Rainy Reflections, Scenic Connections

We took a powered site at Freycinet, which we almost never do. The panels had been struggling since Storeys Creek and winter was close enough now to plan around rather than talk about, so the sensible move was mains power and a couple of days of not worrying about the numbers. It felt faintly like cheating. Everything charged at once, at speed, without anyone doing arithmetic about it.

The plan had been the big walk. Two years earlier we had done the three-day circuit here, two nights out with everything on our backs, and it was one of the walks that made us want this life in the first place. Coming back to do it again with the bus parked at the trailhead had a pleasing symmetry to it.

Then the forecast came in wet, and stayed wet.

We could have gone anyway. People do, and the tracks are still there in the rain, and there is a version of us that would have laced up on principle. But a three-day circuit in cold rain is not the walk we remembered; it is a different walk with the same map. We had a year on this island. Wineglass Bay was not going to move.

So we stayed in the bus for two days while it rained on the roof.

That sounds like nothing and it took some getting used to. There is a discomfort in stopping when the weather is the only reason, because nothing hurts and nothing is broken and the day is simply being spent. We charged everything. We caught up on the journals, which we had committed to keeping daily and which had already slipped a few days behind, and sitting there writing up Storeys Creek and the gorge while rain came down on a national park we were not walking in was a strange but not unpleasant way to spend an afternoon. The days you write about are never the days you are writing on.

The third morning came in blue and hard-edged and cold, the way it does after a front clears out.

We walked up to the Wineglass Bay lookout, which is the short one, the forty minutes of granite steps that everybody who comes to Freycinet does. Two years ago we had walked straight past that turnoff with three days of food on our backs. This time the lookout was the walk, because Sal's friends were landing in Hobart within days and the calendar had finally caught up with us.

The bay from up there is what it is. White sand in a near-perfect arc, water in that improbable blue-green, the Hazards standing pink-grey around it. It is one of the most photographed views in the country and it survives the photographing. We took our own pictures knowing they would be indistinguishable from everyone else's and took them anyway.

Then out to Cape Tourville, which we had missed entirely on the last trip. It is a short loop of boardwalk around the headland with the lighthouse on it, easy enough that anyone can do it, and the sea comes at the base of those cliffs with real weight. We stood at the rail watching the swell work the rock and stayed longer than the walk warranted.

There is something in that, doing the thing you missed last time. The 2022 trip had felt complete when we flew home. It was not. There was a headland twenty minutes up the road we never got to, and we only know that now because we came back with time we did not have then.

Mid-afternoon we packed up and drove an hour south to Mayfield Bay, which was new ground for both of us. That still counts for something after nearly five months: not a return, not a place with a previous version of ourselves attached to it, just somewhere we had never been.

We parked above the water with the light going long across the bay and the birds sorting themselves out for the evening. Hobart was two days away, and Sal's girls were coming, and after that everything would be schedules and people and town. For now there was a free camp on a quiet stretch of coast and nothing else on the list.Read more