What Winter Buys You

Thirty minutes again, north and then east onto the Coles Bay road, to a campground called River and Rocks that we had driven past twice without stopping.

In summer that place is full. It sits on the approach to Freycinet, which is the busiest national park in the state, and in January you would be lucky to get in. We arrived on a Thursday in late July and had the entire ground to ourselves, and could take twenty minutes deciding between sites on the basis of nothing more urgent than which patch of ground was flattest and which would catch the morning sun.

That is the whole argument for travelling Tasmania in winter. Everything that is rationed in summer is simply available. You pay for it in daylight hours, cold nights and a fight with the batteries, and it is worth it.

Late in the afternoon four four-wheel drives came in together, a family group, and set up not far off. There is a specific moment when that happens and you are camped alone: you watch the vehicles arrive, count them, and start estimating what the night is going to sound like. Four is a lot of vehicles.

They were quiet. They cooked, they talked, they went to bed at a reasonable hour, and we heard almost nothing from them. This is what happens nine times out of ten and we still do the estimating every time.

The night was clear and we were away early, back onto the road before the sun had properly cleared the hills, heading for whatever came next inside the half hour.Read more