Day 29 – The Best Day So Far – Perricoota to Barham

From: Perricoota
To: Barham
Distance: 51km
Total Distance Travelled: 1001km
Distance to Go: 1524km

I don’t know why but today feels like it was the best day of paddling have had on this trip.

After going to bed at around 7.30pm last night (I was tired), I was woken up at around 1am by a heavy downpour of rain. At around 2.30am a thunderstorm rolled through. I am not sure when I got back to sleep but there were a lot of hours of listening to the rain, dreading having to get up and deal with the wet and the mud.

At around 6am, I got all my wet weather gear on and crawled out of the tent to find that the skies had cleared and there were stars. It had to be the most perfectly timed storm ever. As I slid down the bank to the kayak I found that the river had risen about 10cm over night. That doesn’t sound like much but that is a lot of water. It also meant that my mud bridge, which was a bit average, actually reached the water and did not need extending to get the boat in the water.

I was on the water at 7.30am and was treated to a beautiful sunrise. I had 51km to paddle today to get down to Barham, where I was going to be camping in the Barham Caravan Park. So I put my headphones on and started paddling.

The weather was perfect. It was sunny, only a little bit of wind and a nice temperature. For some reason I felt really in tune with the river. I was appreciating every small detail of the river. The birds, the trees, the way the water moved around the logs. I was totally in “the zone”.

At around 11.30am I hit the halfway mark and found a nice little beach in the sun to stop and have lunch. I was able to sit there in bare feet (my booties were still wet), eating my cheese and crackers and just chill out for half an hour. Again I don’t know why, but it was the perfect moment. I was in the middle of nowhere, I hadn’t seen another human for 1.5 days and it felt like the moment I had been seeking for a while.

The afternoon was just as enjoyable, although I was starting to get tired. At around 3pm I arrived at Barham and set up camp in the caravan park. It is in a great spot on the bend of the river and a very short walk to the shops and the pub (where I might be sitting as I write this).

One extra highlight of today was that I reached to the 1000km mark. That is 1000km from the top of Mount Kosciuszko.