The First Loop Closes

We left Strahan heading north with the ocean on our left and the mountains on our right, the west coast running between the two in a narrow strip of road that felt, after the Gordon River and Sarah Island, like a corridor between things rather than a destination of its own. Grammy's Hiace followed the bus through rain that came and went without committing, the wipers working in bursts.

A geocache pulled Anth off the road near the coast's largest sand dunes. The cache was at the top. The dune was not steep in the technical sense, but sand does not cooperate with effort the way rock does, and every step upward gave back half its height. He made it to the top red-faced and breathing hard, found the cache, signed the log, and came back down in a fraction of the time it had taken to climb. Sal and Grammy watched from the bus and offered the kind of encouragement that is really just entertainment at someone else's expense.

Zeehan and Rosebery passed in sequence, old mining towns sitting in valleys that had been shaped as much by industry as by geology. The rain settled in properly as we climbed away from the coast, the mountains disappearing into low cloud, the road wet and the bush closing in on both sides. Waratah appeared and disappeared in the time it took to decide the rain was too heavy to make stopping worthwhile. We pushed through Hellyer Gorge, the same dark, mossy stretch of forest that had given us march flies and the old myrtle grove weeks earlier, and came out the other side heading for somewhere we already knew.

The Yolla Tavern appeared in the late afternoon, and pulling into the car park behind the pub felt like arriving at a place that had been waiting for us to come back. We had been here on a Monday night two months ago, strangers walking into a folk session without knowing what to expect. Now we parked in the same spot, walked through the same door, and ordered the same wood-fired pizza as though we had been regulars all along. Rob and Jenny were behind the bar. The pizza was as good as the first time. Grammy and Fran, who had not been with us for the original visit, took to the place immediately, which was not surprising because the Yolla Tavern is the kind of pub that does not require a history to feel welcoming.

We camped behind the pub that night with the bus and the Hiace side by side in the dark, and the full-circle feeling of it was hard to ignore. Three weeks ago we had arrived in Tasmania from the ferry and driven east. Now we had looped the island's west coast, seen its rivers and its convict ruins, stood in its ancient forests, and come back to the same pub on the same road in the same north-western corner where the Tasmanian chapter had begun. The circle was not complete. There was too much left to see for that. But the first loop had closed, and sitting behind the Yolla Tavern with pizza settling and the night cold around us, the shape of the journey so far became visible for the first time, and it was larger than we had expected.Read more