Hiking Freycinet National Park: Day 3, Bryans Beach

Waking up to blue skies, white sand and turquoise water (no matter how cold it might be) is paradise, plain and simple. Even if you haven't showered in three days and the wind is a bit cold, it's still paradise. We weren't ready to take Mt Freycinet today, so we'd planned for a side trip down to Bryans Beach for a few hours.

After a pancake feast, we left the tent and took our packs down to Bryans Beach on the Southern end of the peninsula, across from Shouten Island.

The path looked somewhat overgrown and quite obviously less traveled, but the climbing around and over fall trees and branches was worth it and we were left with a near empty white sand beach. Bryans Beach didn't have many visitors on foot, but it certainly had several boats anchored around.

It was a perfect, lazy, sunny afternoon to dip your feet in the cool water and walk along the warm sand. I also did a fair bit of climbing around the sand dunes to find Bryans Lagoon, which was marked on the map.

After a lunch trail mix and mountain bread dipped in peanut butter, Shannon and I made the hike back to Cooks Beach. The good thing about hiking in December is that the days are the longest and the weather is usually still quite cool. We were fortunate with sunlight by 6am and it lasted until after 9pm. We actually got very little use out of the lanterns we brought with us--except to read The Hobbit aloud at night.

By the time we returned to our tent, there were already about eight other tents set up for the night, but since they were set up far away, we almost didn't know any of them were there. After a hearty dinner and a cup of the last hot chocolate, we turned in after watching some of the sunset. Tomorrow, we were going to find out what hiking is really like.