Day 7: 14 kms, best waterhole on the track

This was our first day as a group of four, and since I began to feel some soreness and pain fairly early in the day, it quickly became apparent our group hiking style was going to be very different from before. 

As a group of six, there were lots of different ways we could break up; into pairs, into groups of 3, into four and two, etc, but by and large, we stayed within eyesight of the whole group and took breaks together. However, the Englishman and GrownUpFriend are big, strong, fit men, and were carrying quite heavy packs; this means they preferred to hike very fast, so as to get to the destination and take the pack off as soon as possible. D and I, on the other hand, had very light packs, and between my shorter legs and my increasing soreness, I slowed us down to about half the speed of our companions. 

I managed to ignore the pain this day, and we got to Ellery Creek quite early in the day. This was magnificent, as it was the most beautiful (and relatively warm!) waterhole we'd seen.

Ellery Creek. So pretty!

Washing clothes.

Butterflies on the bank! Seriously, there were SO many butterflies.

After washing our clothes, the boys of course went in for a swim, and GrownUpFriend, as per usual, swam in his budgie-smugglers. I was seriously considering a swim, as it was a nice warm day, but as soon as he was out there in the water and before I could get in, about 30 retirees waddled up to the creek from the carpark and starting taking a million pictures. One old dude even walked on my stuff to get to a different part of the bank (unnecessarily), and I'm 90% sure it was to get a better angle on GrownUpFriend swimming in the water. Thus, no swim for me.

Lucky for us, there was a chatty little German boy and his mum. He was loud enough that everyone could hear him, and although the only words I caught were smetterling and baum (butterfly and tree), D could understand everything and started giggling. At one point, we walked past the boy climbing up a tree, chattering all kinds of adorable nonsense, so D responded to the boy in German, completely startling the boy and his mother, who asked if D was Swiss. (A Swiss person wouldn't think that, but it shows how fluent D is.) The boy and his mother then chatted to D in German for a while, telling him all about their travels, and D told them about our hike. So cute! 

It was wonderful to have lots of daytime at Ellery Creek. This was our second food drop (yay!), so we spent maybe two hours slowly cooking and eating a big lunch by the water, enjoying the sunlight and making fun of the tourists. 

I'm sitting on the yello Colonelmajig, best chair ever.

In the afternoon, we moved our stuff to the creekbed to camp in the sand (sleeping on sand is the best). At twilight, we saw a dingo silently walk past our camp, just behind that little bush on the right, less than 8 meters from us. Englishman wanted to throw a rock at it, in misguided retaliation for his lost meal and hose at Ormiston Gorge, but the dingo wasn't interested in us at all; he was making a beeline for the car campers, who I'm sure had much better food than we did.

Under the moonlight.

More to come....