Tasmania's Trails and Treasured Moments

We had a week to spend west of Hobart before coming back for the last day of Dark Mofo, and for the first time since Grammy and Fran we were a convoy again. Andy had his car and was following.

Chauncy Vale had been good to us but the batteries had not eaten properly in eight days, so leaving involved the usual town circuit first: water, diesel, the groceries we had failed to buy last time. Then across the Derwent and west, and an hour later we were at Mount Field, which in Queensland terms is not a drive at all. We had stopped being surprised by that and started expecting to miss it.

Twenty dollars for a powered site. We took it without discussion. Mount Field is a serious walking park and we had no intention of walking it properly on this visit, which felt slightly disgraceful, but the bus needed mains power more than we needed another summit. That is the trade you make when your house has a battery in it.

Andy cooked. He set his table up outside in the cold and produced a vegan spaghetti bolognese, which we ate with the low expectations of two committed meat-eaters and then finished entirely. A brush-tailed possum turned up partway through and made a serious attempt at joining us, close enough and bold enough that we picked up our plates and retreated into the bus to finish, which the possum probably counted as a win.

The next morning Justin messaged. He had a week left in Tasmania and wanted to spend it camping with us, so we stayed put and waited for him, and filled the gap by looking at what we could walk in an afternoon. The Three Falls Track came in at 6.1 kilometres, which was about right.

He arrived, and it was already later than sensible. Starting a six-kilometre forest walk in the middle of June with the light going meant driving to Lake Pedder afterwards in the dark, which we do not do, on roads with more wildlife on them than anywhere we had driven. We went anyway.

It was the best forest walk we did in Tasmania.

Lady Barron Falls came first, water coming down over rock in a long white fall, and we set up for the long exposures that turn moving water into something smooth and unreal. Then the track ran through tall wet forest, swamp gums going up further than you can comfortably look, tree ferns underneath them, everything holding water and every fallen log covered in moss so thick it had rounded the shape of the trunk. The light in there in June comes down green and thin and does not reach the floor properly. Nobody said much for a while.

Horseshoe Falls next, and then the track came out at Russell.

Russell Falls is on postcards and it deserves to be. It comes down in two tiers, wide and even, spread across the rock face like something arranged, and there is a platform where you can stand and be rained on gently by it while staying dry. The four of us stood there and took more photographs than we needed to.

We finished with a mocha at the visitor centre, sitting in a heated building with wet boots on, which after a cold afternoon is a genuinely underrated pleasure.

Then out into the last of the light, west toward Lake Pedder and Ted's Beach, breaking our own rule about arriving in the dark and knowing it, watching the verges the whole way.Read more