Lost and Found: Tales from Chauncy Vale

Another post office in Hobart, another handful of parts for the bus. There is always something: a fitting, a bracket, a thing ordered three weeks ago to solve a problem you had forgotten about. The bus was never finished. We had stopped expecting it to be.

Water and groceries, then north. Thirty minutes out of the city there was a donation camp at Chauncy Vale, off the highway we had run months earlier heading for Penstock Lagoon, except this time we turned off early at Bagdad. Filling the tanks before leaving town had become automatic by then. In a house you turn a tap and think nothing; out here you know exactly how many litres you are carrying and roughly how many days that is, and the knowledge never entirely goes away.

Chauncy Vale is a wildlife reserve with a camp in it, quiet to the point of being slightly uncanny, and the site itself was ordinary. Uneven, damp, nothing special to look at. But there was nobody else in it and the weather was doing what June in Tasmania does, so ordinary was enough. On the second day we walked six kilometres through the reserve and up to the caves.

Then Andy arrived.

Anth had met him in Adelaide during the trial, in a room full of people being paid to sit still, and Andy had listened to the version of our life that gets told to strangers and decided he wanted a go at it. This Tasmania trip was the attempt. He turned up at a bush camp outside Bagdad in the middle of winter, met Sal for the first time, and settled in, which is a reasonable way to start.

He wanted to do the walk we had done, so he went off to do it. While he was out, a message came in from Justin, who we had last seen at Gordon and who was passing and wanted to catch up, so we told him to come and we would put a fire on.

Then a second message, from Andy, who had taken a wrong turn somewhere on the loop and come out on a road a long way from where he meant to be. He was fine, he knew where he was, and he was looking at a very long walk back in the dark. Justin arrived about four minutes later with a car.

So Justin's first act on rejoining us was to drive off and collect a man he had never met from the side of a road. We got the fire going and heard the story from both ends, and it improved considerably in the retelling.

Andy left for a game of Ultimate Frisbee in Hobart, which he had somehow already organised. Justin went south. The camp went quiet again.

Monday the bus went in to a truck mechanic for a service and, finally, the airbags. The same airbags that had been sitting in a box since West Tamar a month earlier, when the wheels would not come off and everybody stood around looking at them. These people got the wheels off. It cost what it cost and it was worth every cent to stop carrying the problem around.

Andy lent us his car for the day, which turned a bus service into something close to a holiday. Laundromat first, because you use a machine when there is one. Then breakfast at a café while the dryer ran, the three of us at a table with coffee, Sal and Andy getting properly acquainted for the first time without a bus repair or a lost hiker in the middle of it.

Afterwards we drove up the Derwent and out to Kingston Beach for a late lunch and a walk along the foreshore in the wind. None of it was remarkable. All of it was the kind of day you cannot have when your house is also your vehicle and your vehicle is up on a hoist.

The bus came back mostly healthy, a couple of small things noted for next service. We took one more night at Chauncy Vale and started looking west, at Lake Pedder.Read more