Heysen Trail

I want to start off this post with an awesome message we found in the logbook of a campsite we passed on the trail:

"Tim, where are you? Are you lost? Are you lazy and at home? It's 1pm. We're leaving after eating lunch. Hope you're not lost, it'll be a pain in the arse getting someone to move into your room.

PS if anyone sees a skeleton in red lycra it's Tim. Can you bag him up and send his remains to his mum in Coffs Harbour."

Anyways, this is the rundown on the three-day hiking trip we took along the Heysen Trail, which runs near Adelaide.

Photos!!

We left on the second Wednesday of break (having had a couple days to recuperate from the outback trip). We took tents, sleeping bags, food, and everything else with us in backpacks. Four of us went: me, Katherine, Cassie, and Kyle (a friend we made here - an exchange student from William Jewell College). The trip lasted three days.

On the first day, we took a bus out to the Morialta Conservation park, where we picked up the trail. Morialta was beautiful, rewarding us for a steep climb with views of the city of Adelaide, the wooded hills surrounding us, and the gorge with waterfalls that ran through the park. After that, the trail followed a remote vehicle track that serviced the properties in the Adelaide hills area for a while. After a brief stint alongside a paved road, we turned off onto a path that went down a very, very steep hill. I'm talking steep. According to measurements I made from our map, the hill had an average grade of 31.6%, and some sections were even steeper than that. At the bottom we were rewarded with a very picturesque creek where we refilled all our water and spent a while just playing on the shore and such. Also Katherine made friends with some sheep. She named them 'Fluffykins', 'Brown Butt', and 'Dinner'.

After following the creek for a ways, we turned off into another conservation park. The afternoon involved a lot of climbing (300 vertical meters of it). By the time we made it to our campsite for the night, we were pretty tired. My rough measurements from the map estimate that we walked about 19km that day and did close to 600m of upward elevation change. Our campsite was just a flat grassy area that had been designated as a site. No toilet, water, fire grate, or anything like that. We had brought in frozen beef, so we grilled hamburgers over our little camp stoves, sat around the campfire for a while, and went to bed.

Since we had three days in which to go out and back, we stayed at the same campsite both nights, meaning that on the second day we could leave most of our stuff at the site rather than carry it with us, making it more like a day hike. We walked through more hills, which were all covered in eucalypt forests. Near lunchtime we started passing places that raised sheep and cattle. Just in time for lunch, we reached a "town", which was really just a paved road and a restaurant/gas station/convenience store. Still, we all felt like it was quite luxurious. We bought a plate of chips (french fries), used their bathrooms (with running water!), and asked for plastic forks as we had forgotten to bring cutlery on our trip. We sat in the courtyard (which had a beautiful view of the nearby hills), eating our chips and lunch we had brought with us. Then we turned around and walked back the way we had come, after first stopping for Cassie and Katherine to befriend some horses at the farm across the street.

The third day was pretty much the first day in reverse. Remember the hill I talked about? We had to climb back up that. Fun. We took a different route through the Morialta conservation park which took us past a couple nice waterfalls and such. We made it back by late afternoon and caught a bus back home in time for dinner.

Since I had done most of the planning, I was relieved that the trip had gone off without anything going seriously wrong. Even better, I had a very good time, and I think everyone else did too.

One of the coolest parts about the trip was that we got to see a lot of Australian animals actually in the wild. Among those we saw were:

• Koalas (including a baby koala!!)
• Kangaroos
• Parrots
• A fox
  
• Skinks
• tiny lizards (possibly Tawny Dragons)
• SNAKE! SNAKE! Ohhh, it's a snake!

That last one was especially fun. For all the worrying about the many varieties of snakes that live in Australia, none of us had seen one in the wild until this trip. Early on the second day, we were walking along a grassy part of the trail when Kyle jumped at least one foot up and two feet sideways, simultaneously making a noise which I definitely can't transcribe accurately. I looked over in time to see it slither quickly off into the bushes. We don't know what kind it was (it looked black), but don't worry, it's overwhelmingly likely that it was horribly venemous. That was the only one we saw, but for the rest of the trip, every time we came across a skink (they seemed to like sunning themselves on the trail), Kyle would do the same jumping-in-the-air thing, which in turn made the rest of us very twitchy.

Also fun was the terrifying sounds around our campsite at night. We think it may have been wombats, but we don't really know. All we know is that once it was pitch dark, something would start making unnatural noises at regular intervals very near our campsite. The noises were unlike anything I've ever heard. I can't describe them very well, but imagine an eight hundred pound bulldog, and then imagine that it's purring loudly, and then imagine that punctuated by loud snorting/grunting noises. The sound would last for five seconds or so, and would happen probably every ten to thirty minutes. Sometimes the noises would circle our campsite. Other times, there wouldn't be any noise for a while, and then it would happen unexpectedly (like when Kyle went off into the dark to pee and suddenly the noise happened very, very close to where he was standing). We never saw anything, but apparently wombats make very strange noises, and we don't know what else would have been big enough to be that loud. So yeah, good times.

Alright, that's all I can think of to write. One more thing: I can't promise regular updates again now, since I'm back to the school routine and soon it's going to be finals time, which means I may not have a lot of time, and then I'll be traveling and who knows if I'll have much access to internet. I'll try to put up something once a week or so, but no promises.

Edit: Just remembered that we saw a fox too (even though they poison foxes here). More posts coming soon.