“Today is gonna be a hot one.” Sytske’s first words to me as she pokes her head in the tent. She’s been up for an hour and she expected me to wake up too, but she didn’t know how deep a sleeper I am. Today’s hike has been pretty usual (for the Great Ocean Walk). At least in the morning. Lots of ups and downs with outlooks scattered along the trail. Eventually we broke out onto a road (dirt) and saw the school group’s van. They were heading out early to skip ahead to the 12 Apostles, staying the night at the next campsite, then heading back to Brisbane.
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| Echidna petting. |
Down the road a ways they caught up to us and gave us a ~5 minute lift to the next junction. They’re hiking into the campsite tonight so we’ll see them one more time. After continuing on dirt roads for a while we descended the 366 steps to Wreck Beach. We arrived at low tide, which was the perfect time to see the anchors embedded in the sand.
After we hiked along the beach a while we got to the point where the trail veers inland, up to the campsite. We stopped to eat lunch and I sit here now, roasting in the mid-afternoon sun. Today has been the first really nice weather day—by normal standards, anyway. Hot and sunny most of the day while the others have been overcast and cool. Those days are better for hiking, though, because I have been sweating buckets today. We’ve been on this beach for 1+ hour and haven’t seen another soul.
. . .
I took a quick dip in the ocean, basically just wading in and then diving under a wave—the beach wasn’t great for swimming because there were rocks everywhere and a strong rip. From the beach it took about 30 minutes to hike up the gully to Devil’s Kitchen Campsite. It was deserted. There was a great outlook above the last campsite and from the camp toilet.
As I was sitting up there I noticed what I thought looked like smoke but I wasn’t sure. Then, as Sytske and I were watching the sunset ash started to fall from the sky. The school group hadn’t shown up either so I was starting to get a little worried. In my mind I was planning a mad dash back down to the beach to escape the approaching flames. But eventually the group arrived at 9 PM and reported that as they were driving they saw the smoke of a bush fire off in the distance. They didn’t seem too worried about it so I forgot about the threat. The skies cleared up and the stars that night were amazing—I even saw a few shooting stars.
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