South Cape Track - Day 4 - Beaches

Saturday, 2 January 2021

Day 4 started out with the very bad news that Rob had picked up gastro somewhere and had been up all night suffering from it.  Fortunately all the campsites have good toilets (by hiking standards anyway) which keeps the sites free from grossness and would have been much appreciated by Rob during his multiple visits during the night I'm sure (and everyone who comes after us). Unfortunately there wasn't anything we could really do except press on and hope to hell the rest of us didn't get it.

Our Port Douglas friend had advised us that our day would start with a big bog traverse, so I suited up with gaiters and rain trousers in preparation for that.  I was quite irritated as the morning wore on with no sign of it though, while I sweated away inside my rain trousers.  Instead we started with an easy river crossing and some nice new grating crossing of what would have been quite a bog a few years ago - this was proabably another section of the recent upgrades.

From there we skirted around a headland and crossed a small beach, before a bit more headland and then onto Prion Beach - a beautiful long beach which after the hardships of the previous day was a delight to traverse.  We caught up with our Port Douglas friend here who agreed she'd mis-placed our bog but assured us it was still ahead of us. Yay.

At the end of the beach we crossed the short flat dune section to get to the boat crossing

There are 3 boats there and you have to make sure that there is at least one boat on either side when you are finished. For us this meant Jon rowing back to get Jett and I, while towing an extra boat to leave for the next people.

On the map the next 2 kilometres looked super easy - the route didn't cross any of the (admittedly 40metre) contours and seemed to simply trace the edge of the lagoon.  In reality it was really really difficult.  This was another of the sections where our kilometre rate was laughably low. It was an endless series of steep ups and downs with a lot of clambering over things and multiple crawling sections. After an arduous hour or so we stopped at a river crossing (I think this is the only significant bridge we encountered on the trip) to work out if we would ever make it to the end.

Eventually we convinced ourselves to go another kilometre before stopping for lunch - luckily we came across a great place to stop in 500 or so metres (15 minutes later) so we sat down to enjoy the views and recover a little.  Rob was doing really well to cope with all of this after an energy sapping night.

From there the track turned inland and was much easier going for a kilometre.. 

..before hitting the actual bog (the one I was expecting in the morning). We were used to ankle high mud at this stage but a few times our feet just continued sinking and we found ourselves past our knees in mud. It was really hard to pull ourselves out each time this happened. Thankfully this section only lasted for 20 minutes, by which time we had climbed up for a bit more of a view.

Once again the vegetation changed and we had some relatively easy (and only occasionally muddy) undulating walking down the beautiful Surprise Bay, my favourite beach of the trip.

After a break and a bit of a wash we made our way to the other end and the campsite. To this point we had been lucky with the tides, so we didn't have to wade through that gap in the rocks.

 It had been another long day of hiking. We left at 8.15 and made it to camp after 4. We all agreed that this had been our favourite day though - the (relatively!) easy walking and changes in scenery, together with the rowboat crossing made for a pretty challenging but fun day (less fun for Rob of course).  We made our dinner and then cooked up one of the emergency meals for Rob (as we didn't think he could stomach the rehydrated Strive laksa we had), and once again put ourselves to bed early.  We had the campsite all to ourselves as there are other campsites along the coast to choose from.  We had actually gone an extra 5k than I had originally planned, so we covered about 16km which meant we didn't have to do the 18k which was lined up for day 5.  This turned out to be an excellent decision.