Cast Away

But it was a very good opportunity to see parts of our track from the sky, the flight took us about one hour to get to Melaleuca, a ranger station, a dusty runway and some huts. From the moment on that we landed I felt really good, being out, breathing freely. The to guys that flew in with us wanted to stay over night before starting the Old Port Davie Track, we felt the pressure to get going. But still I took some time to explore the surroundings, a really nice area, while tracing somebody elses track. There is a bird obervatory point to, and I was lucky enough to catch two parrots (taking them through the telescope).
At about 4.30pm, after writing a final entry to the hut's guestbook, I put on my 23kg backpack and we walked off having blue sky. So we were looking forward to at least seven days of bushwalking involving a lot of scening points, beaches, cliffs, abandoned camp sites, wildlife and tired feet. But in fact we were not really aware of what was about to happen. The first minutes we avoided walking through puddles, then we had to find out that the track was flooded (because of heavy rainfalls the days beofre) and walked in water up to hour knees for hours. So the first stage took us longer than expected and we set camp near a beach at Point Eric at 8.30pm. It took us a while to build up the tent, get a routine in setting everything up, but after some time we enjoyed our first fuel stove meal. One out of many.
During the second day, which led us to the feet of the Iron Bound, the highest mountain we would have to cross during the track, it started raining (not before we had seen the first kangaroo). Well, we expected that to happen, but I also expected it to stop again in time. It didn't. So, while wading slowly towards the swamps of the rain forest, barely making it out of some really deep mud sections (Marc jumped in three times in total), most of my gear (that was mainly meant to suit me well in hot Sydney, who had thought of these conditions when I packed my backpack back home) got soaked and we were more than happy to find out that night, that the sleeping bags and some cloth as well as the food had stayed dry because of the extra waste bags we had wrapped them in. Being totally fucked we decided to have our one can meal (real bad idea to bring cans), so that we wouldn't have to carry them anymore. In addition to that they were supposed to be our New Year's dinner anyway, it was December 31st. And then, while opening the second beasty can, it happened: while tearing the lid off I cut quite deep into three fingers of my right hand, circumstances I would regret the next days. There you are, no possibilites to wash it, not even to dry it for it was still raining, having to build up the camp. What do you do? Use your pants! We went to bed around ten, sleeping into the new year, actually freezing a bit imagining that my housemates and Australian friends where just having their parties.
Waking up the next morning the first thing I noticed was, that it still rained. We thought about staying for one day, for the upcoming stage was supposed to be the hardest one, but as the forecast (or at least the one we had heard of a few days ago) supposed the weather to get worse the next day, we decided to get it done that day. It's really mean, when you have to jump into your wet and cold (10°C) trousers in the moring, as well as wet and very dirty socks and shoes. I felt I wouldn't like the mornings that much. But we left in time and began climbing up the Iron Bound (aka Mount Doom), noticing after the first few hours that the legs were getting tired, the pack was getting heavier and only the rain wouldn't get weaker. We definately had to go up on the (bad) weather side, unfortunately we neither could enjoy spectacular views over Tasmania nor even find a dry or wind protected spot to have a break at. So we went on and on, but the summit wouldn't come in sight (only this one time, when we thought we did it, before it got steep again). I was sooo tired, and so was Marc. I should also mention that hour Silvester (10.00am, midnight in Germany) was nothing but a short "Happy new year" while concentrating on the ascent, although I was thinking of my friends having fondue and beer, laughing while going back into the warm house. By that time the temperature had fallen to four degrees, the wind felt terrible on my soaked jeans. It's really hard to describe what I thought during these hours, but I for sure had in mind that it might have been a bad idea and that would have loved to have a proper jacked - not that the bags we had slipped into weren't doing a good job for what they were. I felt like ages, but around noon we finally made it to the descent part of the mountain, which led us directly into rain forest area. This also meant that it was very muddy again and I had to discover that my hands were getting a bit blue, I was shivering and running very low on reserve. But it got worse: at some point we met an old man we had met before, who told us that there was a small creek about to come up a couple of meters ahead. And he was right. So we had to make a quick decision because of getting cold and soon tried to set up the tent while digging a channel around it to protect us from the ongoing rainfalls. Some branches on the floor had to serve agains the mud and finally I was just pulling my extremely cold cloth off to jump into my sleeping bag. I had to discover that it got wet. So, at 4pm we vanished into our tent and tried to get back to temperature, shivering very badly, feeling week and very unfit. I don't think I ever experienced such a physically bad condition throughout my whole life and thought about the fact that we had probably more than three days in both directions, realizing how dangerous and somehow stupid all this had been.
The next morgning things looked better. I felt really weak in comparison the last mornings, but that was just like in heaven compared to what I had expected. The creek wasn't even half of what it was the night before and best about all ... it wasn't raining. Well, not really at least. One bad thing was that I had to discover that my camera had gotten really wet, but that also didn't really bother me, I just understood how replaceable it was. The next bad thing might have been that we got lost wich cost us nearly one hour, but in the end we managed to do the rest of the mountain track plus the next day's stage completely. That one ended with a boat crossing over a maybe 300m wide river connecting a laguna with the sea. I had so been looking forward to that, but of course it wasn't what I had expected. The stream of the river was very strong (probably because of the rainfall) and the shores were wide than the should have been. Having my backpack on my knees I hardly manages to stear the boat - and we had to do that three times. It works like that: you've to take the boat to the other side, come back with two boats and then go over with one again. One boat has to remain on each side in the end. Once again I was just fucked when we finally went to sleep - after having some couscous accompanied by tried peas, dish of the year 2006. As we expected some storms for that night, we had tied all wet clothes to random trees around there, once again only caring about pratical issues.
The next morning a lot of things we're nearly dried, although it had been raining again they seemed to have been protected by the trees they were hanging on. Still they didn't make it to the holy bag containing the last pair of dry socks and the dry t-shirt for the night. So we started again, this time just beeing tired but okay. We knew we would have to carry a lot of water this time and really suffered from not having enough the first hours. But that got better and the most impressing events that day definately were the two beaches we had to cross, both warning us that "drowning could occur". But I didn't really think of it to be hard for we had seen these things before without being opposed to any real danger. So we were observing the tide from some rocks, I was standing about 1,5m above the sea, when some waves came in. Suddenly I was wet up to my knees, the salt water hurting in all the scratches and bites on my lags. But we needed to cross, didn't wanna turn around to walk back to any possible camp site. So, when the water had run out of the bay we started wading through what was left but had to find out that the water was faster. I didn't think I could really sprint carrying all that, but we did. Damn it, made it just in time to the other side, jumped on some rocks and still got caught by the 1m foam wave on top of the water. Really funny from up there, but very close as well. Next beach, same thing. This time a couple of cliffs had to be crossed and the sea looked nice enough. But when I had made it half way to the waterfall we would have to climb up, two waves hit the rocks, one about thigh high, the other one above my belly button. I had grabbed what I could get of the granite cliff in front of me and so managed not to get pulled into the sea, what Marc, who managed to jump around the corner before that, had feared. Once again my hands ended up bleeding and I had some more scratches, I was wet and cold but also very happy to start climbing up to that days campsite. There we met some people who had been camping for a few days already because of somebody getting sick. We decided to give them some of our food, as we had to much anyway, didn't really wanna carry all that stuff anymore and they definately needed it more than we did. So there were actually people that felt way worse than we did and they told us, that we seem to be doing pretty well, how encouraging! We had a good night.
The next day, actually the last real passage as the last day was called easy walking, was meant to consist of some hard walking passages again. 6 to 8 hours were suggested (plus breaks) and so we were keen on finding out how long the promised long ascent it would start with was. Actually it took us 1.5hours doing it, but it didn't fell to bad. We just kept walking, even got some scenery half way up and had the feeling to be quite fast. Only the mud was pissing us off a bit, for it got harder and harder to walk in it. Funny, no recalling how careful we were with that in the beginning, now we just set foot into everything. It turned out that we really were doing a good job, finally regaining some of the self-confidence we had started with. We had some water breaks, filling our bottles with the brown river water we'd been drinking for a week, had a cereal break for lunch and still made it to the final river crossing in less than six hours. Yeah! But it would just have been to easy if nothing had happened and so (after seeing one of these signs again) we had to discover that the water wasn't 50cm deep as assumed by the map, but reached over my arse most of the time. That meant I had to hold up my backpack and would have some more wet cloth again. But hey, at least I knew what I would get... till I slipped on a stone and sat down. My first reflex this moment was protecting my backpack and so I got really wet, what was a bit uncomfortable on the upcoming beach passage. But after refilling the bottles again we went on and skipped the "official" camp site, made it a bit further and enjoyed an awesome view on the South Cape. This is what I'd been walking to and you could really feel that there was only a bit of ocean between us and Antarctica.
The next and last morning out there we took our time. It felt strange. I was looking forward to walking out of there, but I also was sad, cause I felt the wilderness in me. I feared it could start raining badly again, so we first packed everything and then had a cereal breakfast. I climbed down to the sea to do the dishes and nearly lost a pan to the sea... crappy waves. After an hour or so we reached Lion Rock and with that South Cape Bay, this is were we, covered in mud and sweat, bumped into quite a lot of daytrippers that came from the ranger station. So it couldn't be far at all. Marc experienced the running-flo and so we did the last board walk passage again faster then suggested. All these people were really strange but it was also cool having them giving way full of admiration for where we'd been coming from. After less then three hours it was done, we reached the registration point for the south coast track and with it Cockle Creek.
That meant we had done it. Strange. And civilization was trying to get as back into its arms very fast! More like a bear hug.