July 4th 2021

Days km: 24.2km
Total km: 525.8km

What a terrible night. One of my fellow hikers snored so loudly that I could clearly hear them despite having my music on full volume. It was also intermittent, which kinda made it worse. They would go quiet all of a sudden, and after wondering briefly if they had died, I would start to drift off. Then, BOOM super loud snoring kicks in again. It was maddening. And then my sleeping pad popped another couple of baffles, making it pretty much useless. The icing on the cake was my back, which spasmed a few times in the night, no doubt because of the sleeping pad being 1/3rd balloon. It was misery.

I gave up sleep as a bad job and was up and away by 6am.

I honestly don’t recall much of the walk to be honest, I was tired and grumpy. The only real highlight was reaching the halfway mark, which to be fair was a pretty cool thing to reach. 501km down, 501km to go!

My brief joy was tempered somewhat by the rain that started a few steps from the sign. Urgh!

Boarding House shelter is hemmed in by trees and scrub, no phone signal and my Garmin even struggled to send a message. I was absolutely miserable, and if there ever was a day I needed to speak with my family it was today.

I was so tired, but also worried about my sleeping pad and my back, I was not sure how I’d go with another night of no sleep. At this stage about 2/3rd’s of the pad was usable, so I added my packed up tent at the end of the pad for my legs.

It was pretty cold, and with the rain there was no prospect of a fire, so crawled cautiously into bed at 4pm. Surprisingly, it was a lot more comfortable than I was expecting (or I was just too damn tired to care) and my back felt 95% better. I planned to get up at 5 or 6pm to have some dinner, but I wasn’t hungry so I got up briefly to pack away everything and by 6 I was out for the count. I slept like the dead until 5am.