When I said Day 4, I really meant the wee hours of the morning of Day 4. But we need to get back to Day 3 for a bit, for our journey started there.

We let the others know of our plans and started to pack up our belongings. They watched us disapprovingly. In desperation, Tudor pulled me aside and tried to convince me that he was my long lost brother, so I would uncommit myself from this undertaking. To our chagrin, we also experienced some of our first omens while at camp.

First, I was left with a pack of Mediterranean Pasta, all of four servings, bought at 7 dollars from MEC. I walked along the beach trying to pawn it off to other campers but there were no takers. Yup, this was something I was going to have to pack out. The story of this Mediterranean Pasta did not end there. It also accompanied me to Sunshine Coast the following week, and yet again went uneaten. The package sits now in my cupboard, still unopened. Anyone? Anyone?

Second, James was unable to find his flashlight. We spent the remaining daylight minutes looking for it. And then I spent the rest of the batteries in my big flashlight looking for it. We were going to be short two flashlights. To remedy this, we had to solicit flashlights from Greg, Lim, and Michael. In the end, Lim's headlamp saved us. But I just spoiled the ending for you there, didn't I? Damn.

Third, earlier in the evening, Zaven had anticipated becoming really really sleepy during our hike through the night. So he decided to retreat somewhere to sleep while we packed up to leave camp. Yet, when he came back to us, he admitted that he was just lying there daydreaming. We should have known this to mean that he was going to feel sleepy later.

We bid our goodbyes to our fellow campers. It felt like they were sending us off to our doom, like the Fellowship of the Ring leaving Elrond's House of Healing. I had also found myself a walking stick that looked rather like Gandalf's staff. Everything seemed Tolkien.

Yet once we got walking, we were in high spirits. The adventure energized us. We casted our lights ahead and walked single-file in this order: Richard, Zaven, Dusit, James. Leaving James to bring up the rear was a conscious decision; we needed a seasoned hiker to keep our group together.

Soon, we developped a rhythm for navigating in the darkness. Richard had taken Lim's headlamp, the brightest of all our lights, and virtually hiked in broad daylight while the rest of us huddled in the dark, hinged on his every instruction: "Log here!... Roots!... Roots!... Mud!" We continually streamlined our terminology, developping new terms with minimal token conflict to include the most commonly used linear combinations of logs, roots, rocks, mud, and boardwalks. In retrospect, this was immensely helpful: it became automatic to us in no time, allowing us to communicate with ultra efficiency. We had pushed all other English vocabulary from our minds to serve the greater purpose of surviving this trek.

But problems started to creep up. There were a couple of fallen trees over our path that thew us into some initial panics. Our lights were dimming ever slowly. James and I had these 1-foot-wide spotlights that barely lit up the area. We were disadvantaged from the start with seeing things in zero-contrast monochrome, two-dimensions, and only small areas at a time. It made navigating around pools of mud a terribly difficult and slow affair. So much so that it took literally twice as long to do everything, always waiting on one another, eyes straining to extrapolate as much information as possible from what our meagre lights told us.

And, wow, what a sight it was. In the dark, it held tendrils of ground mist that stretched into the horizon, blurring the line where the reeds met the sky. The stars were out in full. It was like somebody turned them on the moment Richard turned his light off. The more we looked, the more we saw.

In this open area, we had enough natural light to see in the dark. We could see one another's expressions, lit by the moon. And it was quiet. So profoundly quiet. I think the sight of that lagoon made the whole night trek worthwhile for me. I wish I could say that it was part of my justification for doing this from the start, but as you already know, my justifications were self-centric: I wanted to prove to myself that I could pull it off. Now, all of a sudden, there was nature asserting itself and saying, "Look here. Look at this beauty here you never considered. THIS is why you should have wanted to be out here. This is something I've been saving only for you guys."

We left the lagoon feeling a little disillusioned. For the first time, I was dreading the substantial distance that remained in our night hike. The moon watched us till we were under tree cover again, hiking through the bog, needing to stop ever more frequently to rest.

At one point, James lost his flashlight on the plankwalk. In panic, we put all our brains together and the best scheme we came up with was for the rest of us to stick eating utensils through the plankwalk gaps and push the flashlight towards James' hand, which had wound its way through the sludge underneath the walk itself. It was disgusting work.

It seemed like forever before we reached the creek. This time, it was shrouded in complete darkness. We hardly saw the water, and the stairs leading down to the creek. By this time, we were out of drinking water; so James pumped furiously while I held the light over his head. And for a time things seemed fine.

Everyone became still. We looked back at him in such horror, fearing immediate response from some kind of wandering monster: a grizzly bear, a cougar, even a rabid raccoon. We felt so vulnerable in the dark, he might as well have covered each of us in tuna juice and wafted the smell into the woods. Then we suddenly resumed what we were doing in full vigor, like somebody had called "ACTION!" And so we took up our packs and left the area.

Our 'weariness' grew into a rather uncomfortable 'exhaustion'. At one point, we decided to rest for a full half an hour, talking quietly amongst ourselves while Zaven napped. I shone my light in all directions, with each quarter of a turn fearing two shiny eyes looking back at me. I felt physically tired, but my mind was awake enough to marvel yet again at how quiet everything was. I had to still myself because I felt like such a baffoon breaking the silence. Nothing. Moved.

We made it to the car when the sky was starting to light up, 7.5 hours after we had started. The last little stretch had gone on forever; every step was a pain. We were exhausted to the point where we simply put one foot in front of the other and fell on it.

In my zombie state, I drove us out to the nearby town and parked in front of some pub... and slept, and slept. It was early morning when we woke up; and I deemed that Richard needed to drive for a turn, while I drifted in and out of sleep. He got us safely back to Slack's house.

Slack's mum treated us gloriously... even gave us the option to shower. But, ah, it wasn't right to shower before we each got back to our respective houses; so we refused that offer. We didn't, however, refuse the rice crispy squares, the granola bars, and the plethora of treats that she showered on us. Thank god for moms.

We had somehow shaken sleep from our brows by the time we were on the ferry again. Then it was like we each discovered that we were tremendously hungry and a concensus to hit Shab was reached immediately.