South Coast Track - Day 2 - Thu Dec 29, 2005

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Day 2 - Thu Dec 29, 2005

After a pretty horrible night of only limited sleep, and much tossing and turning as I tried to escape the feelings of nausea and claustrophobia, the daylight finally began to show itself, which seemed to instantly have an positive impact on me. I lay there in relief that the night was over, and that I hadn't vomited for a number of hours, nor felt like vomiting. Of course, the big question was whether I wanted to tempt fate and drink some water, or be even more adventurous, and attempt to consume some food. First, I drank some water. Despite wanting to drink litres of the stuff due to my extreme dehydration that had accumulated over the previous 12 hours, I took only a few sips. Thankfully, my stomach appeared to have agreed to come back to work, and kept the water down. I kept drinking water for the next hour, while the sun light continued to brighten. Then, in what I can only describe as the most euphoric of feelings at that time, I suddenly realised I felt like eating something. I decided to try and eat a muesli bar, which was easily obtained from my backpack sitting just outside the tent door, under the fly. I ate it and lay back waiting for a response. Again, thankfully, nothing eventuated. The vomiting appeared to have stopped.

I lay in the tent for the entire morning, sleeping off the worst hangover of my life (despite not having had a single drink), while the rest of the group were up and about, pottering around the camp site. Well, at least this was what Claire, Alec and Aff were doing. James, as far as I am aware, spent most of the day playing his hand held Nintendo DS which he had brought along for the hike, along with enough battery life to power Hobart for a week. I don't think I'd include the Nintendo DS on my recommended hiking inventory, but it appeared to serve its purpose well for James, who probably had the most exciting day of anyone. In the end, it was unfortunate that a rest day had to be taken on only the second day of the hike. If it were later, and everyone was more hiking weary, then perhaps it would have been more appreciated, but such is life.

I eventually emerged from the tent in the early afternoon, and again attempted to eat something for lunch, despite not feel particularly hungry. The crucial thing was, of course, to drink lots of water, and to try and eat as much as I could to get my energy levels up. While the vomiting had stopped, I was still experiencing mild feelings of nausea, and still feeling very lethargic.

As late afternoon approached, and I had completed a small walk up the beach, I discussed with Aff (who was walking with me), the possibility of us walking the few extra kilometers (about 4 or 5), to the next camp site at the end of the beach. This was not only to try and get a head start on the next day, but also to move away from the camp site which unfortunately for me, had become a constant reminder of my sickness. Also, a group of 5 female hikers had arrived, which made the camp site rather crowded. So after discussing this suggestion with the rest of the group, it was pretty clear everyone felt similarly, and so we packed up our tents, and embarked on the short walk to the next camp site.

Of course, almost perfectly on cue, the rain and wind arrived as we started walking East along the beach. While the rain was generally pretty light, the wind was fierce. Thankfully, it was blowing from the West, and so its only effect was to push us faster along the beach. The main problem was that it also whipped up the sand and drove it into any bare patch of skin facing into the wind. Each grain of sand was like a miniature bullet, and it wasn't long before my calves were completely red raw from the unrelenting sand storm.

Adding further adventure to what was meant to be a pleasant beach walk, we came to our first river crossing of the hike. At the time, I remember thinking this river crossing was quite a tricky one, but in comparison to the later river crossings, this was nothing of particular note. Being early in the hike, we were a little more cautious about getting hiking boots and socks wet as well, and so spent considerable time taking off shoes and socks to cross it. This was made less pleasant by the cold Westerly wind, and the rain. Once we crossed the river, we then made our way around the bottom of a rocky cliff face that jetted out towards the ocean water, and also served as a shelter from the wind and rain once on the other side of it. After putting our shoes and socks back on, we continued our journey along the Cox Bight beach, only to again stumble onto an even bigger river (name unknown). Again, we crossed this river with shoes and socks off, and then made our way up a path that led away from the beach, and into dense shrubbery, high enough to provide shelter from the wind and rain which had again picked up. About 20 metres in, we find the camp site.

Unfortunately, our decision to leave Point Eric probably turned out to be a bad one. Our new found camp site was no where near as beautiful as Point Eric, but even worse, the campsite was even more overcrowded as a number of other hikers arrived not long after us. These hikers all arrived from the opposite direction to us, which was a little confusing given three of them were people we knew had started the walk from Meleuca on the same day as us. As it turned out, they had attempted to walk to the next camp site, but due to the heavy rain, were unable to cross Faraway Creek, which was about three hours walk from this camp site. So these people had walked there, realised they couldn't cross the river, and then walked back to this camp site. That's a lot of walking for no gain in distance. Two of these people, Gaorg and Cecile, were fellow passengers on the plane when we flew in, and were very friendly. We saw a lot of them in the days to come. The other person, an older man whose name I never found out, was also a nice bloke, but also very keen to dispense his wealth of knowledge on hiking and existing in the wilderness. It was apparently on his advice, that the others did not cross Faraway creek. He also informed us that we needn't bother walking there the next day, as the river was unlikely to come down enough to cross, even if it stopped raining then. Given the rain had started again, and didn't look like stopping for quite sometime, things were looking quite grim.

In terms of my illness, the walk to this camp site, while not as easy as anticipated, did appear to distract me from my feelings of queasiness. I actually felt pretty good, and managed to eat dinner with no great problems. I was, however, still feeling very tired, and so went to bed quite early in the hope that day 3 would bring with it, new found energy, as well as better weather.

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