See, day 3 was New Year's Eve, but the day started early - at least, a 7am departure is early for these hikers. It was meant to get pretty hot - Tasmania is famous for its unpredictable weather, with blizzards possible even in summer, so our clothing was geared more to preventing hypothermia than preventing heat stroke, and we figured that an early jump was our best bet. So of course we were about the last people out of camp. The hike today was 17km, with a short side trip to a scenic overlook and a long side trip that I took to see what was there (nothing).
On the way, however, we got a close up of one of Australia's unique animals. The echidna, while resembling the love child of a hedgehog and a porcupine, is actually quite different, and belonging to that rarest of biological orders, the monotremes. This means that they are egg-laying mammals, with only the elusive platypus as company. That is just one of the cool things about them, including the fact that they don't have nipples, just patches of skin through which they lactate. Also, their young are called puggles.
Anyway, we watched for some time as this little guy sat in the middle of an ant hill, happy as a pig at the trough, as the stinging insects crawled all over our spiny friend, while he shovelled them in as fast as they could cross his snout. I tried to catch it on video, but you would need a bigger screen than Best Buy offers to see the ants. (Incidentally, the ants, known as Jack Jumpers in Tasmania, aka Myrmecia pilosula, are an aggressive species of ant with a sting that is amongst the most venemous of any insect, and allergic reactions cause more deaths in Tasmania annually than spiders, sharks, wasps, and snakes combined - a new thing to fear in Australia! Hooray!) Anyway, here we go...
So the long hike continued, with a foreign legion-like cloth sticking out the back of my cap to protect me from the hole in the ozone. We passed through a bewildering array of landscapes, from a high tundra-like region dotted with lakes, to deep myrtle forest and everything in between. As we passed through the region called frog flats, promises of leeches kept us from even slowing down until we we reached camp.
Setting up our tent on a 4 tent platform, we were amused to find that the other three tents were occupied by residents of Perth, and after we all kicked off our boots for a while, we found ourselves meeting up separately at the swimming hole (backtracking 30 minutes - but what else do you do for a break during the hike except go for a walk?). Here we met a couple of guys who had just trekked out of the real wilderness over the "Never Never" and set up shop in the emergency shelter which was the old pelion hut. They gave us rudimentary directions to the one landmark that was the one must-have side trip for me.
After a little crashing through the bush with Scott and Michaela from Perth, we found an abandoned copper mine. Having been unprepared for the possibility that it would just be wide open, we - all four of us knowing that we were headed to an abandoned mine shaft - had neglected to bring a flashlight. Lighting our way through intermittent flashes from the camera, we carefully edged in about 50 feet, but had to stop our amateur spelunking for fear of, well, fear. Fear of snakes, spiders, jumping ants, falling ceilings, huge Indiana Jonesish pits with booby traps and tribes of heart-stealing cannibals. Fortunately, we retreated just ahead of the tarantulas that were no doubt lurking just around the corner.
So, if that wasn't the big bang at the end of the post, what was it? It certainly wasn't the huge splurge that we allowed ourselves - 1 oz. of bailey's in a tiny little bottle especially to celebrate New Year's Eve. No, the big bang was a firework show.
A truly spectacular thunderstorm rolled through with peals of thunder and flashes of lightning all around, rain lashing the tent and wind trying to tear us from the tent platform. A huge bear of a storm fronted up, threatened us with a show of ferocity, then backed off, grumbling into the early hours of the morning. It was especially great, since a) our tent stayed dry, and b) we didn't get struck by lightning. And we dozed off contentedly, prepared for tomorrow's big climb.
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