I had heard you can climb to the top of the gorge for sunrise. Sunrise is about 5.30 but I thought the sky would start turning colour about 5. I did multiple calculations to work out what time we had to get up. Walking with torches I thought it would take way longer to get there. I did not want to miss sunrise. Chris humoured me and agreed on 2am get up, leave 2.30am even though he thought it was way too early.

At 2.00am our alarms went off. I made thermos coffee and we took off earlier than planned. It was surreal walking along the Main Trail at that hour. The full moon was out so we didn’t need our torches for a lot of the way – lucky because the batteries were low.

Chris pointed to the top of the gorge and said that’s where we are going. It looked very high.

It was probably easier in the dark, one step at a time no looking up to see how far we had to go. It wasn’t as hard as I thought.

Chris noted that I was walking slow. I was – even factoring in night walking. I didn’t want to admit it out loud, but I was getting a sinking feeling that I may have miscalculated the time it would take to get there – by quite a lot… and it may not have been necessary to get up at 2am…

We arrived at 4am. More than an hour before the sun was due to come up. Woops.

We didn’t mind arriving early and lucky Chris is pretty easy going about these things (out of necessity probably LOL). It wasn’t freezing and with the full moon we had a bit of a view over the park and the light of the Visitor Centre to show us what we were looking at.

I sat on the bench seat, got my coffee flask out and prepared to enjoy the tranquillity of the night and the wilderness. Immerse myself in nature. There was no wind. It was dead quiet. Chris though, can’t sit next to someone and not speak. And if you know Chris, you know his voice doesn’t have a low volume button. I said sssshhh. Let’s enjoy the peace and serenity. That lasted about 10 seconds then “what day is it?”

We thought it might get busy but only three other individual people arrived – making a more timely arrival between 5am and 5.30. Two women to  view the sunrise and a male photographer with some very expensive equipment that I was eyeing off. I admired them all having the courage to walk up alone. As I was walking the trail with Chris I have to say thoughts of serial killer movies were running through my head. And every rustle in the bush seemed so loud. 

Sunrise was a bit of a dud. The clouds stopped the red rays from reaching the cliff face (or so the photographer told me). Chris and I didn’t mind though. It had been a bit of an adventure. The view even without the glowing cliff face gave us a completely different perspective of the gorge.

We headed back down the hill.

I was just thinking about the lone walkers and how at times that would be quite peaceful. Literally just as I was thinking that Chris said “I think it would be really sad walking by yourself and not having someone to talk to about it.” I think I may have offended him a tiny bit when I said I would enjoy that sometimes. I noticed he walked quite far ahead after that and we lost each other because as he popped in for loo stop at visitor centre I walked past back to the empty car. He soon got over it though: )

We headed back to our van for a big cooked breakfast.

The photographer told us about a great walk separate to the Main Trail – Mickey Creek Trail. Part of me was glad to know about it, the other part had been looking forward to a relaxing rest of the day. We headed off after breakfast to have a look.

We saw a python sunning itself digesting something quite large.

Maybe because we were tired, or maybe because we did the long walk the day before and there wasn’t many people on the trail, but we weren’t as impressed with the walk as the day before. Still glad we did it though and other people said that this walk was their favourite so don’t skip this on account of our opinion : )

That took us through to lunch and nana nap time and a relaxing day. I said to Chris who would have thought that our 3 day stop would be more tiring than the driving?