Crimson Skies, Bittersweet Goodbyes

Forty kilometres from Griffith to Ben Lomond, which after the previous day's forestry roads was a relief in itself.

We stopped at the café by the park entrance, which we had been to on the first visit back in autumn. It is not a large operation and it is the only thing out there, and the coffee is good enough that you would stop even if it were not the only option. We ate, and took our time about it.

Then up into the park.

The last time we camped here the site had a group of blokes in it with a fire going and a lot to say for themselves, and the noise carried across the whole camp until late. This time there was nobody. Not one other vehicle. We took the same spot we had used before, partly out of habit and partly because it was the best one and there was nothing to stop us.

It was the third time on this mountain. The first was a week on the northern side in autumn, walking up to Legges Tor. Then Storeys Creek in May, under Stacks Bluff on the other flank of the same massif, with the dead town and the quolls. Now this. You do not usually get to know a mountain from three sides, and it had taken us seven months to do it without ever intending to.

We walked out to the lookout before dark and the sunset did something excessive. Red right across, the sky going through the whole range of it, the trees on the ridge standing black against the colour. It went on for a while. Neither of us photographed as much of it as we would have three months ago, which is either a loss or a sign of something better.

The next day we walked down the road so Anth could find a geocache.

That is a low-stakes way to spend a morning and it was the right speed for the day. What made it interesting was the cache itself: it had been sitting there since the early 2000s, more than two decades, placed when geocaching was a few thousand people worldwide with early GPS units and no phones involved. It had survived twenty-odd Tasmanian winters on a mountain road. The log inside had signatures on it from people who had come out here years apart, most of them probably no longer playing.

We did not do any real walking beyond that. There are serious tracks on Ben Lomond and we had done them on the first visit, and this was not that sort of stay.

On the last morning we packed up early and drove down to Launceston, and did not talk much on the way.

Sal had a hairdresser in town she liked, which after seven months of living in a bus is not a small thing, and she went and got it done properly before the flight. Anth waited. There is a specific kind of waiting that happens on the day somebody leaves, where every ordinary task is also the last one before the thing you are not discussing.

Then the afternoon ran down toward the airport, and the flight, and Sal going north to Brisbane and her parents and her kids, and Anth keeping the bus for a few more days before his own flight out.

Seven months and a week, and we had not spent a night in different places on this island since she came back from Hobart in June.Read more