Chores, Shores & IceCream

Town days had a rhythm of their own. Wynyard was the first proper one in Tasmania: a parcel collected from a previous life, groceries loaded, water tanks filled, laundry done, and the bus washed clean of three weeks of dirt roads and red dust. By the time we had finished, the afternoon was gone and we arrived late at the free camp on Myalla Community Oval, but lateness had already stopped mattering in the way it once did. We were three weeks into Tasmania and had filled the diesel tank for the first time since arriving. A year on this island stretched ahead, and the fuel gauge was a quiet reminder that there was no reason to rush any of it.

Ros and Mike found us the next morning. We had met them at Lake Kara, where they had offered their driveway in Wynyard, and here they were making good on the warmth behind that offer. They drove us out to Boat Harbour Beach, a small cove on the north-west coast that they clearly considered their own, and bought us coffee on the foreshore while we talked. Ros and Mike were retired, Tasmanian through and through, and the conversation moved easily between their knowledge of the island and our newness to it. They gave tips without condescending, recommendations without insisting, and by the end of the morning the list of places we wanted to see had doubled.

We worked the following day, the online business demanding its hours, but by afternoon the pull of the coast was stronger than the laptop screen. We drove back to Boat Harbour Beach on our own this time and understood why Ros and Mike kept returning. The water was an improbable blue, the kind of colour you would dismiss as exaggerated in a photograph, and the sand was white and wide and nearly empty. Tasmania in February, it turned out, could pass for the tropics if you did not look at the thermometer.

Helen was on the beach. Twenty-three years she had been caravanning, a stretch of time that made our three weeks feel like orientation. She had walked the Overland Track ten times and spoke about Tasmania's hiking trails with the authority of someone who had worn through the boots to prove it. We sat with her on the sand and listened, and the recommendations she gave carried a weight that guidebook entries do not, because they came from a woman who had spent two decades testing them with her own feet.

That evening Sal made her banana and chocolate-chip protein pancakes for the first time on the trip, folded through with protein ice cream from Anth's Ninja Creami, and the two of them ate on the back step of the bus as the light faded. It was not a complicated meal. It did not need to be. The pancakes would become a fixture, returned to again and again across the months ahead, but that first batch, eaten at Myalla after a day that had given them good water, good company and good advice, carried something the later ones would only echo.Read more