Hiking through a quite flat area made it an easy hiking day today. Also, we met some nice hunters!
Waking up with sandflies all over the place paced up the packing procedure and we continued tramping! Today was meant to be an easy day, as we didn’t have to climb so many ks. “Into the flats” told us some French hikers that we met where we pitched our tent yesterday. Indeed, it was hilly nevertheless and it was quite hot so we were glad that the trail mostly followed a wide valley.
At first we followed the Pott River and had a great view back to the point where the Pott River flows into the Rangitata River.
Soon we reached Clearwater Lake, a small recreation area. Somewhere close to the lake we found a small creek and we washed our hair. The easiest way is to poor water over each other’s head. Sounds refreshing on a hot day but it is actually more of a torture… From the cold water the skin of your head just feels as it would freeze which is quite painful ?. Nevertheless, you just feel so much better with fresh hair!
After another few kilometres, we had to climb a little saddle. Not so flat after all… The little saddle actually looked quite funny as there were two trails leading to its top. One trail had very large switchbacks to climb it and one just went straight up. Usually I like switchbacks but this would have taken forever here, so we just went straight up. It looked as the switchbacks were also more designed for bikers as they were really very wide with hardly any inclination.
A little bit further on the trail we met three hunters. One on a quad and two on motor bikes. This really looked like a fun way of travelling through this terrain! We had a really nice and interesting chat with them. Kevin gave us his number and said we can give him a call when we are in Methven. This was very nice of him and we were happy to note down his number. We thought it would be really nice to see them again in Methven.
As we could see the hunters disappearing, we continued hiking on a 4×4 track until we reached a small country road. Unfortunately, we had to follow this road for a few kilometres. We were really glad when we finally saw a sign that pointed our way off the road again and towards Emily Lake ?
Happily tramping on soft ground again, we soon reached Emily Lake where we pitched our tent in the last daylight ⛺
