Another grueling day on the Great Ocean Walk. And unfortunately not as interesting as yesterday. During the night I got up to pee and the stars greeted me when I poked my head out of the tent. I’ve been yearning to see that many stars since I’ve been in Australia. It was too cold to stay out long, though, and I quickly reentered the warmth of my sleeping bag.
Not long after hitting the trail in the morning we found ourselves in the middle of an army patrol. They were hiking about the same speed as us so we trades places a few times. Apparently they were just out for a hike—a little training. If that’s what the army does, sign me up. When we hit the beach, however, we pretty much lost them for good.
It was a pristine beach—we were the first ones on it that day—and we took the obligatory footprints in the sand photos. It was fun to hike barefoot in the sand. From there we hiked some hilly sections, passing a grounds crew that was weedwhacking the trail. We dropped down near sea level again and crossed the Aire River by bridge, ~10 km into the day.
We ate lunch there but did not stay long because we still had to walk along Johanna Beach (there was no inland track) and high tide was coming up in the evening and we didn’t know how wide the beach was. From Aire River to Johanna Beach campsite was about 12.4 km and a lot of the hike was ups and downs and parts were hard to appreciate because we were so tired.
Eventually we descended to Johanna Beach where we stripped down for a quick swim. It was a beautiful beach, very wide and completely sandy with no rocks. The only thing was the current, which I could feel sucking me out as I dove under waves. The GOW campsite turned out to be ful so we had to hike back down to the campground and found a nice spot under some trees. Only it must have been the windiest spot for a mile in any direction. Inside the tent felt like Everest base camp. We also saw a couple pairs of hooded plovers today.
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