My last day on the Overland Track, somehow I was sad that everything was over now, on the other hand I was looking forward to returning home, having a shower, getting rid of that backpack and working through that huge collection of photos.
Around 8.30am I left Echo Point and tried to walk to Lake St Clair visitor centre relatively quick, as the bus left at 11.45am and I didn’t have a ticket yet. Most people book in advance, but as I didn’t know when I would end my walk I didn’t book a return ticket. The walk would take around 3 hours.
Even though I had to walk fast I really enjoyed this last part of the walk. Sometimes it was like walking through the jungle, it’s a beautiful scenery.
I only needed little more than two hours until I was at the Lake St Clair visitor centre. There I used the public phone to call Tassielink and booked a seat at the bus. In the end it wasn’t really necessary, even though it’s only a small bus for 20 people there were lots of seats left and since you have to pay the driver in cash anyway, you can probably go straight to the driver and check availability of seats without calling the Tassielink centre first (which put me in a queue for 10 minutes…).
From the bus I could see two echidnas on the side of the road, I didn’t see a single one on the track, but I had seen several ones before in Australia.
The bus had a stop in a small town after about one hour. When I was back in Hobart I noticed the difference in temperature, summer had arrived there and with my fleece jacket I looked kind of weird… it’s definitly colder at Cradle Mountain / Lake St Clair than it is in the city, but it’s more like a difference in climate than in temperature alone. Cradle Mountain / Lake St Clair are located about 1000m higher above the sea level than Hobart, personally I found the climate in the mountains much more pleasing than in the city, maybe it’s the different air pressure or whatever.
