By Ruth
Distance: 25 km
After a luxurious breakfast at The Farm (our current breakfast is triple oatmeal packets with peanut butter), where we ate out of real bowls and drank tea from real mugs, we hit the road again. The distance we planned to walk today was quite manageable, so we weren’t in a hurry.
The first 19km of the day was road walking. Some parts were beautiful and scenic, some parts less so.
Although we were promised fine weather for the next week, around midday it started raining hard. After a few minutes of denial, we eventually stopped, got out our rain jackets, and put them on. Of course, just a few minutes after we started walking again, the rain stopped. An hour or so later, the same thing happened again!
Only ten minutes after the second rain squall, we arrived at the perfect lunch spot. Helena Bay is a tiny holiday community with a beach, just a few hundred meters off the trail. And they have picnic benches! So we stopped for a lunch break, congratulating ourselves on our timing: had we arrived just half an hour earlier we probably wouldn’t have stopped at all, because of the rain. However, just as we were finishing our first of two tortillas and cheese, a third rain squall began. We scrambled to finish making the second wraps so we could put everything away and not end up with soggy tortillas. Luckily, like the previous squalls, this one also only lasted fifteen minutes or so. Once it was over we ate a Hazelnut Slab to celebrate.
We took our time over lunch, knowing we only had six or seven more kilometres to get to camp. We knew they would be a little tougher because we would be going uphill, but weren’t too worried.
Once we got back on the trail though, we realized we may have underestimated the difficulty, because we left the road and started going into a dense forest. It was a tough but beautiful trail, and a real treat after so many hours of road walking earlier in the day. After a couple hours we emerged from the forest to a spectacular view of rolling countryside down to the ocean far below. A little bit more walking through some fields and we arrived at our camp for the night: Camp 306.
We call it Camp 306 because it’s at kilometre 306 of the trail. Which means we are 10% done the whole TA! I know 10% is not that much but I already feel like the trail is going so fast.
We got to camp with just the right amount of time to set up our tent, eat a good dinner (couscous with dried edamame snacks and pumpkin seeds, followed by tea and chocolate), and head to bed. Another successful day on the trail!
