Whispers of Adventure: Peninsula Redux

Out of the house at Clifton Beach with a decision to make and a fortnight to make it in.

Anth had a trial booked at CMAX, three weeks in Adelaide, which meant three weeks of Sal alone in the bus in a Tasmanian winter with study to do and not much else. So she booked a flight to Brisbane instead. Seven months since she had seen her parents, her kids within reach, a house with a door on it. If he was going to be gone anyway, there was no argument for her staying.

Which meant a fortnight before both of us left the island, and a question about where to spend it. Inland in late July means frost on the windscreen every morning and clear cold nights, which we like. The coast means a few degrees more and less of a fight with the batteries. We took the coast and left the highlands for after she got back, which was the practical choice rather than the romantic one, and most of these decisions are.

So, the Tasman Peninsula, which we had last seen two years earlier on the birthday trip, in a hire car, with a list. We stopped at Eaglehawk Neck on the way through for the Blowhole and Tasman Arch, both of which are car park attractions in the best sense: forty metres from the vehicle and genuinely worth the walk. Dolerite cut into by the sea over a long enough period to make an arch out of a headland and a hole out of a cliff.

Fortescue Bay was the destination, and Fortescue Bay has a problem. The camp sits in tall forest right down to the sand, which is beautiful and which meant the panels saw almost nothing. We had come off five nights of mains power at Clifton Beach with everything full, and watched the numbers start going the wrong way from the first afternoon. That set the length of the visit before we had finished setting up. Two nights, not the several we had planned.

Which meant doing the walk immediately rather than easing into it.

Fourteen kilometres return, north along the coast to Bivouac Bay. The track runs close to the edge for most of it, through dry coastal forest with the Tasman Sea open on the right and dolerite cliffs dropping away below, and it keeps giving you the view back over your shoulder rather than ahead. Cape Hauy came into sight partway along, the fluted columns standing off the end of the peninsula, which is the shape everybody photographs and which is better in person and smaller than the photographs suggest.

North of that the coast ran away in headlands, each one paler than the last until they stopped being distinguishable from the water.

We turned at Bivouac Bay and walked back, and the timing worked out better than we deserved: we came off the track onto the sand at Fortescue with the sun already low, the bay orange, the water going flat the way it does at the end of a still day. We stood on the beach for a while with the legs complaining and did not rush back to the bus.

Two nights was not enough and we knew it going in. There is a whole peninsula out there we have still not walked, Cape Hauy and Cape Pillar and the multi-day track that links them, and we have now been to the Tasman twice without doing any of it.

But the batteries decide a lot in this life, more than scenery does and considerably more than intention. We packed up on the second morning and drove out under the same trees that had cost us the stay, back toward Hobart and Sal's flight.Read more