Day Forty Five - August 20th, 2013
Undara

My worst nightmare came true. I nipped out of the tent around 10pm, feeling more confident about our surroundings than I had when we pulled in, for a quick wee and found myself face to face with a snake half concealed by leaves. The light of my torch picked up the flat mouth and bright eye, and I ran for it. The adrenaline pumping through me kept me up for a considerable amount of time. Thank God I had a Ricky Gervais podcast to calm me down.

As predicted, we were woken by the kookaburras, and some magpies swooping at the tent. I was keen to get out of the campsite as it had come a horror scene to me after my near death experience, so we took the drive out of the lodge towards the volcanic Kalkani crater rim we could walk the perimeter of. Half of the journey was on sealed bitumen, the remaining half gave us our first taste of corrugated roads. It was rough going, and we took it slow. All was fine, apart from our hazard lights going off and not stopping until Elly had fiddled with the fuses under the bonnet.

We arrived at the base of the volcano, which only two other cars in the car park - it was 9am, the 15km drive on the unsealed road had taken us 30 minutes! We set off up the path, and reached the top pretty quickly. The views from the top were great, and we learnt a lot from the information plaques dotted intermittently around. I was tempted to pick up handfuls of the volcanic rock littering the path like I did all those years ago when we visited Mt Vesuvius as a family, and made Angus carry all the way back to Limpsfield, but resisted. We met the couple we'd been chatting to last night coming up as we descended. For 'grey nomads', they're doing very well!

We were back at the campsite by 10.15 after blitzing the 2.5km walk, and decided to spend the day by the pool to escape the heat. We chatted to a lowly family travelling with their little toddler, Anna. The great thing about camping is that everyone shares their story and helps each other out. We read our books until we got hungry, and then took a short break from the pool to eat our leftovers.

We headed out on our last walk from the lodge at 2.30 - it was very very hot but we wanted to leave enough time to come back and cook/shower in the light. The walk to Atkinson's Lookout was nice but not that striking. I'm hoping our next stop won't be so snakey! Despite knowing they're more scared of us than we are of them, I still worry I'll step on one by mistake; their camouflage means that I'm constantly straining my eyes to see them, and not enjoying the surroundings.

The shop at reception is extremely limited, so we just picked up what we could and tried to make the best of it. 2 minute noodles for me, plain pasta for Elly. NOT the best meal so far! We had a shower in the very 'outback' facilities, and realised how dusty we were! Clean and reasonably full, we headed down to the railcar bar where I am currently sat watching Masterchef and Elly is charging his iPad. It's nice to be somewhere cosy! Tonight the campfire activity is trivia about the lava tubes. Seeing as we didn't pay for the tour and know nothing about it, I think we'll have to give it a miss.