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Nomadic Narratives
  • Sal and Anth
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  • Sal and Anth

Nomadic Narratives

Our home is a bus, our map the whispers of wanderlust, Australia our playground. From shimmering shores to the boundless outback. This journey is a story fuelled by laughter, shared experiences, & the constant hum of adventure's song. Lue lisää
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  • Sal and AnthNomadic NarrativesMatkaaja
    Sunrise Over the Lake

    Road Grime to Lakeside Prime

    3.–4. huhtik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☁️ 11 °C

    We drove west from Dunalley and passed through Forcett without stopping, though both of us glanced toward Michael's farm as it went by. It had been a few weeks since Sal had driven the bus there alone for the first time, and the place already carried a small history.

    Sorell was a supply run. Chocolate, mostly, and the essentials that justified the chocolate. The road from there followed the same route we had taken weeks earlier on the way to Penstock, the landscape familiar enough now to feel like retracing rather than discovering. Past the Penstock turnoff we kept heading west into country we had not driven before, the highlands giving way to farmland and the sky settling into the low grey that Tasmania wears when the temperature is dropping.

    Hamilton offered water and a one-dollar hot shower at the public amenities, which Anth took without hesitation. Days of the recirculating shower outside the bus had their charm, but a dollar for hot water with pressure behind it and a door that locked was a bargain he was not going to overthink. He came out cleaner than he had been in a week and said so, unnecessarily.

    Meadowbank Lake appeared in the late afternoon, the campsite set above the water with a view that opened up as the road dropped toward it. We parked with Grammy's Hiace alongside and had the place to ourselves for the first hour before other travellers began filling the sites behind us. The maps came out over dinner, the route to Strahan traced in pen across the western half of the island. Grammy's second cruise was waiting there, the Gordon River this time, and the anticipation of it sat quietly alongside the cold that was now arriving each evening with real intent. We layered up, closed the bus doors early, and felt, for the first time since arriving in Tasmania, that winter was not a distant idea but something walking toward us.    Lue lisää

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    Rainy Days and Tessellated Ways

    2.–3. huhtik. 2024, Australia ⋅ 🌧 16 °C

    We headed south from Triabunna after a slow start, Sal's pancakes served to all four for the first time on the trip, the batch scaled up and the kitchen briefly crowded. The original plan had been Cockle Creek, Australia's southernmost drivable point, a couple of days further down the peninsula. Dunalley was the night's halfway stop, the bus and Grammy's Hiace parked in paddocks beside the Dunalley Inn with the Easter crowds gone and the space to themselves.

    The Tessellated Pavement was close by and we walked out to it in the early afternoon. The rock platform extends along the shoreline in a pattern of rectangular blocks so regular they look engineered, the formations known as pans and loaves, carved over millions of years by salt crystallisation and tidal erosion. The sea washed across the surface in thin sheets, filling the pans and draining again, and the geometry of it was strange enough to hold all four of us quiet for longer than a rock shelf usually would. Grammy crouched to touch the edges of the blocks, running her fingers along the grooves the way she had at the Spiky Bridge, as though the history in a surface is something you understand better through your hands.

    From there we drove to Eaglehawk Neck, the narrow strip of land that once served as Port Arthur's natural barrier. Thirty metres wide at its thinnest point, the neck had been lined with guard dogs during the convict era, chained in rows across the sand to prevent escape. A statue of one of the dogs stands there now, teeth bared, and the scale of the thing against the narrowness of the land makes the history feel close and specific. The Officers Quarters Museum filled in the rest, the kind of small local exhibition that earns its keep through detail rather than spectacle.

    The rain arrived mid-afternoon and stayed. We retreated to the Dunalley pub for hot drinks, the four of us drying out around a table with the windows streaked and the day outside turning grey and heavy. The rain changed the plan. Cockle Creek would mean two more days of driving south in wet weather on roads that would not improve, and the appeal of the peninsula dimmed with every gust against the pub window. Over a second round of drinks the route shifted: west instead of south, toward Strahan and the wild coast, where Grammy had her eye on a Gordon River cruise. The change was made without argument, the way decisions were starting to be made on this trip, by weather and mood and the shared understanding that the plan was always a suggestion, never a contract.    Lue lisää

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  • Sal and AnthNomadic NarrativesMatkaaja
    Coles Bay
    Coles BayThe Bicehno BlowholeThe Spiky Bridge3Inside the Fossil Cliffs21The Painted Cliffs3Cape Barren Goose24Resting in a Final Resting Spot

    An Island off an Island off an Island

    31. maalisk.–2. huhtik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☁️ 17 °C

    The drive south to Triabunna took us back through country we had seen two years earlier, before the bus, before any of this. Bicheno came first, and we stopped for breakfast at a place we remembered, the four of us at a table overlooking the water, Grammy and Fran meeting a town that already held something for us. The Blowhole was quieter than last time, the swell not high enough to force the spray, but we walked out to it anyway for the sake of completing the visit.

    The ice cream detour was Anth's doing. Two years ago, on his birthday, we had driven to Coles Bay and found an ice creamery with a view of the Freycinet peaks that made the food secondary. It was thirty kilometres off the route and he did not care. Grammy, who had not been consulted on the detour, tasted her first scoop and became an immediate convert, and the thirty kilometres justified themselves in a single mouthful.

    On the way back to the highway we stopped at the Spiky Bridge, a convict-built structure from 1840, its surface covered in vertical stone slabs that give it a rough, defensive look unlike any other bridge in the country. Grammy ran her hand along the stonework. We camped that night behind the pub in Triabunna with Maria Island visible across the water and the boat tour, Grammy's gift, set for the morning.

    Mic, the owner of Maria Island Cruises, met us at the marina at dawn. The water was flat, the sky overcast, and the boat was full, but Mic had the kind of knowledge and timing that made a full vessel feel like a private tour. The circumnavigation began at Darlington Probation Station on the island's northern tip, the convict ruins sitting heavy and grey at the waterline, and moved clockwise into the Fossil Cliffs.

    The cliffs are three hundred million years old, and up close from the boat the fossils were visible in the rock face, pressed into the stone like evidence filed and forgotten. The calm water allowed Mic to steer into a cave where the detail was closer still, and a white-breasted sea eagle watched from a ledge above as though supervising the visit. On the eastern side Mic showed us a geological sequence he clearly loved: metamorphic rock beneath sedimentary beneath igneous, the entire history of the earth's forces stacked in one cliff face. None of us understood it fully. All of us understood his excitement, which was enough.

    Mille, the first mate, mentioned dolphins. She had barely finished the sentence when a pod of common dolphins appeared alongside, feeding on a school of fish in tight, fast circles. They came close enough to see the light on their flanks, and the albatrosses arrived within minutes, drawn by the same fish, different varieties wheeling above the surface while the dolphins worked below. It was the kind of moment that no itinerary can promise and no amount of planning can produce.

    Morning tea was at Riedle Bay, a sheltered beach on the southern coast where wedge-tailed eagles circled the cliffs above. Peron's Pyramid rose from the sea at the island's southern tip, and sea lions lay on the rocks below it, a dozen pups playing in the shallows with the particular gracelessness of young animals that have not yet learned what their bodies are for. The painted cliffs on the return leg glowed with their banded colour even under overcast sky, and by the time we landed at Darlington for the walking tour the island had already given us more than we had expected from a day on the water.

    The wombats appeared within five minutes of stepping ashore. A mother and a joey, feeding on the grass beside the track, unbothered by the group walking past. Two months in Tasmania. Countless camps, countless walks, cube-shaped droppings at every turn, and not a single sighting until now. Grammy had never seen one either, and the expression on her face as she crouched with her camera was worth every one of the empty searches that had come before. The island was thick with wildlife: Cape Barren geese, bandicoots, swift parrots flashing colour through the trees, pademelons grazing in the clearings. We stopped so often that two hours passed without covering much distance at all, and nobody minded.

    On the boat back to Triabunna the four of us sat on the top deck in the wind and agreed without needing to argue about it: this was the best day of the trip with Grammy so far. An island off an island off the mainland, reached by a gift, walked among wombats we had spent two months failing to find. Some days do not need to be improved upon. They only need to be remembered accurately.    Lue lisää

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  • Sal and AnthNomadic NarrativesMatkaaja
    2The Gardens
    2The GardensPicnic at Swimcart Beach2

    Red Rocks and Hot Cross Buns

    30.–31. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ⛅ 19 °C

    We drove south from Policeman's Point with the convoy intact, the corrugated road shaking the bus until it finally relented into bitumen just before St Helens. The town was louder than it had been the week before. Easter Saturday had filled it with families and four-wheel drives and the particular energy of people determined to enjoy a long weekend. We passed through without stopping and continued south toward The Gardens, at the northern end of the Bay of Fires.

    The Red Rocks were worth the crowd. The granite here is covered in an orange lichen so vivid it looks painted, and the boulders sit along the shoreline in clusters that glow against the white sand and blue water. Grammy and Fran had not seen them before, and the two of them moved from rock to rock with cameras raised and the unhurried pleasure of people encountering something that lives up to what they were told. Easter visitors were everywhere, claiming every flat surface for picnics and towels, but the rocks held their own against the traffic. Some places are large enough to absorb a crowd without losing themselves.

    From The Gardens we swung back to Swimcart Beach, which already felt like returning rather than visiting. We sat at a seaside table with hot cross buns and tea, the four of us looking out at the same bay we had spent a week beside, and the familiarity of it felt different now, shared with Grammy and Fran in a way that made the earlier stay feel like a private rehearsal for this one.

    Both vehicles refuelled, we turned south and put the Bay of Fires behind us. Grammy had booked a boat tour to Maria Island from Triabunna, a gift she had arranged before arriving, and the drive down the east coast had the pleasant forward pull of something good waiting at the end of it. We covered the distance in easy stages, the Hiace keeping pace behind the bus, and by late afternoon we had pulled into the free camp at Aulichs Beach near Iron House Brewery, a night's stop with Maria Island now close enough to plan around.

    Grammy sat in the Hiace doorway that evening with a cup of tea and the quiet satisfaction of someone whose plan was coming together. She had been on the island of Tasmania for two days and had already fed us waffles, survived corrugated roads, claimed a campsite on Good Friday, and organised a boat tour. The pace she intended to set for the next three weeks was becoming clear.    Lue lisää

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    2
    2

    Good Friday's Campsite Quest

    29. maaliskuuta 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 21 °C

    The convoy formed for the first time that morning: the golden bus in front, Grammy's hired white Hiace following behind, two vehicles heading east toward the Bay of Fires. It was a new shape for the trip, checking mirrors for a second vehicle, matching speed, pulling over when the gap grew too wide. Grammy drove the Hiace the way she approached most things: with confidence, at her own pace, and without any visible interest in being told what to do.

    Bridport appeared mid-morning and the waffles drew us off the highway. A food stop in a busy little hub where the waffles came golden and stacked, topped with ice cream and nuts and enough syrup to make the plate stick to the table. Grammy and Fran approved. It was the kind of meal that belongs to a holiday rather than a life, and for the next three weeks that was exactly what the trip would be: part life, part holiday, the two blurring at the edges.

    The roads corrugated past Bridport, the bus juddering along in a way that rattled the cupboards and tested the patience. Good Friday was tomorrow, and the camps along the Bay of Fires coast would fill early with families driving up from Launceston and Hobart for the long weekend. The prospect of arriving late to a full campground with two vehicles and four people was enough to sharpen the search. Policeman's Point appeared before the anxiety could build much further, a site with enough space for the bus and the Hiace side by side, far enough from the main road to feel private, and we took it with the relief of people who had been imagining worse.

    The afternoon slowed down once the camp was set. Fran and Grammy put coffee on in the Hiace and Sal walked across to join them, the three women sitting together in the small van with mugs and conversation while Anth stayed in the bus and caught up on work. It was a new dynamic, the social centre shifting from the couple to the group, the evenings expanding to include other voices and other rhythms. Grammy had stories. Fran had opinions. The combination was good company and would remain so for the next three weeks.

    That night someone mentioned the aurora. The conditions were not certain, the forecast said possible, and we went to sleep with one eye on the idea that the southern sky might put on a show. It did not, or if it did we slept through it, but the hope alone added a layer to the evening that ordinary starlight would not have carried.    Lue lisää

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    4

    A Hiace in the Mirror

    27.–29. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 22 °C

    The trucks at Scottsdale had rumbled through most of the night, and we left the RV park under-slept but buzzing. Grammy was arriving in Launceston at three.

    The morning was errands. Sal disappeared into a hairdresser's chair for the first time since Queensland, a small act of civilian life that the road makes feel like an event. Anth handled the laundry and the supermarket run, the practical half of the partnership ticking over while the other half got a haircut. By early afternoon the bus was clean, stocked, and parked at Old Mac's Farm, a busy RV stop near the city, louder and more populated than our usual camps but right for the occasion.

    Grammy arrived with Fran, her best friend, the two of them in a hired Hiace van and carrying the particular energy of women in their seventies who have made a plan and intend to enjoy every minute of it. We had said goodbye to Grammy in the driveway at Chatsworth eleven weeks earlier, and the farewell had carried real weight, the kind that comes from not knowing when you will see someone again. Now here she was, in Tasmania, ready to travel with us for three weeks through a place she had never been. Fran, who had her own decades of friendship with Grammy and her own appetite for the road, completed the party. The reunion was warm and unhurried and slightly louder than either of us had expected.

    That afternoon we drove to Cataract Gorge, which sits improbably close to Launceston's centre, a deep gorge with a chairlift spanning its width. We rode it across, the gorge dropping away beneath us, and walked back over the suspension bridge at a pace that suited four rather than two. Grammy and Fran were not slow, but they were sensible, and the walk was shorter than our usual range. It did not matter. The company changed the shape of the day in a way that extra kilometres would not have, and the coffee at the cafe afterwards tasted better for being shared across a larger table.

    Back at the camp we spread the maps out on the bus table and planned the next few days together, the route south marked in pen, Grammy and Fran leaning in with suggestions and questions that made the planning feel less like logistics and more like anticipation. Dinner was kebabs, which would have been straightforward had the European wasps not arrived in force. We had not dealt with them in Queensland, and their persistence around food was a new education. The meal retreated inside the bus in stages, plates first, then people, then dignity, and we finished eating behind closed doors with the wasps patrolling the empty table outside.

    Three weeks ahead, Grammy and Fran and the hired Hiace following the golden bus south. The trip had been two people for eleven weeks. Now it was four, and the extra voices in the evening and the second vehicle in the mirror changed something that we had not realised needed changing until it changed.    Lue lisää

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    2

    Giant Walks & Towering Gums

    26.–27. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 19 °C

    We refilled the water tanks at St Helens and turned northwest, the Bay of Fires already behind us and Grammy a day away. She was arriving in Launceston tomorrow, and the drive north gave us one last day of travelling as two before the convoy became three.

    The Blue Tiers rose to the west of the road, and a side track led us to Halls Falls on the way through, a short diversion to a cascade dropping over mossy rock in the kind of shaded gully that Tasmania keeps tucked behind its main roads. We stopped, looked, and moved on. The falls were pretty but the day had something larger waiting.

    The Blue Tier Giant Walk announced itself through the road first. The bitumen narrowed to a single lane, then to dirt, then to something closer to a goat track that climbed through forest dense enough to scrape both sides of the bus. The Coaster managed it with the slow, deliberate progress that had become its signature on rough ground, and the trailhead appeared at the end of the track with the particular quietness of a place that does not get many visitors. The walk from there was short. The trees at the end of it were not. White gums, nearly sixty metres tall, rising from the forest floor with the same pale, straight authority as the White Knights at Evercreech but in smaller numbers, isolated in a grove that felt private and slightly reverential. We walked among them with our heads tilted back and the canopy absurdly high above, and the comparison to Evercreech came naturally: both stands of trees that had survived simply by being difficult to reach.

    Back on the main road we stopped at the Pub in the Paddock, which is exactly what it sounds like: a pub, in a paddock, surrounded by farmland and rolling hills. Inside it had the warmth of a place that knows its purpose, and we sat with coffee and a plate of fries and watched other travellers come and go with the easy drift that country pubs encourage. It was a short stop. It did not need to be longer.

    Legerwood came next, and the mood changed. The memorial carvings stand beside the road: tree trunks carved into the likenesses of local men who served and died in the First World War, each one named, each face worked into the timber with a care that makes them difficult to look at quickly and impossible to drive past. We stood among them for a while, reading the names, and the quiet of the roadside felt different from the quiet of the forest. This was not solitude. This was remembrance, held in wood, kept by a town small enough to know every name on the list.

    Scottsdale's free RV park was the night's stop, busy and functional, the kind of camp that serves a purpose without pretending to be more than it is. We parked among a row of other vans and turned in early. Launceston was a short drive in the morning, and Grammy would be there, and the trip was about to change shape.    Lue lisää

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    3

    Millionaire's Row

    19.–26. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ 🌬 21 °C

    We left Evercreech in rain, the dirt roads through the forest slick enough to keep the speed down and the wipers going. St Helens was an hour east, and by the time we reached it the rain had eased and the coast was close enough to smell. We split the errands the way we had started to split them: Sal took the supermarket, Anth emptied the bins, refilled the camp stove gas, and came back to the bus carrying pool noodles. The pool noodles were for the awning. One of the support arms had a habit of pooling rainwater until the fabric sagged, and Anth had worked out that a noodle wedged along the rail would fix the angle. It was not an elegant solution. It worked.

    At a water stop on the way out of town we met a young Belgian woman travelling alone in a Nissan, covering Tasmania at her own pace. We talked for ten minutes, swapped recommendations, and parted ways. The encounters had become a rhythm now: brief, warm, genuine, each one confirming that the road was not as solitary as it looked from the outside.

    Swimcart Beach sits at the southern end of the Bay of Fires, and the campsites along the dune line are known among travellers as Millionaire's Row. Beachfront, free, first-come-first-served. We had timed it for a Tuesday, hoping to beat the weekend traffic, and it paid off. Two prime sites were open, right on the sand, with the bay stretching north in a long curve of white beach and orange lichen-covered granite that gives the place its name.

    The first day was rough. Onshore wind, big swell, the kind of coast that looks spectacular and feels like being shouted at. By the second morning the wind had swung offshore and the bay settled into something entirely different: clear water, gentle break, the kind of beach that makes you wonder how the same stretch of sand can change so completely overnight.

    We stayed a week. The days divided themselves between the beach and the laptops without needing a schedule, the online work done in the mornings while the light was flat, the afternoons given over to walking the sand or sitting in the dunes watching the water do its slow, repetitive work. It was the first camp since Penstock that made leaving feel like a mistake, the first place on the coast that held us the way the highlands had held us above.

    But Grammy was arriving in Launceston in a few days, ready to travel with us for three weeks in her own vehicle, and the diary would not stretch. We packed up knowing we would be back. Swimcart had announced itself clearly enough, and we were learning to trust the places that did that.    Lue lisää

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    From Alpine Peaks to Forest Deep

    16.–19. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☁️ 22 °C

    From Ben Lomond we dropped back through the park entrance, stopped to refill the water tank at the old campsite, and treated ourselves to coffee and pie at a stop on the road toward the coast. Pie and coffee on the road was a rarity, the kind of small indulgence that felt larger for how seldom we allowed it.

    Mark and Stacey at Ben Lomond had mentioned Evercreech Forest Reserve, and the way they had spoken about it suggested we should not drive past. It sat halfway between the highlands and the coast, down a dirt road that led into dense forest, and the shift from the open alpine plateau to closed canopy was abrupt enough to feel like entering a different park. A tiger snake crossed the track on the way in, the second of the trip, fast and purposeful and gone before alarm could turn into anything more than a sharp intake of breath.

    The campsite was nearly empty. One other couple, travelling in a truck with the unhurried look of people who had been at this for a while, were set up across the clearing. We parked, introduced ourselves, and by evening were sitting around a shared fire trading the stories that campfire light seems to draw out of people who would not tell them in daylight. The cloud cover that had followed us down from the highlands stayed, which meant the solar panels gave us very little, but we managed a wash cycle during a brief break in the grey and counted it as a win.

    The walk the next day was the reason the English couple had sent us here. The track ran through rainforest to a waterfall that dropped over mossy rock into a pool below, the kind of falls that looks smaller than it sounds. But it was what stood above the falls that stopped us. The White Knights: the tallest white gums on earth, rising out of the forest floor with trunks so pale and straight they looked less like trees and more like columns built to hold something up that was no longer there. We stood among them with our necks craned back and the canopy impossibly high above us, and the scale of them made the dolerite at Ben Lomond feel like a different kind of grandeur. The rock had been ancient and hard. The trees were ancient and alive, still growing, still reaching, and the quiet around their base had the quality of a place that knows exactly what it is and does not need visitors to confirm it.    Lue lisää

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    1The Remains of an Old Cabin2112224

    Wombat Wishes and Dolerite Dreams

    15.–16. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 13 °C

    We drove further into the park toward Carr-Villa, the trailhead for the walk to Legges Tor. The dolerite appeared before we had left the car park: grey columns of it rising above the tree line, angular and blunt, the kind of rock that looks like it was broken rather than shaped. Tasmania's highlands are built on dolerite, and up here, at altitude, the stone stops hiding beneath the soil and stands exposed.

    The track climbed through boulders almost immediately. Not steep in the exhausting sense, but constant, the path picking its way over lichen-covered rock that required hands as often as feet. The views opened with every gain in height, and by the first rest stop the country below had become something we could see the edges of: valleys running south, ridgelines stacked to the west, the scale of the highlands laid out in a way that walking at sea level never allows. Sal said, without much hesitation, that this was the best hike she had done. She had said similar things before, and would say them again on later walks, but in the moment she meant it completely, and the view was not arguing.

    We ate salad rolls at the halfway point, sitting on a flat boulder with our legs hanging over nothing in particular, the wind steady and cool. The food tasted better than it had any right to, the way food always does when it has been carried uphill and earned.

    Legges Tor is Tasmania's second-highest peak, and the summit flattened into the Alpine Plateau in a way that made arrival feel less like a climax and more like entering a different room. The vegetation dropped to ankle height, the wind had nothing left to break against, and the ground stretched away in every direction, sparse and pale and enormous. We sat near the summit marker for longer than the temperature justified, not talking about anything in particular but both thinking about the same thing: two months ago they had been packing a bus in a driveway. Now they were sitting on top of Tasmania's second-highest point, with no schedule and nowhere to be except wherever came next. The gap between those two facts was still catching up with them.

    The walk down was slower than the walk up, partly because the boulders demanded care on the descent and partly because neither of us was in a hurry to leave the altitude. We watched for wombats the entire way. None appeared. Their droppings were everywhere, the distinctive cube-shaped pellets scattered across the track like evidence left deliberately to prove they existed and equally deliberately to prove they were elsewhere. The wombat drought continued.

    We camped at the trailhead that night, the bus parked on flat ground with the dolerite columns still visible above the tree line in the fading light. Sleep came quickly, the kind that follows a long day on your feet, and the satisfaction of the walk settled over us like something physical, heavy and warm and entirely earned.    Lue lisää

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  • Sal and AnthNomadic NarrativesMatkaaja
    1

    Streamers on the Handlebars

    9.–15. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 23 °C

    Ben Lomond National Park was full when we arrived, or so it appeared. The afternoon was getting late and every site on the loop road had something parked on it, and by the time we had driven the full circuit without finding a gap the mood in the bus had turned from hopeful to flat. Then we came around a bend and saw the group.

    Five men, most of them bearded, a couple shirtless, arranged around a camp in a way that did not immediately suggest a welcoming committee. Something in a flagon was being passed between them. Sal's first instinct was to keep driving. Anth slowed the bus anyway, because the only open ground left was beside them, and before either of us had decided what to do a voice carried across the clearing: "G'day mates, set up right here, plenty of room."

    The relief was instant. They were postie-bike riders, a group of blokes on a week-long lap of Tasmania on the small, low-powered motorcycles that Australia Post uses for mail delivery. One of the bikes had streamers on the handlebars, which told you everything you needed to know about the seriousness of the expedition. They were fathers, tradesmen, weekday workers spending their leave doing something pointless and joyful on machines that topped out at sixty kilometres an hour. We parked beside them and within minutes were sitting around their fire with drinks in hand and the mosquitoes circling.

    The evening ran late. Stories came easily, the kind that men on a trip together tell when they have an audience that is not their wives: exaggerated, self-deprecating, delivered with the timing of people who have been making each other laugh for years. The fire crackled and the mosquitoes bit and nobody moved inside until the cold made sitting still uncomfortable. It was the best campfire night since the Yolla Tavern, and it had arrived from the last place we expected.

    They left the next morning, engines buzzing like lawnmowers, bound for eight days of gravel roads and pub stops. The campground felt quieter for their going, but the site was ours now, and what it offered was considerable: flushing toilets, running water, and a location inside the national park with Ben Lomond's ridgeline visible from the bus window. We stayed a week.

    The days settled into a routine that was becoming familiar: mornings at the laptops, afternoons outside if the weather allowed, pancakes when the mood struck. We edited video, wrote content for the online business, and kept a hopeful eye on the scrub for wombats that never appeared. Ben Lomond is known for them. They knew we were there and chose not to confirm it.

    Midweek an English couple pulled in, Mark and Stacey, nomads like us, originally from somewhere in the south of England and now years into a travelling life in Tasmania. They had the quiet authority of people who had been doing this long enough to know where the good spots were, and over a few hours of conversation they shared places we had not heard of and would not have found without them. The tips went into the notebook alongside the ones from Helen, from Ros and Mike, from Mick. The list was growing, fed by every person who stopped long enough to talk.

    On the last day we hiked. Not Jacob's Ladder, the switchback road to the summit that the bus had no interest in climbing, but a trail nearby that climbed through forest to a ridgeline view without requiring anything mechanical. The walk was steep in places, the air noticeably thinner than the lowlands, and the view from the top ran south across the highlands in a way that made the week below feel small and well spent.    Lue lisää

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    2

    Apples on the Apple Isle

    8.–9. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 25 °C

    From Liffey Falls we dropped north to Hagley, where parcels were waiting at the post office. The pickups were becoming a rhythm of their own: things ordered weeks ago from a previous life arriving at small-town counters, each one a reminder that the postal system was holding up its end of the arrangement even when we could not say with certainty where we would be collecting from next.

    Five minutes past Hagley we found a paddock on the outskirts of Westbury and pulled in for the night. It was not a beautiful camp. It was a flat field with a fence and a road nearby, the kind of place that exists purely to be free and close to where you need to be in the morning. After Penstock and Liffey Falls, the plainness of it was almost refreshing. Not every night needed a lagoon.

    Anth walked four kilometres into Westbury to chase geocaches through the town, and came back with a handful of finds and a Tasmanian apple eaten on the walk, the kind of small pleasure that earns its place on the Apple Isle without needing to try. Sal had the bus to herself for the afternoon, which by now was a familiar and welcome arrangement.

    That evening we rewatched Dune Part One on the laptop, propped up in bed with the paddock dark and quiet outside. Part Two was screening in Launceston, close enough to reach the next day, and the prospect of seeing it in a cinema after weeks of nothing but bus screens and campfire light had been building quietly between them for days. The paddock was not the point. The paddock was the pause before the thing they were looking forward to.    Lue lisää

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    44

    The Better Site by the River

    6.–8. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 23 °C

    Liffey Falls was an hour north of Penstock, and the drive down from the Central Plateau felt like dropping into a different season. The highlands fell away behind us, the open plateau giving way to farmland that spread green and gentle across the valley floor. After eight nights of lagoon and campfire and wind, the lowlands looked almost domesticated.

    We stopped at Bracknell to fill the water tanks, a small town that asked nothing of us beyond the time it took to top up, and arrived at the Liffey Falls campground later than we had meant to. It was becoming a pattern, the late arrivals, and the site we found reflected it: functional but uninspiring, hemmed in by other campers and lacking the privacy that Penstock had spoiled us into expecting. After the lagoon's silence, the campground felt crowded even when it was not.

    The next morning most of the other campers packed up and left, and we did what we were learning to do: moved. A better site sat further along, closer to the Liffey River, with afternoon shade, better solar angle, and enough distance from the remaining neighbours to feel like our own space. The river ran beside it, audible from the bed, and the difference between this spot and the one we had slept in was the difference between staying somewhere and choosing somewhere. We set up again with the feeling of having earned the upgrade by waiting.

    The walk to Liffey Falls took two hours through rainforest that thickened as the track followed the river upstream. The canopy closed overhead and the light came through in broken shafts, the understorey dense with ferns and moss. The falls themselves arrived as sound before sight, a low roar building through the trees until the track opened out and the water was there, dropping in tiers through a rock face darkened with spray. A handful of other walkers stood at the base, all of them doing the same thing: looking up, saying nothing, letting the noise fill the space that conversation would normally occupy. We climbed further upstream and found smaller falls above, quieter and less visited, before turning back along the same track with wet boots and the satisfied tiredness that a good walk leaves behind.

    The final morning we took a shorter trail through the surrounding bush, a loop maintained by Bush Heritage Australia. The signage along it told the story of the conservation work being done in the area, the slow, patient business of protecting what remained of the original forest. It was not a dramatic walk. It did not need to be. After Penstock's eight nights and the rainforest the day before, a quiet hour among the trees with something to read along the way felt like exactly the right speed.    Lue lisää

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    At the Steppes HomesteadSunset at our first CampsiteSunset at our second Campsite2

    Return to the Lagoon

    27. helmik.–6. maalisk. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☁️ 19 °C

    We had promised ourselves we would return to Penstock Lagoon, and a week later we drove back up into the highlands to do it. The drive south from Forcett took us through the Steppes, a stretch of highland country where someone local had arranged rocks into a display on a hillside, painted and carved with enough care to suggest it mattered to them. Further along, the remains of an old homestead stood open to the weather, its walls leaning and its rooms exposed. We walked through it briefly, the silence inside heavier than the silence outside, and the life that had been lived there felt both near and entirely gone. It was not a place that asked you to stay. We drove on toward Penstock with the highlands opening up around us.

    This time we took our time choosing a site. We drove the loop slowly, inspecting each campsite as though we were buying a house, and settled on a spot beside the lagoon where the water was close enough to hear and the trees gave shelter without blocking the sky entirely. Black swans drifted on the surface in pairs, their necks dipping and rising with a rhythm that made them look less like birds feeding and more like a form of patience in motion. We set up and stayed.

    On the second day Anth discovered the grey water sensor was missing from the underside of the bus. The Victron display was showing a fault, and a quick look underneath confirmed the sensor had been knocked clean off, almost certainly by a rock on the way out of the previous site days earlier. It was a fifty-minute walk back to the old campsite. Anth went on foot, retracing the road, and came back with the sensor in his hand and the particular satisfaction of a problem solved by stubbornness rather than parts.

    The campsite was beautiful but the solar was poor. Cloud cover and tree shade kept the panels below what the batteries needed, and within a few days we made the shift without much discussion: the induction cooktop and air fryer went off, the camp stove came out, and the campfire became the kitchen. It was a step backward in convenience and a step forward in something harder to name. Cooking on the fire slowed everything down. The meals took longer, tasted of smoke, and required tending in a way that the induction hob never had. Evenings stretched out around the flames, the Milky Way visible above the clearing once the fire burned low, and the trade felt more than fair.

    A firewood run led us to a second site, sunnier and better angled for the panels, and we moved the bus just ahead of a severe weather warning. The wind came that night, hard enough to shake the trees above us, and the temperature dropped sharply. We layered up inside the bus and listened to the gusts batter the canopy overhead, the new site's windbreak holding where the old one would not have. Tasmania's weather continued to arrive without negotiation, and we continued to adjust.

    Eight nights. The longest single camp since the trip began. By the end the water tanks were low and the food stores were thin, and neither of those facts felt like failures. They felt like proof that a place had held us longer than we had planned for, which was exactly what Penstock had done the first time, only now it had done it at eight times the scale.

    On the way out we stopped at Waddamana Power Station, Tasmania's first hydro-electric plant, decommissioned and preserved. The Pelton wheel turbines still stood in the hall, enormous and still, their surfaces darkened with age. They had powered the state for decades, and standing beside them in the quiet of the old building, the scale of what had been achieved in this remote highland country was difficult to dismiss. We walked through slowly, read the panels, and left with the turbines still turning in our heads, the kind of engineering that belongs to a time when building something meant building it to last.    Lue lisää

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    2

    Forcett, Farms & Farewell

    25.–27. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☁️ 22 °C

    Penstock to Hobart was a drive through country that kept changing: highlands to midlands to the outskirts of the city, the landscape dropping and warming with every hour. We were not heading into Hobart itself but to Forcett, a farmstead twenty minutes from the airport, because Anth had a screening flight to Adelaide the next morning and needed to be close.

    Michael met us in the yard. A retired dairy farmer from New Zealand, he had been in Tasmania over twenty years, long enough to have stopped being a newcomer without ever quite losing the Kiwi warmth he had arrived with. His property sat east of the city, quiet and green, with enough space to park the bus without feeling like an imposition. Tess, his dog, came over with the disciplined enthusiasm of an animal that has been trained well and knows it, offering a greeting that was equal parts obedience and showing off. Michael talked easily, the way farmers do when they have time and company, and by the end of the first cup of tea the stay had shifted from a stopover to a visit.

    The next morning Sal drove Anth to the airport. It was the first time she had taken the wheel of the bus on her own, and the fact of it mattered more than the twenty-minute drive. The Coaster is not a small vehicle. She managed it without fuss, dropped him at the terminal, and drove back to the farm alone, which was also a first. Anth's screening trip was thirty hours, a quick flight to the mainland and back, and the gap it left was the first real solitude either of them had experienced since the driveway at Aroona.

    Sal did not fill it with anything useful, and that was the point. She stayed up late watching television, the kind of formless evening that would have felt wasteful in a previous life and now felt like a luxury she had not known she wanted. She slept in the next morning, properly late, and spent the afternoon walking through Michael's paddocks with the phone to her ear, catching up with family in conversations that ran long because nothing was pulling her away from them. The solitude was not lonely. It was room, the kind that appears when the other person steps out and you discover that the shape of the day is entirely yours to decide.

    She picked Anth up that evening and the bus was whole again. Neither of them made a large thing of the reunion, because thirty hours does not warrant a large thing, but the small ease of being back in the same vehicle said enough. Forcett, Michael, Tess, the farm: all of it had been a one-night plan, and already it felt like somewhere they would return to. In a fortnight Sal would be on her own again, longer this time. The first solo stretch had shown her she could do it. The next one would show her what she would do with it.    Lue lisää

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    Preparing the daily essentials
    Preparing the daily essentialsSmoke On the WaterSunset32SunriseAnother Daily Necessity - Homemade Protein IceCream

    Fiery Skies over Penstock

    24.–25. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C

    WikiCamps found it for us. We had been tracing the route south to Hobart on the tablet, looking for a halfway stop that would break the drive without adding hours to it, and Penstock Lagoon appeared in the highlands above Deloraine, roughly centred between the north coast and the city. Neither of us had heard of it. We marked it and drove.

    The country changed as we climbed. The coast fell away behind us and Deloraine passed quickly, a small town at the foot of the Great Western Tiers that we would come to know better on later visits. Above it the road rose into the highlands proper, the farmland thinning into scrub and then into open, wind-scoured plateau. Snow markers lined the road, tall metal poles designed to stay visible when the ground disappears under winter cover, and Sal watched them pass with the particular brightness of someone already imagining what this place would look like in four months' time. She said nothing about it yet, but the idea of the bus in snow had taken hold, and it would not let go.

    The Great Lake appeared on our left, enormous and flat, its surface catching the light in a way that made it hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began. Smoke sat across the highlands, not thick but present, a haze from bushfires burning somewhere to the west. We checked the government website at a pull-off, scrolling through the alerts with the engine idling, and found a green tick beside Penstock. The fires were not close. We drove on, the smoke filtering the afternoon light into something warmer and stranger than ordinary sun.

    Penstock Lagoon is man-made, built for trout, and the fishermen who use it had not yet arrived or had already left, because we were alone. Completely alone, the only vehicle at the campground, the lagoon still and flat in front of us and the highlands rolling away in every direction. We parked at a site near the water and stepped out into air that was cooler than anything we had breathed since the Bunya Mountains in the first week. One night, that was the plan. A stopover on the way to Hobart, nothing more.

    The sunset that evening came through the smoke. Anth sent the drone up and it climbed into a sky that was not orange or red but something between the two, the smoke bending the light into colours that did not belong to a normal afternoon. Below, the lagoon held the reflection without moving. Sal cooked inside while the footage recorded itself, and the meal we ate that evening was the quietest of the trip so far, not because anything was wrong but because the place did not seem to want noise.

    We checked the fire website again before sleep, a silent habit that would stay with us through fire season, and found the same green tick. The night was cold and still.

    The sunrise matched the sunset. Smoke again, but softer now, turning the early light a deep, improbable pink that lasted only minutes before the sun climbed above it and returned the sky to normal. We photographed it knowing the photographs would not carry what the moment had, and Sal made pancakes while Anth packed the drone away, and by mid-morning we were driving south toward Hobart with Penstock already sitting in a different category from the other camps. We had stayed one night. We would come back. Neither of us said so yet, but the lagoon had done something quiet and precise, and the road ahead already felt like a temporary departure from a place we had not finished with.    Lue lisää

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    Tarkine Sinkhole
    Tarkine Sinkhole3Couta RocksThe Arthur RiverChisholm Sinkhole2Terry's Place

    Across Tasmania: Hobart's Beckoning

    23.–24. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ 🌬 15 °C

    The reason for leaving the west coast was practical. An opportunity had come up for Anth to screen for a clinical trial in Adelaide, which meant flying out of Hobart, which meant crossing the island. The trials funded the travelling life and, more immediately, the planned trip to visit Torrin in Japan. Leaving the Tarkine unfinished felt wrong even as we packed up at Nelson Bay and pointed the bus south.

    The coast gave us a last run of itself on the way out. Couta Rocks sat among a cluster of weathered shacks, the sea smashing against the shore in onshore wind and rain, the spray reaching the road. Sal stood at the edge of it and watched the waves come in with the expression she wore when a place had reached her before she had time to think about it. Further south, Lake Rebecca lay behind the dunes, a freshwater lake that had sustained Aboriginal communities for thousands of years, the land around it still carrying the quiet weight of long habitation. Camp Elsewhere, named with the kind of humour that suits a place at the end of a dirt track, tempted us to stay, but the flight had a date and the date did not move.

    We turned east and the roaring forties, which had been pushing against us for days, became a tailwind. The fuel gauge barely moved. The farmland dropped away and the Tarkine took over: temperate rainforest, one of the largest tracts of it left on earth, pressing up against the road on both sides. At Kanunnah Bridge we stopped to help a carload of tourists who had run themselves low on fuel and lost their phone signal, the kind of small roadside moment that feels like nothing at the time and stays with you because of what it says about where you are. Sumac Lookout offered a view of the Arthur River below, though the cloud and rain gave us only glimpses, the valley appearing and disappearing as the weather moved through.

    The Julius River walk was the best of the Tarkine stops. The track ran through rainforest so dense and old it felt less like a walk and more like an interruption, the moss thick on every surface, the ferns enormous, the air damp and still. Lake Chisholm, a flooded limestone sinkhole, held the sky on its surface like a mirror set into the forest floor. The Dempster Plains opened up beyond the trees into vast, flat button grass country, wind-scoured and empty, and the Tarkine Sinkhole sat dark and still in its clearing, reflecting nothing but cloud. Each stop deserved longer than we gave it. We both knew it, said so, and kept driving, because the flight would not wait and the Tarkine was not going anywhere.

    Terry was at the Berry Patch, camped between Ulverstone and Devonport, and we pulled in beside him just before dark. We had met him on our very first night in Tasmania, at Preservation Bay, his caravan parked nearby with the two cockatiels he carried everywhere. A month later and the friendship had held, the way road friendships do when they are going to last: no arrangement, just a message and a campsite and the assumption that turning up was enough. He met us with the ease of someone who had been expecting us even though no firm plan had been made, and the evening unfolded around cooking and conversation. We made pizza and banana pancakes as a thank-you, though Terry seemed to consider our company payment enough.

    The next morning Sal woke to the sound of Terry murmuring to his cockatiels in the half-dark, the two birds answering in short, bright calls that cut through the quiet like small alarms set to the wrong time. We shared coffee, Terry helped with a couple of jobs on the bus, and the morning passed in the unhurried way that mornings pass between people who are not pretending to be busy. Saying goodbye to him was harder than we expected, not because the friendship was old but because it was becoming real, built not on shared history but on shared pace, the understanding that two people moving slowly through the same country at the same speed will keep finding each other.

    We drove south toward the highlands with the north coast behind us and Hobart still half a day ahead. The Tarkine sat unfinished in the rear-view mirror, a place we had tasted rather than known, and the promise to return was not a polite ending but a genuine one. Some places ask for more time than you have, and the honest answer is to come back.    Lue lisää

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    21The Arthur meets the Edge of the World5

    Whispers from the Edge

    21.–23. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ⛅ 18 °C

    The Tarkine Drive ran south from Marrawah along the coast, narrow and winding, the bush pressing in from both sides. Bluff Hill Point Lighthouse came first, a short stop with a view that confirmed what Preminghana had introduced: this coast was not gentle. The water was dark and rough, the wind constant, the sky the kind of grey that is not overcast so much as permanent.

    A single-lane bridge carried us over the Archer River, the timbers rattling under the bus's weight, and from there the road bent toward the Arthur River and the place the signs called the Edge of the World. It earned the name. The Arthur runs dark with tannins from the rainforest it drains, and where it meets the ocean the colours collide: brown water pushing into blue, each wave pulling the boundary back and forth, the spray lifting off the whitecaps and carrying inland on the wind. There is nothing between this point and South America. A plaque at the lookout carried Brian Inder's poem:

    "I cast my pebble onto the shore of Eternity.
    To be washed by the Ocean of time.
    It has shape, form, and substance.
    It is me.
    One day I will be no more.
    But my pebble will remain here.
    On the shore of eternity.
    Mute witness from the aeons.
    That today I came and stood
    At the edge of the world.”

    We stood beside it for a long time without adding anything of our own. Some places arrive with their own words already in place, and the Edge of the World was one of them.

    Chris's Shack was the kind of thing that only happens because someone speaks to a stranger at a petrol station. Days earlier, a brief conversation at a bowser had led to an invitation, and now we were parked on Chris's front lawn at Nelson Bay, south of the Arthur River, with the ocean for a front yard and nothing expected in return. Two nights. The shack sat close enough to the water that the sound of it came through the bus walls at night, and the hospitality was of the Tasmanian kind we were learning to recognise: quiet, practical, offered without ceremony and genuinely meant.

    We walked the coast around the shack, explored the river mouth where the tannin water pooled against the sand, and spent the evenings inside the bus listening to the ocean build and settle and build again. It was not a comfortable coast. It was not trying to be. The west of Tasmania had a bluntness to it that the sheltered northern bays did not, and the beauty here was bound up with the rawness in a way that made separating the two feel dishonest.

    Departure morning matched the place. Wind and rain, the ocean grey and muscular, spray reaching the road in gusts. We zipped into wet-weather jackets and drove south into the Tarkine Loop with the wipers going and the heater on, and the wildness of the morning felt less like bad weather than like the coast saying what it had been saying all along, only louder.    Lue lisää

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    Watching the local Surfers
    Watching the local Surfers2The gate to Nowhere

    Hello Wild Wild West

    20.–21. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ 🌬 22 °C

    West from Smithton the country changed quickly. The settled farmland of the north coast gave way to dairy paddocks and then to dirt roads, and within an hour we were in a part of Tasmania that felt noticeably emptier than anything we had driven through so far. Robbins Island appeared off the coast as we passed, a low shape across the sand flats with a history of cattle being herded across at low tide, though the tide was wrong for it and we saw the island from a distance only, shimmering behind a strip of wet sand.

    The road ran through the kind of quiet that comes from land being used for one thing and one thing only. Dairy country, green and flat, with fences and gates and very few people. We followed the dirt south-west toward Marrawah, feeling the coast before we could see it.

    We saw it first at Preminghana. The west coast of Tasmania arrived without preamble: dark water, rough swell, wind that pushed at the bus the moment we opened the doors. Surfers were out, which seemed improbable given the temperature, but they moved through the waves with the confidence of people who had made peace with cold water a long time ago. Watching them from the shore, warm and dry and slightly in awe, felt like an introduction to a part of the island that operated on different terms from the sheltered north.

    Green Point was meant to be the night's camp. It sat at the start of the Tarkine Drive, wild and exposed, with ocean views that would have been worth the wind. But the campground was full. Every site taken, not a gap to be found, the one time on the trip so far that free camping had failed us. We stood in the car park for a moment, recalculated, and drove back into Marrawah.

    The Marrawah Inn solved the problem in the most uncomplicated way possible. Salt and pepper calamari, loaded fries, cold drinks, and a room with a flushing toilet. After days of drop dunnies and bush camps, the toilet alone was worth the price of admission. We ate slowly, the kind of slow that comes from sitting in a chair that someone else owns at a table that someone else will wipe down, and the small luxury of a pub meal on a wild coast felt disproportionately good. The Tarkine started tomorrow. Tonight, the west coast had introduced itself, and we had accepted the introduction on its own terms: rough water, full camps, cold surfers, and calamari in a town that barely qualified as one.    Lue lisää

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    Geocaching Triumphs & Pancake Feasts

    18.–20. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 23 °C

    Tall Timbers was a free camp on the edge of Smithton, flat and open, with enough RVs scattered across it to suggest the town had a generous view of travellers. We pulled in without much ceremony, planning a quiet couple of days of work before heading for the west coast. Anth had other ideas, or rather the geocaching app did.

    We had climbed the Nut that morning, legs already well used by the time we reached Smithton, and a sensible person would have stopped there. Anth left Sal in the bus with a promise of being back soon and set off on foot with the app open. The area had a spread of caches across it, and he came back hours later having found thirteen of them, six of which were brand new hides that no one had reached yet. First to find, six times over. The thirteen kilometres he had covered on top of the Nut made it the longest day on his feet since the trip began, and the particular grin he wore in the doorway was the grin of a man who has spent the afternoon doing something pointless in exactly the way he wanted.

    Sal was unimpressed in the affectionate way that partners are unimpressed when the other one has been gone three times longer than promised. She had worked through the afternoon and was ready for the evening to begin, which meant the shower first and pancakes after. The recirculating shower set up outside the bus and did its job, washing off the dust and the distance, and then Sal made her banana and chocolate-chip protein pancakes for the second time on the trip, folded through with protein ice cream, served on the back step of the bus in the last of the light.

    Anth ate like someone who had climbed a volcanic plug and walked thirteen kilometres in a single day. Which he had. The pancakes held up. Sal watched him finish and said nothing, because the empty plate was the only review that mattered.

    Two days of work followed, laptops open, the online business ticking over, the west coast waiting. Tasmania's western shore was the next pull, wilder and less visited than the north, and the road toward it would take them off the settled circuit they had been following since Devonport. They packed up at Tall Timbers without looking back, which was itself a sign that the life was working: the camps were starting to feel like pauses rather than destinations.    Lue lisää

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    2The return along Tallows beach after a Geocaching adventure

    Trails & Tales

    17.–18. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ 🌬 21 °C

    Rocky Cape was the first proper hike since the canyon floor at Leven, a ten-kilometre loop along the north-western coast that AllTrails had rated as moderate and the flies had rated as theirs. They were bad from the start. Not the lazy, circling kind but the kind that aim for the face, and within the first kilometre Anth inhaled one mid-sentence and spent the next few minutes coughing it out while Sal dug through her pack for the fly net. We had one between us. Sal wore it. Anth walked ahead with his mouth closed and his dignity adjusting.

    The track followed the coast above Bass Strait, the water rough and dark below the cliffs. Sea eagles rode the updrafts along the headland, wide-winged and unhurried, circling in a way that made walking feel like the slow option. Tinkers Lookout opened up a view east toward Stanley and the flat-topped shape of the Nut, distinctive even at a distance, and Cathedral Rock stood on the exposed clifftop like something the wind had been working on for longer than it cared to remember.

    The tiger snake appeared without warning. A rustle in the scrub beside the track, a flash of brown, and then it was across the path and gone, fast enough to make the heart rate meaningless for a second or two. Sal stepped back and gestured Anth forward with the kind of courtesy that is really just self-preservation in good manners. He led for the rest of the loop. Neither of them pretended it was for any other reason.

    Cathedral Hill, which they had bypassed on the way out, caught them on the return with a view that ran the length of the coastline in both directions. They stood there long enough for the sweat to cool and the flies to find them again, taking in a stretch of coast that felt, from this height, wilder than anything they had seen from the road. It was the kind of view that makes the walking worthwhile and makes you wonder why you nearly skipped it.

    The afternoon softened. We visited the lighthouse, read the panels about the sailors it had guided, and drove the short distance into Stanley for fish and chips on a bench in town. Simple food in a simple place, the kind of meal that becomes part of a day rather than the point of it. Sal went to bed early that evening, tired from the walk, and Anth went out alone with his phone and a head torch to hunt geocaches in the dark. He found three. The quiet of a small Tasmanian town at night, with nobody else on the streets and the GPS leading him through back lanes and parks, was its own kind of walk.

    The next morning we climbed the Nut. The chairlift ran to the summit, but we took the walking track instead, steep and direct, the sort of climb that asks you to earn the view rather than buy it. The top was a flat circuit with the town spread out below on one side and Bass Strait stretching away on the other, and the wind up there was strong enough to make standing still feel like an activity. It was a good summit. But Rocky Cape, from the day before, still sat higher in both of us. Some places set the mark early, and the Nut, for all its shape and drama, was following rather than leading.

    We drove twenty minutes to the next camp, already talking about what came next.    Lue lisää

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    422

    Chores, Shores & IceCream

    13.–17. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ 🌬 20 °C

    Town days had a rhythm of their own. Wynyard was the first proper one in Tasmania: a parcel collected from a previous life, groceries loaded, water tanks filled, laundry done, and the bus washed clean of three weeks of dirt roads and red dust. By the time we had finished, the afternoon was gone and we arrived late at the free camp on Myalla Community Oval, but lateness had already stopped mattering in the way it once did. We were three weeks into Tasmania and had filled the diesel tank for the first time since arriving. A year on this island stretched ahead, and the fuel gauge was a quiet reminder that there was no reason to rush any of it.

    Ros and Mike found us the next morning. We had met them at Lake Kara, where they had offered their driveway in Wynyard, and here they were making good on the warmth behind that offer. They drove us out to Boat Harbour Beach, a small cove on the north-west coast that they clearly considered their own, and bought us coffee on the foreshore while we talked. Ros and Mike were retired, Tasmanian through and through, and the conversation moved easily between their knowledge of the island and our newness to it. They gave tips without condescending, recommendations without insisting, and by the end of the morning the list of places we wanted to see had doubled.

    We worked the following day, the online business demanding its hours, but by afternoon the pull of the coast was stronger than the laptop screen. We drove back to Boat Harbour Beach on our own this time and understood why Ros and Mike kept returning. The water was an improbable blue, the kind of colour you would dismiss as exaggerated in a photograph, and the sand was white and wide and nearly empty. Tasmania in February, it turned out, could pass for the tropics if you did not look at the thermometer.

    Helen was on the beach. Twenty-three years she had been caravanning, a stretch of time that made our three weeks feel like orientation. She had walked the Overland Track ten times and spoke about Tasmania's hiking trails with the authority of someone who had worn through the boots to prove it. We sat with her on the sand and listened, and the recommendations she gave carried a weight that guidebook entries do not, because they came from a woman who had spent two decades testing them with her own feet.

    That evening Sal made her banana and chocolate-chip protein pancakes for the first time on the trip, folded through with protein ice cream from Anth's Ninja Creami, and the two of them ate on the back step of the bus as the light faded. It was not a complicated meal. It did not need to be. The pancakes would become a fixture, returned to again and again across the months ahead, but that first batch, eaten at Myalla after a day that had given them good water, good company and good advice, carried something the later ones would only echo.    Lue lisää

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    Myrtle Mysteries

    12.–13. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 23 °C

    South from Yolla the road dropped into Hellyer Gorge, and the forest closed over it like a lid. The free camp sat deep in the canopy, shaded and cool, and within minutes of parking we understood both the appeal and the problem. The trees were too dense for solar. The panels, which had kept the batteries healthy since Queensland, could not find enough light to hold a charge. Worse, the canopy killed the Starlink signal entirely, which meant no work, no contact, and for a couple who still relied on an online business to function, no second night.

    The march flies made the argument redundant. They arrived in numbers the moment we stepped outside, large and persistent and unimpressed by waving arms. The bus screens held them off, but the screens also meant staying inside, and staying inside a bus that was not charging in a forest that was not connecting felt like the wrong kind of stillness. One night. We agreed on it quickly.

    What the gorge lacked in practicality it made up for on foot. The River Track followed the Hellyer River downstream, an easy walk through tall forest along the banks, well-maintained and clearly popular. We walked it and enjoyed it, but it was the second track that earned the stop. Anth had been following a geocache on his phone, and the coordinates led off the main path toward a walk that was not signposted from the car park: the Old Myrtle Forest Walk, tucked behind the tree line, its entrance easy to miss if you were not looking for something specific.

    The myrtle beeches inside were old in a way that made the word feel insufficient. Their trunks were thick and dark, wrapped in moss so deep it looked like a second skin, and the forest floor beneath them was soft and damp and quiet in a way that had nothing to do with absence of sound and everything to do with the sound being very old. We walked slowly without deciding to, speaking less as we went deeper in, and the feeling the place carried was not mystery or magic but simply age: the patient, unhurried accumulation of centuries in a grove that almost no one visits.

    Anth found the geocache. Sal waited on a fallen trunk, looking up. They walked back out to the bus and the march flies and the flat batteries, and left the next morning without regret but also without dismissing the place. Hellyer Gorge had given them one good thing, and the one good thing had been hidden behind the obvious path, found by accident, reached through a hobby. It was becoming a pattern.    Lue lisää

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    Sal, Natalie and Johnny
    Sal, Natalie and Johnny3

    The Grand Ballad of Yolla Tavern

    11.–12. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☁️ 19 °C

    Someone at a campsite, possibly Mick, had mentioned the Yolla Tavern. A former butter factory turned into a pub, twenty minutes inland from the coast, with wood-fired pizza and a monthly Irish folk session. You could camp for free behind the building if you asked the publicans. We did not need much convincing.

    We arrived early and parked the bus around the back, the only vehicle there. The pub sat in the small town of Yolla with the quiet that surrounds country pubs on the hours between lunch and evening, a stillness that suggested nothing much was about to happen. By six o'clock the car park had begun to fill, and by seven the place was something else entirely.

    The musicians arrived the way musicians do in small towns: without fanfare, carrying their instruments in soft cases and nodding to each other as though resuming a conversation that had only paused since last month. A tin whistle opened the session, clean and sharp, and within minutes the fiddles had joined, and then the uilleann pipes, and the room that had been a quiet country pub was suddenly full of sound that belonged to a different hemisphere. Irish folk, played not for an audience but for the room, for each other, for the pleasure of the thing itself. Nobody announced the songs. Nobody passed a hat. They played because it was the first Monday of the month and that was what happened here on the first Monday of the month.

    Rob and Jenny, the publicans, moved through the evening with the warmth of people who had built exactly the place they wanted. Rob pulled beers and checked on tables. Jenny appeared with pizzas at the right moment, every time. The food was good, proper wood-fired pizza in a room that smelled of dough and woodsmoke, and we ate slowly, not wanting the evening to end any sooner than it had to.

    Johnny found us between sets. White-haired, white-bearded, old in the way that people who have spent decades outdoors are old: weathered rather than frail. He had been a sailor. The stories came without prompting and without hurry: Iceland, New Zealand, years at sea on vessels we could not picture, a life measured in coastlines rather than addresses. His hands moved while he talked, shaping the distances, and his voice carried the particular cadence of someone who has told these stories before and still means every word. We listened the way you listen when the person speaking has earned the right to take their time.

    Natalie appeared later in the evening, the solo traveller from Lake Kara, drawn to the same session by the same word of mouth. Her arrival did not feel like coincidence so much as confirmation of something the road was beginning to teach us. The travelling community in Tasmania was not large, and if you stayed long enough and moved at roughly the same pace, the same faces surfaced again. Not by arrangement, just by the quiet mathematics of a small island and a shared set of free camps and tips passed between strangers.

    We slept behind the pub that night with the bus parked on level ground and the last of the music still fading in our heads. The Yolla Tavern had been open for one evening, and in that evening it had given us more than most campsites managed in a week: food that someone had made with care, music that no one was selling, stories from a man who had seen the world from the waterline, and the unexpected comfort of a familiar face. We would come back. We both knew it before we said it, and when we did say it, driving out the next morning through the green hills around the town, it was less a plan than a fact that had already settled.    Lue lisää

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    Woven Paths: Heart and Horizon

    9.–11. helmik. 2024, Australia ⋅ ☀️ 22 °C

    Eight days off the grid had emptied the water tanks. Lake Kara could have held us longer, but the bus could not, and so we drove north to Burnie on the coast for the unremarkable business of filling up and restocking.

    There was a parcel waiting at the post office. Weeks earlier, somewhere in the first days of the trip, we had mentioned the flies to Grammy. Mentioned it once, in passing, the way you complain about a small thing without expecting anyone to act on it. Grammy had acted on it. Inside the parcel was a macrame fly-door, handmade, sized to the bus's rear entrance, finished and posted from Gympie without fuss or announcement. We stood in the Burnie post office car park and fitted it to the doorframe, and it worked, and neither of us was surprised because Grammy's projects always worked. The flies would not cross it. The breeze still came through. It was a piece of her, stitched and knotted and sent south, hanging in the doorway of the home she had helped us prepare to leave.

    Cooee's free camp sat on the edge of Bass Strait, a basic RV spot with no facilities to speak of but the ocean right there, close enough to taste the salt in the air when the wind came off the water. The first night the wind came hard, rocking the bus in gusts that rattled the cupboard latches and woke us both more than once. We were learning that Tasmania's weather did not negotiate. It arrived, did what it intended, and moved on.

    The second night was calmer, and just before dark a lone fairy penguin appeared on the rocks below the camp. It picked its way along the shoreline toward whatever burrow it called home, small and deliberate and completely unaware of us watching from the window. Sal pointed. Anth leaned across. They watched it until it disappeared into the scrub, and the silence it left behind felt like something the evening had offered and they had been quiet enough to receive.    Lue lisää

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