The 30 Minute Rule

We gave ourselves a rule for the run north to Launceston. Every camp had to be under thirty minutes from the last one, and none of them could be a place we had already stayed.

It is a good rule. Seven months in, the temptation is to run the same road and use the same camps, because you know which ones are level and which have a toilet and which get truck noise at four in the morning. The rule broke that. It also meant covering three hours of coast over a week and a half, which suited a fortnight with a departure at the end of it.

The first one was Samuel's Place, up off the highway on a hill.

The road climbs to a cleared paddock at the top and then just stops, and the whole thing is view. Freycinet to the north, unmistakable even at that distance, the peaks we had walked in May. Maria offshore to the east, low and long on the water. In between, coast running both ways as far as it went.

Samuel came down from the house not long after we parked. He had built the place himself, slowly, over years, doing it as he could afford to and as he had time, which is a particular way to make a house and produces a particular relationship with it. He talked about it without much ceremony. Then he told us the paddock was there for travellers, no charge, stay as long as suits.

People do this occasionally and it never stops being surprising. A man buys a hilltop with one of the better views in eastern Tasmania, spends years building on it, and then sets aside the best part of it for strangers to park on. He was not running a business. There was no honesty box, no rules sheet, no expectation. He had a good spot and had decided other people should get to sit in it.

That night the sky was as clear as we had seen it. No town within reach, nothing on the horizon, and the Milky Way came up right across the middle of it, the dust lanes visible, the whole structure of the thing there to look at rather than inferred. We stood out in the cold for longer than was sensible and then went in.

We stayed a second night, which was not the plan.

The wind arrived with the dark on the second evening, straight up the hill with nothing to slow it, and it worked on the bus all night. A Coaster on its springs in a real wind does not sit still; it moves, and the body creaks, and things you thought were secure announce themselves at two in the morning. Neither of us slept much. Neither of us minded, particularly. You are eight tonnes on a hilltop and the weather is simply having its turn.

We left a token for Sam in the morning, which felt about as adequate as these things ever do, and dropped back down to the highway to find the next place inside half an hour.Read more