wanted to take my shoes off so badly, but we were rationing our bandages so I didn't want to lose any off of my feet.  The beach also held our second "river" crossing, which we were eagerly anticipating.  We didn't bring any shoes, which was a good decision because much like the first river we were supposed to ford, we could just hop over this one!

Just past the beach we found the public campground, but since we didn't see our trailer we kept walking along the trail up a hill.  It didn't seem quite right, so after a second look at the map we realized that the trailer was supposed to be at the public campsite but we must have just gotten there too early.  By the time we walked back down the hill the trailer had arrived.  Upon inspecting the map again, we realized that our campsite was actually 800m up the hill.  Instead of carrying our gear up the hill that night, then down again in the morning, then hiking back up the trail to continue the hike, we just decided to camp at the bottom of the hill in the public campground.

The trailer service was also supposed to provide us with clean water each day, but that night the jug was empty.  Good thing we didn't camp up the hill, because we had to wait around again for someone to deliver us some water!  We somehow managed to miss the trailer driver every single time he came by, and this time was no exception.  Later we found 5 mismatched water bottles hanging off the side of the trailer because they had just scrounged up whatever bottles they could find to fill.  It was just enough to last the night, then they were delivering more in the morning.

With everything finally sorted out, we had a delicious dinner of dehydrated rice, broccoli and squash with a curry sauce.  After slathering ourselves in Tiger Balm we played a few games of cribbage, read our books, and we were fast asleep sometime shortly after 7pm!