Matt Down Under

I didn’t sleep at all during the night, I managed to place my tent on uneven ground and kept slipping of my mattress. At some stage I simply grabbed my emergency iPod and listened to music until half past six in the morning.

I didn’t feel like eating another breakfast bag, instead I’ve eaten the snack leftovers as breakfast. Everything was wet in the morning, so I had to dry tent and tarp after I returned home. I decided to burn the remaining gas while packing, the can was almost empty and I didn’t want to store halfway empty cans at home. In the end it kept burning for over an hour at full throttle. I always make the mistake of taking too many gas cans with me. Now I know that even when using it three times a day on a ten day trip, one 230g can should be enough. Somehow my Kovea stove doesn’t seem to need a lot of gas.

It was almost a bit sad when I walked along the beach, climbed up the stairs and then looked back again. I knew this would be the last view of the sea on the South Coast Track, a good place to look back and think about the fantastic adventure I was about to finish. It had been really tiring, sometimes frustrating, lots of ups and downs but in the end I made it. No major incidents. Well done.

But still there were about 2 hours to walk until Cockle Creek, the definite end of the track. It was relatively unspectacular to walk, between Lion Rock and Cockle Creek almost the whole track is boardwalk. The only interesting thing was the number of day tourists I passed, despite the not very promising weather. Their smiles spoke volumes, I must have looked pretty bad after 8 days on the track under suboptimal conditions.

At Cockle Creek I found a note from Evans Coaches (ph 6297 1335), there would indeed be a bus pickup around noon, so I waited for the bus. I could only think of pizza, I knew when I would be home I would have a shower for half an hour, then go and get two or three pizzas, I only wanted to go home.

The bus pickup was very friendly. It wasn’t very expensive and two hours later they actually dropped me off only a few metres from my house in the city, amazing.

It was a lot warmer in Hobart than it had been on the track. When I was home I was so happy that I cleaned the whole place before I left, it’s such a great feeling to return home and find a tidy and clean house.

I texted a couple of people to tell that I was back and I decided to be back at work the following day, I didn’t want to sit around the next day, I would only become lazy. It was only one day until the weekend anyway.

So this was the South Coast Track, very muddy, tiring, with some really cool ups, but with plenty of downs as well. I probably won’t walk it again, I could imagine walking South West Cape next, Walls of Jerusalem or maybe something interstate, but it won’t happen until summer anyway.