A Dangerous Business

I really need to get better at recognising flat ground. Sleeping on a very subtle longitudinal tilt isn’t the most comfortable of sleep positions. Oh well, it was still probably the best sleep I’ve had in this tent so far. A big part of that is probably because we were back to normal spring temperatures overnight instead of, y’know, 0 degrees.

Today’s plan was simple: get back to Melbourne, fly home. There were a few side-quests to complete along the way, the first being breakfast and actual coffee before boarding the first of two legs to get back to Victoria’s capital. Dunkeld is primarily served by two daily coaches to Ballarat. The first of these leaves at 7am which is, as the kids say, very early. Twice a week, however, there’s a coach going from Warrnambool to Ararat that departs at a much more humane time. Conveniently, my itinerary aligned with this service.

The coach itself was modern and clean, making for a relaxing journey back north through the Grampians to Halls Gap and a handful of small towns before reaching the gold rush town of Ararat. Now for the second leg, a VLocity all the way to Southern Cross.

Taking the more direct broad gauge line and travelling an awful lot faster, the VLine service is much faster than The Overland that I took to get out here. For the first half to Ballarat, we zoomed through dry bushland with a train only about a third full. Those seats filled up quickly the closer we got to Melbourne, making several stops at towns that are rapidly being transformed into outer suburbs of Australia’s largest city. I’m pretty sure there’s a master plan somewhere that shows a good portion of this line being electrified in the not too distant future.

I stepped foot onto Southern Cross at 2:15pm and once again found myself with time to kill before my flight. Wanna take a wild guess at what I did?

Of course it was gonna be more trams, but I didn’t just dart between lines in the free tram zone, there was one place I wanted to make a pilgrimage to.

Yep, the Montague Street Bridge. Calling it an Aussie icon might be a bit of a stretch, but it certainly has quite the reputation in Melbourne. Why is it famous? Well, trucks keep hitting it. That’s it. It’s a low bridge that gets regularly bonked primarily by people driving rental trucks and not being aware of how high their vehicle is.

Yes, I’m acutely aware of how silly I sound. No, I sadly (maybe not sadly) did not witness it being hit (at the time of visiting it had gone 40 days without being struck).

Right, now that’s out of the way, I went back to the CBD. My final stop of the day was for dinner… with Matt and his dad.

We caught up as best we could in the hour we had, reminiscing on our TA experiences and how the GPT had gone. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for long, I had a coach to catch. Partly because the fare as cheap, and partly because I’m weird and wanted to visit an airport I hadn’t been to before, my flight home was out of Avalon Airport. It’s marketed as Melbourne’s second airport, but really it’s more of an airport for Geelong. There’s only a handful of flights operating out of it each day (all by Jetstar) and SkyBus only runs enough coaches to meet each service. If I didn’t get this coach, I’d miss my flight.

I picked up my bag from the lockers, hugged Matt and his dad goodbye, and settled in for the 70 minute trip to Avalon. A lot was great about this trip, but it wasn’t perfect. Gariwerd is such a beautiful place, with its mountains, rock formations, wildflowers, and fauna of every kind. It may not reach to the same heights as the jagged peaks in New Zealand, but I was transfixed by the mountains here all the same. The campsites on the trail were also special (albeit a tad expensive). Apart from the first night I didn’t have any problems with the tent platforms and the shelters made for a nice place to relax, make dinner, and talk with your fellow hikers. Would’ve been nice if we had met someone on a similar itinerary to us, but I guess there aren’t that many people crazy enough to nearly halve the recommended time to complete the trail. The best feature by far were the USB charging ports. I barely tapped into my power bank at all, and it meant I could be more liberal with my phone usage, recording each day’s walk on Strava and catching up with friends and family at camp.

Now for the difficult lessons I learnt. The biggest of these was experience doesn’t equate to fitness. I knew I wouldn’t be going as quickly as I was on the TA, but I still expected that I could go for 20+ km a day. I mean, I did accomplish that, but it was quite a bit harder than I was expecting. I had read blogs and watched a decent number of videos of the trail, most of which pointed to it being rougher than many other well-known Australian trails. But the trail notes listed most sections as Grade 4 walking trails with a couple Grade 5 bits through the middle. I figured – rather naively – that anything below Grade 5 would be a walk in the park for someone who’s tackled the Tararua and Richmond ranges. To say I was left feeling surprised and confused when I found myself having a much harder time than anticipated on day 2 would be an understatement.

I believe it’s primarily for this reason that my nerves shot through the roof when I got to Halls Gap and realised there would be 5 more days of trails of a similar standard or tougher. I was under the impression that if I started early enough I could be at camp by mid-afternoon and have a good chunk of time to relax before sunset. With the benefit of hindsight… that was foolish thinking. When you sign up to walk the distances and elevation gains that I was doing, you’re signing up to spend all day on trail. That was my experience on Te Araroa, clearly my brain had suppressed that reality.

It also didn’t help that a lot of my gear is probably at the end of its life. My sleeping bag, for example, came from Anaconda and dates back to 2019 when I was gifted it for a trip on the Routeburn and Kepler tracks with Eli. 5 years on, some of the baffles on the bag are developing small tears so it’s clearly not giving me the same amount of insulation as when it was new; not great news when it’s getting down to 0 degrees overnight. Thankfully I managed to throw on enough layers on subsequent nights to ward off most of the cold, and I’m now earning a nice bit of coin that I’ll be able to replace it with a better model.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the GPT was all pain and no gain. Getting to spend 7 days traversing through one of Australia’s iconic national parks is a huge blessing, and looking back a can appreciate the challenge of those long days and take satisfaction in completing them. No, my problems stemmed from overconfidence in my post-TA abilities and the foolish belief that a bespoke, new trail rated as Grade 4 wouldn’t hold a candle to the roughness of the TA. I hope that in my next adventure – wherever that is – I’ll remember that each trail I go on will have its own unique challenges and won’t be a walk in the park, even with all of the experience I have on these multi-day hikes. It’s a good reminder to thoroughly research a track before I step foot on it and to not dismiss other people’s accounts or the trail notes just because I have a long distance trail under my belt.

The coach pulled into Avalon Airport, I grabbed my bag and made a beeline for check-in. Bag dropped off and security passed, my final hour in Victoria was spent relaxing in the terminal waiting for my aircraft to arrive. One uneventful flight later, I was back in the humid embrace of Brisbane.