On Sunday morning we woke up and heard Thomas’ voice outside our tent. We were all so surprised that he made it all the way to us so early. He traveled more than 22 kilometers in one night, when we were planning to travel that far spread over three days. It does help that he’s so tall and tends to walk faster than all of us, but we were still shocked to see him so early.
It was lightly raining, so we packed up our sleeping bags and packs one at a time since there wasn’t much room to move around in the tent. After we had gotten everything packed up and eaten breakfast, we left our packs at the campsite kitchen shelter and left on a short loop track that goes out to Pitt Head and back. It stopped raining pretty soon after we started walking, and we enjoyed walking without our heavy packs. We stopped at several lookouts and then at a beach on the way back.
When we returned to the campsite, Kaelyn was surprised to find the apples that she had put in an outer pocket of her pack had been pecked apart by Wekas, the brown flightless birds that walked around the campsite looking for food. She was a little upset, but we were all pretty amused that they had found them. She ended up putting the apples in the grass, and we all laughed when a Weka came, picked up the entire apple, and ran off.
After this first hike, Maia had realized she didn’t have her phone. She decided to retrace our steps and look for it. Around a half an hour later she returned with her phone, which had apparently fallen out of her jacket in a cave down at the beach. It was lucky that she found it, even though it wasn’t working properly.
We headed off on our hike for the day and Thomas persuaded us to take the low tide route across an estuary, even though it wasn’t exactly low tide anymore. He was understandably tired from all the walking he had done the night before and didn’t want to take the longer, more hilly route if we didn’t have to. I wasn’t too thrilled about this since I didn’t want to have to get my shoes wet or wade into the freezing water and mud with bare feet. But, everyone else was going that way so I went along with them and reluctantly trudged through the estuary, which luckily only went up to about our knees. After getting through the estuary, I was happy to dry off my feet, put my shoes back on, and continue on the hike.
Crossing the estuary
Our next stop was at Cleopatra’s pool, where there is a little waterfall and pool from a river. We climbed over the rocks to get a good view and saw that there is a natural water slide. None of us really wanted to swim since it was pretty cold out, but right before we left Maia decided she wanted to go for it and try out the water slide. However, she forgot to take off her glasses and before any of us could stop her, she was down the slide and the glasses were nowhere to be found. Thomas and Bryn even went in to help her look, but her glasses were gone. Maia really had bad luck this day, and while we all felt terrible, we were able to laugh it off and try to make the best of the situation.
Cleopatra’s Pool
The rest of our hike was relatively uneventful compared to the mishaps from earlier in the day, but we did get to see a lot of pretty views. The coastal walk reminded me a little bit of the Cinque Terre trek that we did in Italy, except that it was much cooler and the forest that we were walking through was more like a rain forest. We did cross several bridges though, including a very bouncy suspension bridge.
After walking for about three hours we reached the Bark Bay Hut, where we would be staying that night. We had decided to stay in the hut rather than camp since it was supposed to rain that night, and I was very glad for that. The hut was pretty cute with benches and tables, as well as a fire to sit around and warm us up. The beds were like large bunk beds that you could put about six mattresses across, so we all fit on the top bunk. It was so nice to be warm and rest after our hike, and we had fun playing Contact, a word game, throughout the evening. We ended up going to bed pretty early since we were all pretty exhausted and I was so happy to sleep on a mattress where I could fully extend my legs.
Hut sweet hut
Hammond Adventures 