Day 6 - Overland Track, Tasmania

Bert Nichols' Hut via Narcissus Hut to Lake St Clair  
Distance to cover: 9.5km walk, 16km ferry ride
Forecast: Fine and sunny   
Dinner to look forward to: Rehydrated Indian takeaway - Goat Masala and Dhal Makhani!
Socks and Boots: Still wet but I have decided to treat myself with the pair of clean fluffy socks I have been saving!! <3

another scenic water bottle refilling point

A pretty easy walk today, it looks flat and boring on the map but we are fine with that! The forest we are going through today is much lower altitude than we have seen previously. It looks very familiar - similar to drier Karri/Jarrah forest in the south of WA. Just replace karri with gumtop stringybark, splendid fairy-wren with superb, golden whistler for olive etc.

Olive Whistler in a silver banksia

By this point, Sean has twitched all of the Tas endemics except for 40 spotted pardalote. For anyone interested, this has included; Tas wedge-tailed eagle, Tas native hen (Hilarious, noisy, looks like a giant moorhen), yellow-tailed black cockatoo, green rosella (which is actually yellow??), Tas scrubwren, Tas thornbill, Tas scrubtit, yellow wattlebird, yellow-throated honeyeater, strong-billed honeyeater, black-headed honeyeater, dusky robin, grey shrike-thrush, black currawong. Plus some other cool non endemics such as the pink robin, olive whistler and swift parrot.

I love this button grass! And also boardwalk!

We have been slightly concerned about missing our bus tomorrow, it is due to pick us up 5km south of the end of the track tomorrow. So if we stay at the next hut tonight (Narcissus), we need to cover 20km by 11.30am. After talking the options over with a few of the other hikers, we decide it would be a better idea to skip Narcissus, catch the ferry across Lake st Clair to the end of the track this arvo, and camp at the visitor centre. Then we only need to walk 5km in the morning to be at the bus stop.

Narcissus River crossing

Some dead people I found

At the ferry pickup, there are a lot of exhausted hikers soaking up the sun. On the right are the 3 guys we spent the most time with - Nick, Pat and Peter. They kindly donated us some spare vitaweets for lunches when I realised we had miscalculated and only had enough for half the journey!! This worked out OK for them too, as they had spent a few days arguing about whose fault it was they had bought too many, and their packs were overflowing with vitaweets...

View from the Narcissus Hut Jetty, north end of Lake st Clair

Everybody else who finished the track today opted to stay in the caravan park cabins or hotel down the road. Not us!! We have one more day to go so we will tent it at the free campsite!! Also, there's no point having a shower now when we have no soap or clean clothes to get into. Our little suitcase with clean clothes for the conference, shampoo etc is waiting for us just 5km down the road, at the bus pickup. Yay!

We have been told that this is a good place for platypus and quoll spotting, so after the cafe has closed we take our trusty trangia and dried food supplies over to the picnic tables and set up. Sean spots a furry echidna but lost it before I got to see it. There was another awesome black tiger snake curled up in the sun right about 3m from the sign that said "Beware - Tiger Snakes in this area". There are more friendly pademelons grazing nearby, as well as some cute fat skinks on the rocks. A persistent currawong is disgusted to have only stolen our box of matches rather than something delicious.

Ocellated skink - Niveoscincus ocellatus

 

Zen - Hugel River

It turns out to be a very social place to stop, Sean's PhD supervisor just happens to drop by (he is in Tas for the same conference Sean is attending), as well as several of the people we have been walking with for the last week.

When it finally gets dark, they all head off looking for platypus. We pack up our stuff and are surprised by some small hissy shadows scampering around - eastern quolls!!! Two are pale, one black. Awesomely cute.
 

Zen II - Lake St Clair

Well, that's the end of the walk! Tomorrow we have a casual 5km stroll on a road, down a hill, with a greasy fry up at a service station to look forward to. Whee! And clean clothes, and a shower. I feel quite a sense of achievement at having done this trek- especially when we got up the top of any of those peaks that looked back toward Cradle Mt, our start point, getting further and further away.

Next time... Walls of Jerusalem. http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.aspx?base=3904
Who wants to come? :)

Hot chocolate on the jetty, looking for Platypus