From Stacks Bluff to Birthday Bliss

Stacks Bluff let go of the sun early and held the cold late, so we were glad enough to drop out of that valley and go looking for the coast. Down to Fingal, east through farmland with the hills easing off on either side, then St Marys, and then the road tips over Elephant Pass and starts falling.

That is a good piece of road. It corkscrews down through wet forest with the gradient doing most of the talking, and every few turns the trees break and there is the Tasman Sea a long way below, grey-blue and enormous, and then the forest closes over again. By the bottom the air has changed. Salt in it, and several degrees warmer than the country we had left that morning, which after Storeys Creek felt close to generous.

Hobart was seven days south. So we turned north.

There is no sensible defence of this. Sal's friends were flying in, the date was fixed, and the correct direction was down. But Lagoons Beach was a few kilometres up the coast and free and we had the days, and going the wrong way on purpose is one of the few genuine luxuries this life hands out. We took it.

The camp sat above a beach with a lagoon behind it and black swans working the shallow water, half a dozen of them, tipping down and coming up and paying us no attention whatsoever. Good open sky for the panels, which by then we were reading the way other people read a fuel gauge. We put the chairs out and stayed two nights, because the second of them was Anth's birthday, and it would be the first one either of us had spent living in the bus.

The beach was cold underfoot and mostly ours. On one of the walks we fell in with another traveller who had been doing this in Tasmania for six years, not passing through, living here, moving camp to camp around the island through six winters. He talked for a while about breakdowns and weather and places to sit out a front. We had been on the road four and a half months and had privately wondered whether the novelty had a shelf life. Here was a man who had not found the end of it yet. It was not exactly reassurance. It was more like being shown a longer road than the one you thought you were on.

That evening it got cold again, less brutally than at Storeys Creek but enough. We had been circling the diesel heater conversation for weeks and that night we stopped circling it. Winter was coming, we were staying, and there was no version of the next few months that did not involve being properly cold unless we did something about it. Sal was visibly pleased. Neither of us said the obvious thing, which was that buying a heater meant committing to the island through the worst of it.

The birthday came in clear and sharp. Coffee, porridge, both of us outside in jackets with the swans out on the lagoon and the sea working away beyond the dune. Nobody sang. There was no cake, no wrapping paper, no one else there at all. Just two people eating breakfast in the cold at a free camp on the east coast of Tasmania, which is a strange way to turn a year older and, as it turned out, entirely sufficient.

After lunch we packed up, which took the minutes it takes when everything already has a place, and went south to Bicheno.

Third time there. The first had been two years earlier, also for this birthday, back when the shape of a trip was Airbnbs and day packs and a return flight, and the two of us walked the coast tracks by day and slept in a bed somebody else made. Driving in this time with the bus and everything we own inside it, that version of us felt both very close and completely gone.

Off-season had shut the town down. The ice cream place we had specifically been thinking about was closed, which for a birthday afternoon was a genuine blow, and Sal solved it inside four minutes with a raid on the IGA. Dinner was pizza from the one restaurant still open, eaten warm and gratefully.

Then out to the Douglas-Apsley trailhead to park for the night, ready to start walking early. The sky cleared hard after dark, the way it does on the coast in May, and we lay there with the walk waiting and the year turned over and nothing at all needing to be decided before morning.Read more