Australian Hiker

The guide book advised this would be a day of ups and down. Compared to previous days much of today was spent ascending or descending slopes, and navigating wooden stairs or rock stairs. The day was classed as medium difficultly day and it certainly was. This day is also known for being muddy and it certainly made the hills really challenging no matter how good the traction on the bottom of your shoes. The day started with a steady climb up from the campground and this became the pattern for the day and so far our most difficult day of travel.

Wildlife continues to be almost non existent it hasn’t been totally absent with lots of bird life being our companions. In fact we’ve found that each of our campsites has a small group of Superb Fairy Wrens that do the rounds of the campsite in the morning including the kitchen shelter to see if there is any food. I’ve learnt more about Fairy Wrens in the past week as a result of this trip than I’ve ever know before being keen to find out what I’m seeing, or in the case of the Wrens, what I thought I was seeing. Almost every beach we’ve come across has had Hooded Plovers which are endangered mainly because of where they nest. They are such a cute little bird to watch.

Today was also our best day for whales as we followed what we originally thought was a group of Southern Right Whales making their way along the coast but after doing our research it turned out they were Humpback Whales. We got to watch them breach, blow, and hunt food with bubble nets as they slowly made their way along the coastline.

We expected a day without inlet crossings but I suppose it’s a fine line between what an inlet is as opposed to a creek crossing; there were two of them today that required us to strip our shoes off to cross at Milanesia Beach.

One thing we noticed was that each day has something unique about it and today apart from the terrain and the whales, there was a big variety of vegetation types noticeable as we moved from one type to another.

We arrived at Ryans Den campsite at around 2:20pm and spent the afternoon deciding which of the flat but bare earth campsite to use, having a late lunch and setting up our tent. As I write this post it’s 5:30pm and Gill is cooking dinner which as usual will mean that we’ll be in bed by 7:30pm particularly because the temperature is noticeably starting to drop. Tomorrow is supposed to be the hardest day of the trip so that is going to be interesting. According to the trail map in each of the shelter kitchens we are moving inland for the remaining few days of our trip.

Tomorrow is all bushland as we continue our way through the Great Otway National Park. Two things we’ve also noticed are that the distance guidance varies from one source to another and some of the ‘Decision Points’ don’t really require decisions particularly when Parks Victoria says ‘don’t use the alternative option’. In all honesty it would be better to remove most of the decision points from the trail.The other thing of note is the variation in distances quoted between the various sources ranging from 98.5km up to 110km. So if you feel you are travelling more than expected it may just be due to some additional mileage that you hadn’t factored in.