We woke up on day 2
feeling a lot better than we had expected.
We were stiff, but we were definitely ready for another day of
hiking. At 8:45am we were on our way,
and the first hour of the hike was pretty much used for working out the sore
muscles from the day before. We kind of
expected to get into a rhythm that day, but it turned out to be a lot harder
than I expected. Ryan did fine - it was
mostly me that struggled.
We went up and down
a few small hills, and through a nice forest that had been previously burned by
a forest fire. We also crossed our first
"river". Walk91 told us to
bring extra shoes to cross the river, so not knowing what to expect we carried
them all day. Turns out the river was a
trickle of water on a sandy beach (second picture below) so we jumped over it
and never brought extra shoes again.
The highlight of the
morning was our first snake encounter! I
was walking in front and somehow managed to completely miss seeing a 1 metre long
copperhead snake on the path. I walked
right by it, and Ryan, who was only maybe 2 metres behind me, made the most
ridiculous noise like a dog barking in pain.
I honestly thought he was being attacked by a wild dog. Seriously, it was uncanny. When he "composed" himself he
finally managed to tell me it was a snake, but by that time the snake had
escaped into the bushes. Needless to say
that Ryan never let me walk in front again, and we also stopped looking in the
trees for koalas! From that point on,
every stick looked like a snake, and every little rustling lizard or bird made
us look twice.
We emerged from the
forest to walk through rolling hills and farmers' fields. The snakes were replaced by cows, and it was
a nice change of scenery. We began to
walk towards Cape Otoway Lighthouse, but the problem was that we could see it
but it never felt like we were getting any closer. That was where the day started to go downhill
(unfortunately not literally) for me.
When we finally made
it to the lighthouse we collapsed on one of the picnic tables, I took off my
boots, and we ate a delicious lunch. The
lighthouse itself was down a long path, and neither one of us was keen to go
check it out. Eventually I gave in and
hobbled down the path to get there, but Ryan didn't bother. Later, back at the picnic table, an old man
was giving us a hard time for not going UP the lighthouse. That is something I will never regret. The view was alright, but mostly it was just
a really nice rest.
The next 11
kilometres were by far the hardest of the entire trip for me. It really became a mental game - trying to
ignore my muscles getting sore and trying to forget how far we still had to go. Thank goodness for Ryan, because he's done a
lot of hard slogs before and knew how to help me through it. We also didn't bring any sunscreen that day,
so the elements got to us a bit too.
This part of the hike was along the top of the cliff, so each time we
got a view we could see where we had come from.
That's actually really cool, and gave us a great sense of
accomplishment. At one of our lookouts,
we came across this glorious specimen:
This guy was
motoring! We forever dubbed that point
"Naked Man Point", so whenever we looked back along the coast we
always recognized that one and had a little giggle.
As you can see, the
trail turned very sandy which made it even more difficult to walk. Since we were up on the cliff, every once in
awhile we got a good look at the trail ahead.
With the white sand trail, on low green brush, we could see the trail
weaving as far as the eye could see, which reminded us of the Great Wall. I thought we would never get to the end! It was also prime location for snakes sunning
themselves, and consequently Ryan saw 2 more baby snakes (one copperhead and
one unidentified one). Of course I
didn't see them since he was leading and scared them away.
And the trail went
on and on. And on. And on.
Until this happened:
Then some tears,
Ryan took a few things from my pack, and we FINALLY made it to our
campsite. It was definitely a low point
for me, but I'm proud of making it through eventually. After that the trip got much better for me
(and worse for Ryan), but in a 6 day hike everyone's bound to have their low
point.
The campground was
really pretty and set along a nice river full of birds. We found our trailer, but then discovered our
actual site was 100m up a hill. We
collapsed at a picnic table debating whether we should bring all of our stuff
up the hill or not, but after a pep talk from a nice old lady who had to carry
all of her gear for the entire hike, we just sucked it up and did it.
The other group of
hikers up there was really friendly, and it made us want to get smaller gear so
we could also do real overnight hiking.
At this point, though, our gear just isn't compact or light enough.
Dinner was small
since we weren't very hungry, so we split a can of soup and had some tea. During the cooking Ryan managed to sit on a
giant inch ant and got a painful bite on his butt. Luckily it wasn't a scary red one and he was
fine shortly thereafter, but we're not joking when we say they're actually an
inch long! That night it was almost
impossible for me to move after my muscles seized up, and I wasn't really sure
what was going to happen the next day. I
slathered myself with Tiger Balm, we creamed our sunburns, and did some
stretching. We decided to sleep on it,
and hit the sack at 7pm hoping that I would be able to walk in the
morning!
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