Tuesday 22 March 2011

Final Day : Windy Ridge to Narcissus Hut

 Today was the final day of the trek, a 10km stretch to the shores of Lake St Clair and the ferry terminal.

It was a busy day coming out of the trek, it seemed that something like 60 people were finishing today, so the ferry was full on all 3 trips, lucky we had made a booking.

I guess if you don't get on the ferry you have to walk the extra 16km around the shore of the Lake to the Visitor Centre and civilisation.  According to some sources you haven't really walked the Overland Track unless you finish this way, phft.  I really didn't want the extra 16km at that point.

We set off early in the morning and set a good pace and ended up at Narcissus Hut by about 11am or so.  Then it was just a wait by the river for our ferry to turn up.


By the Narcissus River
Overall the walk was awesome, particularly the first 3-4 days, they were incredible.  And there seemed to be no issues for us, in fact it was probably a little too easy, I definitely recommend it as a first multi-day trek.  There are so many people and helipads around that you feel even if things did go bad you would never be in too much trouble.  I'm sure that could be different in the middle of winter though.

I want to also give a shout out to two bits of gear in particular.  The first was our UV sterilisation pen, that was so quick and easy to use, and there was none of that horrible iodine taste left over. I really recommend that over the tablets.  Though I haven't tried the more involved water filters so I'm not sure how it compares to those.  All I know is that we used it (nearly) everytime we gathered water and it seems that giardia hasn't infested us.  One of the only times the UV pen wasn't used was also the last time we gathered water, straight from Lake St Clair.  I think the last 5 days had started to get to us by then, because after being fairly vigilant we basically drank straight from the lake.  I think our brains were a little tired.

The other awesome thing we had were our dehydrated meals.  If you are doing multi-day treks and want to take dehydrated meals I can't recommend the Chefsway brand highly enough.  The meals actually taste like food, hard to believe I know for something which is meant to feed you.  But I've had the Backcountry meals one and they taste like chemical compounds.  I don't even think there is all that much difference in the price.  Seriously check them out.

Jetty at Narcissus Hut
Enjoying the first fresh food in a while
Dave relaxing in Salamanca Square (Hobart)
It was a little odd being back in Hobart. I think my nose had long grown accustomed to my stench because I honestly couldn't smell anything coming from me.  Though I did notice that in Hobart that first afternoon/evening everytime someone walked past they smelt soooo good.  I was trying to huddle in on myself to try and restrict the smell radius.  Thank goodness there was one clothes shop still open so I could buy myself a different set of clothes.  The shop attendants must not have been happy though seeing me handle all their nice clean clothes.  Don't worry I didn't try any on.

Again the photo to the left has had some serious photo-shopping, too much do you think?

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