Windswept Wonders & Wash Cycles

The ferry let us out at Devonport on a morning that was cooler and greener than anything we had seen in three weeks. Tasmania did not arrive gradually. It was simply there, fully itself from the moment the ramp dropped: dense bush right to the road edge, air that tasted different, a sky that sat lower and closer. We drove south toward Ulverstone with the windows down and the feeling that the mainland was already a long way behind.

The Ulverstone laundromat was not what we had pictured as a first Tasmanian stop, but three weeks of hand-washing had built a backlog that could not wait. The machines were enormous, industrial things that swallowed everything we owned in a single load, and Sal fed her white doona cover into the drum with the kind of satisfaction that only weeks of dusty camps can produce. While the machines ran we walked to a nearby beach with coffee, the wind strong enough to steal from Anth's mug and scatter it across the sand before he could drink it.

Preservation Bay was the night's camp, and the wind followed us there. Gusts over sixty kilometres an hour rocked the bus on its first Tasmanian evening, the ocean close enough to hear even above the noise of it. We cooked inside with the doors shut, ate in the warmth of the Coaster while the world outside roared, and slept deeply despite the movement, the kind of sleep that comes after a long crossing and a longer three weeks.

We stayed five nights. The days found their shape around coastal walks: east along the shore toward Penguin, where the surf club sat above a long beach; west to a headland where the wind had carved everything to a lean. One evening we walked out after dark and found two little penguins huddled in the undergrowth near the camp, small enough to hold in two hands, entirely still, watching us with the calm indifference of animals that were here first.

The camp filled and thinned around us as travellers came and went. Benyu and Rach had been on the road three years and carried the ease of people who had stopped counting. Hope had been travelling over a year with her young son, the two of them managing alone in a way that made the logistics look simple, which they almost certainly were not. Terry was parked beside us with his caravan and two cockatiels for company. He had come to Tasmania eighteen months earlier and never left, moving from camp to camp around the island in a slow, contented circuit. The way he spoke about the place suggested he had found something here he had not been looking for and had no plans to give back.

On the last evening Benyu spun fire on the beach, turning circles of flame against the dark while the rest of us sat by the coals and watched. We said goodbye the next morning with the usual promises, and meant them in the way you mean things when you have shared a fire with someone and are not yet sure whether the road will bring you back together. With some of them, it would.Read more