A beautiful day awaited us. But the night wasn’t the best. I woke up in the middle of the night. I laid on the flat ground and just a few breaths were left in my mattress.
In the night I became suddenly awake: I laid on the flat ground. I had no clue why the mattress let the air out. The valve was closed and the mattress didn’t touch any stone since last night. Why on earth did it let me down?
Ages ago I burnt a small whole in my mattress. I patched it, and I slept at least over 100 nights on it. However, tonight the patch detached.
But in the night a had no clue that it was because of the patch. I just blew on it again. Woke up. Blew on it. And again.
Finally the dawn came. Like yesterday night, there were no sandflies around. It felt so unusual to have the the tent completely open without the fear of sandflies inside the tent.
On parts the trail was quite eroded. But it was never dangerous
After 2.5 hours we came across the Porters Creek Hut. That’s where we actually wanted to go yesterday. From the Red Hills Hut it should be 4 hours according to the DOC Sign. It took us 6 hours! We have no idea how to do that in 4 hours.
After having lunch at the picnic table it was already 2pm. The Doc sign said 4 hours to Hunters Hut. Again 4 hours… 4 hours? If these 4 hours would be like the last ones, we should stay here at the hut. Beside of our campspot in the morning, we haven’t seen any good ones on the trail.
Tomorrow should be the day with a lot of rain (or snow?), it would be nice to stay in a nice hut. This one is pretty nice, how likely is the chance that the next one is even nicer? After having another close look on the map we decided to go further.
After three hours we nearly reached the hut. Just a few hundreds meters left. The trailnotes said something about boulderfields since then we had no ideas what they were talking about. The last hundred meters clarified that.
We just reached the hut with the last daylight. We were not alone: With us was Eiji. We met Eiji already before, he was the hutwarden at the Greenstone Hut close to Queenstown. It was the right decision to go further, the Hut is quite new (1990s) and so cozy!