Wild Trails and Turquoise Waters

The visitor book sits at the Douglas-Apsley trailhead and you write your intentions in it before you go. We put down the full circuit: down through the gorge, along the riverbed, back around. Somebody would know where to start looking. Then we shouldered the packs and went in.

Late May in a Tasmanian national park means the place is yours. No cars at the trailhead, no boots on the track, nobody coming the other way to trade a nod with. The forest was doing what dry east-coast forest does in the cold months, which is very little, loudly. Eucalypt leaves underfoot going off like packing material. Something heavy shifting in the scrub twenty metres away and then not shifting again. Otherwise nothing.

The waterhole came up early and it stopped both of us. Apsley Waterhole is a wide green-blue pool held between rock shelves, and the colour is not what fresh water is supposed to look like. Deep, clear, and turquoise all the way down, with the trees standing over it. We stood there a while working out whether the water was actually that colour or whether the light was doing it. Both, probably.

Downstream we made the first crossing, boot to boot on the dry tops of rocks with the pack shifting your balance a half-second after you have committed to a step. The water underneath was snowmelt cold. We both stayed out of it, mostly.

Then the climb, which is where the walk stopped being pleasant and became work. The track goes up hard toward the gorge rim and the packs start to register, and it was cold enough that stopping for more than a minute meant getting properly chilled, so we kept moving and let the effort do the heating.

The descent to the river was worse than the climb, as descents in that country always are. Wet roots polished by every boot that has come down them, rock slabs greased with moss, the trail more of a suggestion than a path. The poles earned their keep. You put them down and trust them and take the next step, and you do that a few hundred times, and eventually the noise of the river comes up to meet you.

The gorge is worth the trip. Sheer dolerite walls standing well above the water, boulders the size of small vehicles, the river running clean and cold through the middle of it. We stopped, ate something, drank something, and sat looking up at a great deal of rock.

Then we started downstream, and the gorge began saying no.

There had been rain in the days before. The boulders that you are meant to hop across were slick with it, the river was up, and the gaps between the good landings had opened out. We picked our way for a while, slower and slower, testing more and committing less. Then we came to a place where the water filled the gorge from wall to wall, the walls went up sheer and unclimbable on both sides, and the only route through was to swim.

We stood there and looked at it for a fair while.

It would have been possible. That is the honest part. Two people could have got their packs over somehow and gone in and come out the other side and kept going, and it would have made a much better story. It would also have meant swimming in near-winter meltwater, several kilometres from the bus, with the light already thinking about leaving and no one else in the park. So we turned around.

And then we walked all the way back out. That is the bit that never makes it into the telling: the decision takes a minute, and paying for it takes two hours. Back up the greasy descent, which is now a climb. Back over the crossing. Past the waterhole, the same colour, nobody there to see it either. Not much conversation.

But we were not sour about it, and the reason is the thing that makes this life different from a holiday. On a trip with a return flight, that gorge was our one attempt, and turning back means losing it. We had no return flight. We had no end date at all. The gorge would still be there in summer with the water down and the rocks dry, and so, presumably, would we. That is the actual luxury out here. Not the freedom to go anywhere. The freedom to not go, today, and mean it as a postponement rather than a loss.

Back at the bus we peeled off wet gear and dumped it, then drove south to Freycinet.

We had walked there two years earlier, on the trip that started all of this, when Tasmania was a fortnight and a hire car and a list of things to see. Coming back to those same tracks with the bus underneath us was becoming a familiar sensation on this coast: the place unchanged, us unrecognisable.

We parked up for the night with a walk planned for the morning, boots drying, everything smelling of wet forest.Read more