Lake Saint Claire

From Tully we drove round to Lake Saint Claire and began to look for accommodation. After flitting back and forth between the two accommodation choices in the town we settled on the hotel which was about a mile from the lake but offered backpacker rooms. We were expecting the rooms to be actually in the hotel, but were told as we checked in that they were in little sheds to one side. Ominously they told us we would to be staying in "B-Block". With their cramped, basic conditions and tin roofs they were more concentration camp than holiday camp, and if I was Jewish I don’t think I could have stayed there.

Four days earlier we’d been sunning ourselves in Hobart in 25 degree heat. Now it was just starting to snow. Worried that we might get stuck there and have to spend the next 6 months in a one pub town we asked the bar staff whether there was any possibility of us getting snowed in. They reassured us by saying that the snowploughs would come and dig us out if the roads got blocked, so that just left the question of who would dig our frozen, hypothermic bodies from our little tin huts if we didn’t make it through the night.

The next day, finding that none of our fingers or toes had dropped off, we cleared the snow from Marina’s windscreen and headed down to the lake. It was still snowing, but as we started to walk round it turned to sleet, then to driving rain. After 45 minutes Marie and I were walking up at the front and we stopped to wait for Aimee, who was dawdling behind and had dropped out of sight. We waited for 5 minutes but she didn’t turn up and we decided to go and look for her. Retracing our steps down the narrow path to the point where we had last seen her, there was no sign and we were slightly baffled. I thought she might be hiding behind a tree playing an April Fool’s joke but after 10 minutes of calling her name we still she hadn’t come out of the bushes laughing. We knew she hadn’t gone back the way we came as there were only three sets of footprints in the snow on the path, and they were ours from when we walked in. But then we found a footprint leading off the path past a tree and we worked out she must have wandered off into the bush. Just the other side of the tree was another path that formed part of the Overland Track – a 5 day walking route that skirted past the lake. Deciding not to meet up with Aimee 5 days later in Belgium or wherever the track finished we ran through the deep muddy puddles to catch up with her. Five minutes later we found her wandering back looking lost, but not as worried as we were looking. We resolved to buy her a set of "baby reins" so that she might never wander off on her own again.