Midland Meanders & Melbourne Moments
23–25 сент. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☀️ 11 °C
East off the plateau and then north into the Midlands, which after weeks of sub-alpine moorland felt like a different state entirely: farmland, hedgerows, stone buildings, sheep.
Campbell Town again. Anth had been through in August on his own, on the way south to the Adelaide flight, and had walked the Convict Brick Trail then and told her about it. This time both of us walked it.
It is a different thing with two people. Alone you read the bricks at your own pace and the accumulation does the work. Together you keep stopping each other. Look at this one. Fourteen years for a coat. This one was sixteen.
And then Sal found one Anth had walked straight past.
John Kelly. Transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1842 for stealing two pigs. Seven years.
He served it, got out, went to Victoria, married, and had a son called Edward. Ned Kelly, the armour, Glenrowan, the most told story in Australian history. All of it descends from a man who stole a couple of pigs in Tipperary and got sent to the bottom of the world for it, and whose name is now set into a footpath in a small Tasmanian town where several thousand cars a day drive over him without looking down.
We stood there a while. Anth had read that footpath carefully three weeks earlier and missed it entirely.
Coffee afterwards at a café on the main street, sitting inside with other people's conversations going on around us, which is its own small pleasure when most meals happen in a parked vehicle.
Then Launceston for the practical run: water, diesel, groceries. And in the middle of that, a phone call, and another opportunity to put money into the Japan fund, and Anth booking a flight to Melbourne for a screening the following morning.
We ate quickly and drove out to Evandale, to Honeysuckle Banks, again. Third time at that camp and the only reason we ever choose it is that it is five minutes from the airport.
He was gone under twenty-four hours. Sal had the trains and the headlights and the flight path for a second time and knew exactly what she was in for.
The next day ran in two places. Anth in a Melbourne clinic doing bloods and questions and forms. Sal in a bus in a paddock at Evandale with her laptop open, working through her coursework, occasionally with a plane going over that might have been carrying him. He was back that afternoon and we drove the five minutes from arrivals to the camp.
We stayed another night, and Sal had lectures. Live ones, on a schedule, which means being somewhere with signal at a fixed hour, laptop open, headphones in, in a bus. While that was happening Anth walked into Evandale and looked at it properly for the first time. It is one of the oldest surviving Georgian villages in the country and almost the whole main street is intact, buildings from the 1830s and 40s still being used as shops and houses rather than preserved behind glass.
The last day was laundry and the hairdresser, which is not much of a way to describe a day and was exactly the day. Machines running, then Sal in a chair getting her hair done properly for the second time in a month, and then out of Launceston in the dark with clean clothes and a full tank.Читать далее
Waddamana: Where Four Make a Crowd
21–23 сент. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 7 °C
We left Penstock with the last of the snow still lying in the shaded patches and took the long way out, on roads we had not driven, because there was no reason to hurry and the direct route was one we knew.
That took us past Waddamana, which we had been to before for the power station. It is the first hydro station Tasmania ever built, opened in 1916, and it is a museum now: the original machine hall preserved with the generators still standing in it, the whole scheme that electrified this state beginning in a shed in the middle of nowhere.
But the station was not what stopped us this time. The village was.
Waddamana has four residents. Four. And when we came through, three of them were standing around a van-café having their morning coffee, which meant that seventy-five per cent of the population was in attendance and the remaining twenty-five per cent was presumably at home.
We pulled in, because how could you not.
The van belongs to Llry and Toni, who are also two of the four. So the café is run by half the town and that morning it was serving a quarter of it. They were pleased to see two more people, and we stayed considerably longer than a coffee stop warrants. They talked about what it is like out there: a place with a museum, a road, and almost nobody, up on a plateau that gets properly cold and properly cut off. There is a whole life in a settlement that size and it does not resemble anybody else's.
We left with pastries they would not charge us for and a promise to come back through.
Then the dirt road east, with Anth stopping for geocaches along the way and Sal in the passenger seat with her laptop out.
The Masters had started. There is reading to do now, and things due, and they are due on dates that have nothing to do with where we are parked or what the weather is doing. She works in the front seat while the country goes past, and when we stop she keeps working, and a life that has been entirely responsive for nine months has a fixed obligation running through the middle of it.
Neither of us has said much about how that is going to work. It is early.
We came out on the Lake Highway, turned east on a road neither of us had been on, and got to Dago Point on Lake Sorell in the afternoon.
Two nights there, and it was warmer, which after Penstock felt like a considerable indulgence. Not warm. Just not minus one. The lake sat flat below the camp and nobody else came in the whole time, and after the snow week and the four-person town meeting, two days of nothing at all was about right.
Then the water ran out again, which is how most of our stays end, and we drove down off the plateau to Launceston, where Sal had the hairdresser booked.Читать далее
A Snowy Sojourn in Tasmania's Highlands
13–21 сент. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ❄️ -1 °C
Back up the Lake Highway and in the ten kilometres of dirt to Penstock, third time, and this time we parked close to the water.
The app said snow. It had said snow before and delivered nothing, so we were treating it as a possibility rather than a plan, but the temperature was going the right way and the sky had the particular flat heavy look it gets when something is coming. We went to bed with the Dweller banked and both of us wondering.
Anth woke first and knew before he opened the curtain. There is a specific quality to the silence when snow has fallen: sound gets absorbed, the ordinary background of wind and bird noise disappears, and the light coming through the curtain is wrong, brighter than it should be at that hour and coming from the wrong direction because it is coming up off the ground.
Several inches of it. Everything.
The bus was under it, roof and bonnet and windscreen. The scrub had gone shapeless. The track in had disappeared entirely, just a smooth white channel between the trees where a road had been the night before. The lagoon was black against all of it, the only dark thing in the landscape, with the snow running right down to the waterline.
We did not make coffee. We got into every layer we owned and went out into it, and the first thing either of us did was stand still and listen to how quiet it was.
Sal had asked for this for her birthday, eight days earlier, and the weather had comprehensively failed to provide. Now here it was, unrequested and a week late, deeper than she had asked for.
We had seen Tasmanian snow before, two years ago, walking the Walls of Jerusalem and coming in after a fall had already happened. This was not that. This was waking up inside it, with the bus buried and the whole plateau converted overnight, and being the only two people who had made a mark on any of it.
Then, twenty minutes into a walk, two other people.
Cody and Sian had been going round Australia for a year and had come to Tasmania for a week for precisely this: they had watched the forecast from the mainland and flown at it. They had got it. The four of us stood in the snow being incredulous at each other, and then we invited them back to the bus.
We set the Dweller up outside and fed it, and it earned every cent it cost. Snow around it, sleet coming through in bursts, and a stove throwing real heat out into open air with four people standing round it. That is what the thing is for, even without the tent.
We were all Queenslanders about it. Cody and Sian too. None of us grew up anywhere that does this, and the whole time we were talking, we were also catching flakes and watching them go on our hands and behaving in a way that would embarrass anyone from a cold country. Grown adults, delighted, standing in a paddock.
Eventually the cold won and we went in and finally had the coffee, five hours late, in a bus that smelled of woodsmoke with the windows fogged.
The snow kept coming for the better part of a week.
Not the same fall, but new ones, most mornings a fresh layer over whatever had partly melted the day before. The place rearranged itself daily. A stand of trees you had walked past twice would be unrecognisable. The lagoon edge froze and unfroze. The light came off the snow at a low angle all day, because the sun barely gets up at that latitude in September, and everything was lit from underneath.
The panels did nothing, obviously. You cannot generate power through four inches of snow, so the first job each morning was clearing them, and even then the return was poor under that sky. The batteries went down all week and we let them, because we were not leaving.
Cody and Sian went after a couple of days with the usual promises about crossing paths, which on this island is a reasonable expectation rather than a politeness.
What finally moved us was water. The tanks emptied at their own pace regardless of how good the camp is, and eventually there was no more of it, and no amount of scenery solves that. So we cleared the panels one last time, got the bus out through the churned track, and drove down off the plateau toward town.
She got her snow. Nine days after the birthday, and about three hundred times more of it than she asked for.Читать далее
ПутешественникWas so happy for you both when you messaged and said it was snowing. What a beautiful wonderland. 🥰🥰
ПутешественникLucky seeing the snow.How are you both,loving every minute of your trip.
Bunnings, Burgers & Bus Adventures
11–13 сент. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 3 °C
Launceston in the cold, three degrees, and a list.
Bunnings first, which after seven months has become a genuinely enjoyable stop rather than a chore. There is always something the bus needs: a bracket, a fitting, a length of something. You walk the aisles looking at solutions to problems you have and problems you might one day have, and you come out with a small bag and a project.
Then the supermarket, and then, because the day had that feeling about it, McDonald's.
That is worth defending. We cook nearly everything we eat, from scratch, in a small kitchen, and it is good food and we like doing it. Which is exactly why a paper bag of burgers eaten in the front seats of a parked bus registers as an event. Novelty is relative. Ours had become a Big Mac in a car park in Launceston.
Then out to Honeysuckle Banks at Evandale, five minutes from the airport, because Anth had a flight to Melbourne that evening.
We set up quickly, knowing we would be leaving again within the hour, and then drove to departures. Neither of us was in a hurry to get out of the vehicle. It was one night, he would be back the following afternoon, and it was still the sort of goodbye where both people wait for the other one to move first. Then a hug at the drop-off and he went in.
Sal drove the five minutes back to camp on her own.
Here is the thing. Anth had stayed at that exact camp a month earlier, alone, on the night Sal flew to Queensland. He had lain there listening to freight trains going through in the dark and aircraft coming over on approach and thought it was one of the more restful sounds available, gone straight to sleep, and thought as he did that Sal would have hated it.
She hated it.
The trains came through and she felt them in the bed. Headlights swept the windows every time a vehicle came in or left. Aircraft went over on the approach path all evening and again early. She sleeps lightly and notices everything, and a camp with three separate sources of interruption is not a camp, it is a night spent waking up. She got very little and was up at dawn feeling every hour of it.
He had known that would happen. He had known it from the other side of the country, a month before, lying in the same spot enjoying himself.
In Melbourne, Anth's night was not much better in its own way. The flight was delayed, then delayed again, then again, and he spent hours in an airport doing what everybody does in that situation: sitting under fluorescent lights on a chair designed to be sat on briefly, watching a board. It was near midnight when he finally got to Blake's place and onto the couch, which was a considerably better offer than a hostel and considerably cheaper than a hotel, and he took it gratefully and slept badly anyway.
He was back at Evandale the following afternoon, and climbing into the bus after twenty-four hours in airports and someone else's living room was the best part of the trip.
We stayed one more night at Evandale, which Sal endured for the second time and did not enjoy any more than the first, and in the morning turned north for the highlands and Penstock again.
There was still snow up there somewhere. We had not given up on it.Читать далее
Fire & Frost: Birthday in the Highlands
5–11 сент. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 11 °C
Michael and Amanda had the bus for a month and would not take anything for it, so we said goodbye at Forcett and drove north with a stop to make first.
The Dweller was waiting at a FedEx depot. It is a hot tent stove, a proper one, firebox and flue and a glass door, designed to sit inside a canvas tent and heat it without filling it with smoke. We did not own a hot tent. We had ordered it anyway, on the reasoning that we could set it up outside and get the heat and the flame without any of the smoke that a normal campfire puts into your clothes, your hair and everything you own. Whether that reasoning would hold up was untested. It sat in its box in the back all the way to the highlands.
Sal had asked for snow for her birthday.
That was the whole brief. Not a restaurant or a present, just to be somewhere with snow on it, and the Central Highlands in early September is the only place in this state where that is even a reasonable request. The forecast was not promising. We went anyway, up through Chauncy Vale where Andy had got himself lost back in June, and then up onto the Lake Highway, where the country changes character completely: sub-alpine moorland, low scrub, no shelter, water standing everywhere after weeks of rain. Then ten kilometres of dirt in to Penstock Lagoon and the boat ramp where we had camped the first time round.
Thin tree cover there, which is exactly what you want going into a week of unsettled weather. The panels got what they could while the sun was out.
The birthday came without snow.
She got coffee in bed, which is what there was to give, and it turned out to be enough. Then lunch at the Great Lake Hotel with Michael and Amanda, which had been arranged as a goodbye and turned out to be a bigger one than expected: they are leaving Tasmania. Not for a holiday. They are going to New Zealand, giving up the property and the Hipcamp and the whole arrangement, and doing something else entirely.
They said our life had something to do with it.
That is now three. Grammy went home from three weeks in the convoy and bought herself a van at seventy-four. Andy came down from Adelaide to try this on and left having decided it fitted. Now Michael and Amanda are selling up for New Zealand. We are not recruiting anybody. We turn up, we park, we talk to people about what we do, and every so often somebody goes away and rearranges their life. It is unsettling as much as it is flattering, because none of them are seeing the flat days.
Back at the lagoon, the week settled into itself.
Penstock is a fly fishing water and the fishermen were out from first light, standing thigh-deep in it, casting and recasting on a surface that on the still mornings was a perfect mirror of the sky. They stayed until dark. We watched them the way you watch anybody doing a slow thing well.
We drove the tracks around the lagoon looking at other camps, threw the frisbee Andy had left us, and each evening got the Dweller going.
It works. It works remarkably well. You feed it small wood through the door and it draws hard up the flue, and the glass glows, and the heat comes off the body of it in a way an open fire does not manage unless you are practically in it. And nothing smokes. You can stand next to it for three hours and go to bed without smelling like a bushfire, which after months of open fires is not a small thing. Gathering wood for it became the evening job, the pair of us out in the scrub with armfuls of whatever would burn.
Snow never came. It stayed cold and grey and threatened all week and delivered nothing, which Sal took better than the weather deserved.
Then Anth got a call from the mainland that needed him on a plane, and the week ended sooner than planned. We packed up and drove out past Arthur Lake and down through Poatina, off the plateau and back toward Launceston and another town day.Читать далее
Parallel Journeys: Love, Science & Home
12 авг.–5 сент. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 14 °C
The oval at Tunnack emptied out easily, because there had been nothing on it but the bus.
Anth drove south to Sorell with a list. The bus needed washing, and it needed it badly: seven months of Tasmanian gravel, forestry mud, salt off the east coast and whatever had come off that road above Griffith, all of it layered on until the original colour was more of a rumour than a fact. Twelve minutes at the coin wash and it came back looking like a vehicle rather than a geological sample.
Then laundry, then the post office for parcels, and then out to Forcett.
Michael had said in June to stay as long as we liked, and had meant it, and this was the version of that offer that actually mattered: somewhere safe to leave seven metres of house for a month while both of us were on the other side of the country. He took it entirely in his stride. There is a kind of person who offers you something and then is not put out when you take them up on it, and he is one.
The flight went out of Hobart the next morning.
Adelaide was CMAX and a Phase I trial, which means healthy volunteers, controlled doses, and a great deal of sitting still while people take your blood on a schedule. Three weeks of it. The days are structured to the minute and the food arrives when it arrives and there is nothing to decide about anything, which after seven months of choosing where to sleep every single night is either restful or maddening depending on the hour. It paid what it paid. That money was going to Japan in November, and that was the entire point of being there.
Sal was in Brisbane.
Grandad and Mack met her at the airport, which after seven months of video calls is a different thing entirely to a good conversation on a screen.
Three and a half weeks, and no agenda beyond being there. Her father practising the organ in the next room, the way he had for as long as she could remember. Coffee with her mother, sitting still, the kind of conversation that only happens when there is no plane to catch that day. Sophie and Mack within reach and able to be hugged rather than phoned, still at the house at Aroona, which was still an address the family had.
That is the part nobody warns you about. It is not the cold or the water running out or the batteries. It is that everybody you love carries on being somewhere you are not, and what you actually gave up was the ordinary access to them: dropping in, staying for dinner, being in the same room without it costing a flight and a month.
The two returns lined up almost by accident. Anth's trial finished, Sal's weeks in Brisbane finished, and the flight routing put them both through Melbourne on the same day. So they met at a domestic terminal, which is not a location either of them would have chosen for it, and got on the same aircraft to Hobart.
The plane came in over the Derwent with the whole thing laid out below: the mountain, the bridge, the channel running south toward Bruny and Gordon, the east coast somewhere off to the left. All of it now recognisable from the air, which it had not been in January.
The bus was at Forcett where they had left it, clean, waiting, with everything they owned still in it.Читать далее
Traces of Time, Tranquility's Promise
11–12 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 14 °C
The plan was Oatlands, twenty minutes down the road. What happened instead was Ross.
Grammy had wanted to see Ross. It had been on her list during the three weeks she and Fran were with us and it had not happened, the way things do not happen when there are four people and a schedule and a ferry at the end of it. Anth pulled in on his own, four months after she flew home, and went round it for her.
The town centre is a crossroads and the locals have a name for each corner. The hotel is Temptation. The Catholic church is Salvation. The town hall is Recreation. The old gaol is Damnation. It is the kind of thing that could be a tourist invention and is not; it is just what people there have called it for a very long time, and standing in the middle of it you can see the whole scheme at once, all four options available within thirty metres of each other.
There was a geocache up past the church, which took him toward the river, and that is how he came to the bridge.
Ross Bridge was finished in 1836 and it is the third-oldest bridge still in use in this country. What makes it worth walking to is not its age. It is the carvings: one hundred and eighty-six of them, cut into the stone of the arches, animals and faces and Celtic patterns and figures that are recognisably particular people. They were carved by a convict called Daniel Herbert, transported for highway robbery, and the work was good enough that he was granted a pardon for it. He stayed in Ross afterwards. He is buried there.
So a man sent to the end of the earth for robbery cut faces into a bridge and got his life back for it, and the bridge is still standing and still carrying cars, and the faces are still there, worn but legible.
On the way there were the old stables, which are the sort of building that has outlived its purpose so completely that there is nothing to do with it but look at it.
He would have stayed longer. But there was a camp to find and light to lose, so he got back in the bus.
Oatlands, when he reached it, was mid-festival. Winter festival, the last day of it, and the free camp that would ordinarily be a paddock with a few vans in it was stalls and parked cars and people. There is nothing wrong with any of that. It was simply not what he had driven there for, and after seven months of choosing camps for how few people are in them, the calculation happens automatically.
WikiCamps again. Something at Tunnack, twenty minutes off.
Tunnack is a small town in the sense that there is not much there, and the camp is the community oval, which you are welcome to drive onto. He put the bus at the edge with bush on one side and the whole open field on the other. One other vehicle, well away.
A country oval is a strange place to sleep and a very good one. Flat, mown, absolutely quiet, and enormous relative to the one vehicle on it. Somebody plays football there on winter Saturdays and somebody mows it and somebody put a set of goalposts up, and none of them were there that evening.
Last night alone. Hobart in the morning, then the flight, then Adelaide and CMAX and a fortnight of blood tests and controlled meals and the money that would put all four of them in Japan in November.
Sal would be back before long. The bus would be full again. For now it was an oval in the middle of nowhere, going dark, with a bird calling somewhere in the bush and nobody at all to talk to about the faces on the bridge at Ross.Читать далее
ПутешественникIt really was ... I am sure Sal will get to see it before we leave Tassie.
Bricks, Bridges & the Nomad's Heart
10–11 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C
Anth came off the highway at the first opportunity and took the back roads south.
It costs almost nothing in time on this island and it changes the day completely. The Midland Highway is the fast way between Launceston and Hobart and it is dull in the specific way that efficient roads are dull. The alternative was farmland, patches of forest, small rises with something on the other side of them, and a string of geocaches to stop for along the way. He had done the highway version months earlier with Sal. This was better.
Campbell Town by mid-afternoon, and a camp on the bank of the Elizabeth River with the Red Bridge standing over it.
Setting up alone takes longer and is quieter. There is nobody to hand you the thing you are reaching for, nobody to say the chairs would be better facing the other way, nobody to disagree with about where the level ground actually is. He got it done and the bus sat there with the river behind it and too much space inside, and he did what people do in that situation, which is take a photograph to send to somebody who is not there.
The Red Bridge is worth the stop. It was finished in 1838 and it is the oldest brick arch bridge still standing in this country, and every brick in it was made and laid by convicts. Somewhere between one and two million of them went into it. It is still carrying traffic. Trucks go over it.
That is the thing about Campbell Town: the convict period is not commemorated here so much as still functioning.
Down the main street there is the Convict Brick Trail, about fifteen hundred bricks set into the footpath, and each one has a person on it. Name, ship, year, crime, sentence. You walk along reading them and the crimes are almost all the same, which is the part that gets you. Stealing a coat. Stealing a handkerchief. Stealing food. Seven years, fourteen years, life, sent to the far side of the planet and never going home. Roughly seventy-five thousand people were transported to Van Diemen's Land, and a decent proportion of them ended up doing work like the bridge at the end of the street.
He walked it slowly, from the Foxhunters Return, which is a convict-built coaching inn from the 1830s and also still in use, down through the town, reading names off the ground.
There were geocaches through the town too, which sounds trivial alongside the rest of it and is not, particularly. Both things are the same impulse: somebody leaves a record, and somebody else finds it later. One of them is a name pressed into clay by a man with no choice about being here. The other is a plastic container behind a fence post. But they are both people saying that they came through this place.
He bought food at the grocery, walked back down to the bridge as the light went, and stood there a while looking at it.
Then back to the bus, and the river, and an early night, and Hobart tomorrow. Sal was in Brisbane with her parents. In a few days he would be in Adelaide with a needle in his arm. The bridge had been standing for a hundred and eighty-six years and would presumably keep standing, which was a reasonable thing to think about while going to sleep alone.Читать далее
Путешественник
The colours in this photo are magic! Such a beautiful bridge.
Echoes of Absence, Promise of Return
9–10 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 13 °C
The airport at Launceston is a small one, and Sal was through the doors and gone inside about four minutes.
Anth drove out south with the passenger seat empty. Second time in seven months. The first had been the four nights at Gordon in June, and that had felt like a small holiday from each other; this felt different, because she was flying to Brisbane to be in the same room as her family for the first time in seven months, and he was heading for Hobart, and he was heading for Hobart and then Adelaide and a cannula in his arm for the Japan money.
Ten minutes down the road, Evandale.
He had not planned to stop that soon. But there was a sign for a free camp at Honeysuckle Banks, on the South Esk, and nobody was waiting for him anywhere, and there is no reason to drive for four hours when the day has already done its important thing. He turned in.
The site sits along the river with a handful of vehicles in it, spread out enough that nobody bothers anybody. He parked, and the sun went down over the water, and that was the day.
Then the noise started.
Honeysuckle Banks is close enough to the Launceston airport that aircraft come over on approach, and close enough to the line that freight trains work through in the night. Neither of these is a secret; the reviews mention both. Anth lay there listening to a train go through somewhere in the dark and thought it was one of the better sounds available, and went to sleep.
Sal would have hated it. She sleeps lightly and she notices everything, and a camp with trains and planes would have been a camp with no sleep in it, and they would have moved in the morning if not sooner. He knew this with complete certainty, lying in the dark, from the other side of a country.
That is the thing about being alone in a shared space. It is not the absence that gets you, exactly. It is knowing precisely what the other person would have said about each thing as it happened, and having nobody to say it to.
He thought about Torrin, too, before he slept. Nine months in Japan now, and the whole reason for the trial in Adelaide was to get all of them into the same country in November. There was a symmetry in it that would have seemed neat if he had been in the mood for it: everybody scattering in different directions in order to eventually converge.
In the morning there would be another short drive south, and then Hobart, and then a flight. For now there was a river, a bus with too much room in it, and a train going through at some hour with nobody there to complain about it.Читать далее
Crimson Skies, Bittersweet Goodbyes
7–9 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C
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.Читать далее
Two Plastic Containers
6–7 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C
Gary had told us about the quolls. We had met him at Lake Barrington months earlier and he had described a camp in the north-east forests where eastern quolls came out at night and could be found if you were prepared to walk around in the dark with a torch. We had been carrying that piece of information ever since.
So we went east into the forestry country past Evercreech, which we knew from an earlier stay, heading for a camp at Griffith. The obvious route was the long way round. The GPS offered a shortcut, and we took it, which is where the day began to go wrong.
The shortcut dropped steeply almost immediately. The gradient itself was not the problem; the bus has an exhaust brake and we run downhill on that as a matter of course, letting the engine hold it back rather than cooking the brakes. What the exhaust brake does not do is widen the track. Anth drove it down with both hands, checking the mirrors, not for what was behind but for whether there was anywhere to turn around if it got worse. There was not, for most of it. Seven metres of vehicle with everything we own inside it, committed to a descent with no exit.
A wombat came out onto the track partway down and stood in it, then went into the undergrowth, unhurried, entirely indifferent to the vehicle.
And then, near the bottom, an old dirt mound across the road. Somebody had put it there years ago to close the track and time and traffic had worn it down, and a four-wheel drive would have gone over it without dropping a gear. For us it was the end of the road. There was nothing for it but to turn seven metres of bus around on a forestry track, which is a slow, awkward, multi-stage operation involving a lot of reversing toward vegetation you cannot see behind, and then drive back up everything we had just come down.
By the time we got back to the main trail it had started raining and the light was going.
That is the combination you do not want. Wet gravel goes slippery in a way that dry gravel does not, the trees close in and drop branches onto the track, and every corner arrives sooner than you expect because you cannot see far enough ahead. We slowed right down. We should have slowed down further.
On one of the sharper bends the back end let go and the rear wheels went off the edge of the road.
For a moment one corner of the bus was in the air. Everything not secured came off the shelves at once, a noise like a cupboard falling over, and then it came down and the wheels found the road again and we were still on it and still going.
We stopped. Sat there for a bit. Then got out in the rain and looked at the edge we had gone over and at the drop below it, which was not enormous, and was enough.
Inside, the damage was two plastic containers. That is all. Everything else had landed on something soft or landed and survived. The bus itself had taken it without complaint, which says something about how it was built and something about luck, and we were not sure that day which of those we had been relying on.
We drove the rest of it very slowly and got to Griffith in full dark, and added proper driving lights to the wish list, immediately below the e-bikes, with rather more urgency attached.
Dinner went in the instant pot. And while it cooked, we took the torch and went out into the forest, which after the afternoon we had just had was either brave or stupid.
Pademelons first, at the edge of the beam, the way they always are. Then, further out, something moving differently: lower, faster, with a rolling gait, and when the torch found it there were the white spots on dark fur. An eastern quoll, working the ground, hunting.
We followed it. Slowly, and badly, because two people in boots cannot move quietly on forest floor, but the quoll tolerated us for a surprisingly long time and let us get within a few metres before it decided it had had enough and went into the scrub.
Gary had been right. We had gone looking for a specific animal on a stranger's word and found it.
Back at the bus the food was ready and the rain had stopped and the whole afternoon had rearranged itself into something we would tell people about rather than something that had frightened us.
In the morning the camp looked worse than it had in the dark. Rubbish in the fire pits, the usual: bottles, cans, half-burnt packaging that somebody had decided the fire would deal with and it had not. We packed up and moved on.Читать далее
ПутешественникIt certainly was... My heart skipped a beat for a moment there.
Tides of Kindness, Waves of Wonder
2–7 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C
We put the fire out at Trout Creek and left, which took longer than it needed to because neither of us was in a hurry to do it.
St Helens on the way through for water and food, and then out to the coast and north to Swimcart Beach in the Bay of Fires. We had been there at Easter with Grammy and Fran, in the middle of the school holidays, when every site was taken and the place ran on the noise of other people's kids. We arrived in August to an empty camp and took the best spot on the beachfront without having to think about it.
That comparison is the whole case for winter in this state, made better than any other camp had made it. Same beach, same view, same white sand and orange rock. In April you queue for it. In August it is yours.
The surf was enormous. We had actually heard it from Trout Creek, inland, on the still nights, and had wondered what was making that noise. This was what: a heavy swell running straight in, breaking hard along the whole length of the bay, loud enough that we raised our voices outside without noticing we were doing it.
Then that night the aurora came again.
Third time. May over the Great Western Tiers, three nights earlier at Trout Creek, and now here, over the ocean with nothing between us and the pole. It sat low across the southern horizon with vertical structure standing up out of it, moving slowly, and we stood at the edge of the camp in the wind and watched it for as long as the cold allowed. Three months earlier Sal had seen her first one and cried about it. Now it was becoming something that simply happened when the sky was clear and we happened to be facing south.
The next day the wind swung offshore and the sea went flat. That happens on that coast: the same water that was breaking like artillery the night before lying down as though nothing had occurred.
It was on that flat day that a woman came over to look at the bus.
People do this fairly often. What was different was that Debi came back the following day, with more questions and an invitation. She and her partner Brett had recently bought a place at Binalong Bay, an Airbnb they called The Ship, and she wanted us to come and have coffee before we moved on.
Sal was flying out in three days. We went.
The Ship sits on twenty-seven hectares, which is a lot of ground to have around a house, and after the tour and the coffee they produced electric mountain bikes and told us to go and look at the property properly.
Neither of us had ridden one. It is a strange and slightly ridiculous sensation the first time: you pedal, and the bike does considerably more about it than your legs justify, and hills that would ordinarily involve suffering simply arrive and pass. We were out there for a good while, through the bush at speeds neither of us would have managed unassisted, and came back grinning like idiots.
E-bikes went straight onto the list of things to buy, which is a list that mostly functions as a way of wanting things in an organised fashion. But we meant it that afternoon, and we still meant it a week later, which is more than most things on the list can claim.
Debi and Brett would not let us leave without something, so we came away with local bacon and eggs from the property. That keeps happening in this state. Michael at Forcett with the paddock and the pub, Samuel with the hilltop, John at Trout Creek with the firewood, now these two with breakfast. We have been offered more by Tasmanians who had no reason to offer us anything than we would have thought plausible before we came.
Three days left before the airport. We drove back to the beach.Читать далее
Путешественник
OMG. How wonderful! Tassie is just making sure you remember how wonderful it is. 🩷💚🩷💚
Frost and Flames: A Forest Interlude
28 июл.–2 авг. 2024, Австралия ⋅ 🌬 10 °C
Scamander first, and not for anything interesting. We had a load of rubbish that needed a tip, which is one of those problems that does not exist when you live in a house and is never more than a few days away when you do not. The GPS wanted us to turn off before the town. We went through it anyway, found somewhere to dispose of it all, and only then went looking for Trout Creek.
The obvious way in is off the highway. We took the forestry roads instead, gravel through plantation and regrowth, corrugated in places and slower than the map suggested. The bus handles that sort of thing better than people expect, being built for exactly this and considerably tougher than it looks.
Trout Creek Forest Reserve had people in it when we arrived, which after a fortnight of empty camps was almost novel. John and Sarah and their kids, and a bloke called James, all out from towns nearby for the weekend, all with fires going. We talked. They were the sort of campers who are pleased to see somebody rather than resentful about it, and John gave us firewood before he left, unprompted and in quantity.
By Sunday night they had all gone home and the reserve was ours.
We cooked on the fire for the rest of the stay, which is a different proposition to cooking on a stove. There is the wood to process first, splitting and stacking and getting it to the right sizes, then the business of getting a bed of coals rather than flames, and then the food, which takes as long as it takes and cannot be rushed by turning a dial. It occupies an afternoon. That is the point of it. After a fortnight of induction hobs and battery percentages, standing over a fire working out whether it was ready was a genuine pleasure.
The second morning came in frosted. Everything white: the ground, the windscreen, the roof of the bus, the grass in the clearing all stiff and pale, and the sun coming through the trees at an angle that lit every bit of it. Fog was sitting on the river and lifting off it in strands. We stood out in it with cold hands and made the decision then, more or less, that we were not leaving the next day.
One night became five.
The birdlife there was better than anywhere we had camped in Tasmania. Not just more of it but more kinds, going all day, and the river had fish in it that came up regularly enough that you would catch the splash out of the corner of your eye and look over too late.
And on one of those nights, the aurora came back.
Not like May. Nothing is going to be like May, when the sky went red over the Great Western Tiers and Sam swore at it and Sal stood in the wet grass crying. This was quieter: a green glow low in the south, structure in it if you watched, more obvious through the camera than the eye. But it was there, in a forest reserve on the east coast, three months after the first one. We got it on camera with the Milky Way standing up behind it, and stood out in the cold looking south for the second time that year.
Sal saw an aurora once in her life, having wanted it since she was a girl. Then she saw a second one twelve weeks later, in a paddock by a river, because we happened to be outside.
Those five days were the last easy ones for a while. Sal was flying to Brisbane to see her family for the first time since January, and Anth was going to Adelaide for another trial to put more into the Japan fund, and the two trips did not overlap, which meant a stretch of being apart with a bus and a schedule between us.
We did not talk about that much either. We put wood on the fire, and cooked slowly, and let the frost do what it did each morning, and stayed a day longer than we meant to, twice.Читать далее
Driftwood Dreams and Coffee Steam
27–28 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
Bicheno for diesel, which took ten minutes and involved no ice cream this time, and then north again.
The road out of town runs past Lagoons Beach, and we went by the turnoff without stopping. Two months earlier we had spent Anth's birthday down there, porridge and coffee outside in the cold with black swans working the lagoon and the diesel heater still an argument we had not settled. It was a good camp and we had every reason to like it, and we drove past because the rule was the rule: nowhere we had already been.
That is a strange discipline to keep. You pass a place that was good to you and keep going on the grounds that you already know what it is.
Half an hour brought us to Little Beach State Reserve, where there was one other traveller and nothing else. We took the far end of the road, as close to the water as the sites allowed, which was not right on it but close enough that the surf was the loudest thing all night.
Then we went looking for sticks.
The Solo stove runs on whatever you can pick up off the ground, and a coastal reserve in winter provides generously: dry twigs, small dead branches, the sort of thing that would be useless in a fire pit and is exactly right for a burner the size of a saucepan. There is a specific pleasure in gathering fuel for a fire you will light within the hour. It is a small closed loop of effort and result, uncomplicated by anything, and it takes about fifteen minutes.
We had coffee off it as the light went, sitting outside in coats with the sea working away in the dark below.
The morning was the reason to have come.
We walked down onto Little Beach early and found the sea up. Big waves coming in hard, spray coming off the tops of them and hanging, and the sun low enough behind us to light the spray from underneath. Then it started raining, out of a mostly clear sky, the kind of shower that arrives from nowhere on that coast and passes in a few minutes. And with the sun where it was and the rain where it was, a rainbow came up over the water and stood there.
We got wet. Neither of us moved for a while.
There is no way to plan for a morning like that. You cannot look it up, cannot book it, and the only way to be standing on a small beach in a state reserve at the exact eight minutes it happens is to be living somewhere near it with nothing else on. That is what all the rest of it buys: the batteries, the gas we forgot, the paid night in the car park, the endless calculation about sun and shade and where to park. It buys you being there when the light does something.
We packed up afterwards and drove on to Trout Creek Reserve, and beyond that, in a day or two, Swimcart Beach in the Bay of Fires, where we had spent a week in the autumn with Grammy and Fran. That one is not new ground, and we were going anyway.Читать далее
Ice Cream in July
26–27 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
The batteries were down near fifty percent, and it was our own fault.
We had missed gas on the last resupply. No gas means no stovetop, which means the induction hob and the air fryer do all the cooking, and those two things pull more power than everything else in the bus put together. In January that would not have mattered. In late July, with the sun barely getting above the hills and giving up by four, the panels could not make back what the cooking was taking. Three days of that and the numbers had gone somewhere we did not like.
So we went south rather than north, back past Coles Bay to the National Park RV stop, which we had used once before for exactly this reason. Paid for a night. Plugged in.
Then sat there while it charged.
A large battery bank takes hours to come back up from half, and there is nothing to do during those hours except be present in a car park and watch a number climb. It is a dull way to spend a day and it is entirely the correct decision, which does not make it less dull. We had a working solution, a paid site, a cord running out of the bus, and a strong desire to be anywhere else.
By the time it was full the day was mostly gone. We turned north again, rejoining the route we had left, and got maybe forty minutes up the road before the light went.
A sign came up for the Pondering Frog Café, which offered free camping and had good reviews and a name that made the decision for us. We pulled in as it was going properly dark.
Something we had both noticed that week: the evenings were lasting longer. Five weeks past the solstice and it was measurable, twenty minutes or so of extra light at the end of the day, which does not sound like much until you have spent a winter arranging your entire life around when the sun leaves. Cooking in the dark, walking in the dark, deciding at three in the afternoon whether there was time to get anywhere. It was starting to loosen. Summer in this state, when it comes, gives you until nine at night, and we were beginning to look forward to it.
The café was still open, so we went in and had ice cream, in July, in Tasmania, in the cold, which is the correct time to have ice cream and requires no defence.
Then back to the bus, and we watched television. Several episodes of it. The heater on, screens up, the door shut against the dark, doing precisely what anybody in a house would have been doing at that hour on a Friday night.
The frogs started up not long after. The place is named for them and they earn it, a steady racket from the water somewhere behind the café that went on the entire night and which neither of us minded in the slightest.Читать далее
What Winter Buys You
25–26 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 14 °C
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.Читать далее
River Dreams: Our Fleeting Paradise
24–25 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 14 °C
We were slow leaving Samuel's. The hill had sun on it all day and the panels were making the most of it, which is reason enough to stay put until mid-afternoon when the alternative is parking somewhere shaded.
Then twenty minutes north, which kept us inside the rule, to a free camp on the Swan River just past Swansea. Neither of us had been there. That kept us inside the other rule.
The site sits back off the road on the riverbank with a few different places to put a vehicle, and there was nobody in any of them. We took a bit of raised ground with the river turning below it, which is the kind of choice you can only make when you arrive somewhere empty and are the only vote.
That was the day.
It is worth being honest that most of them are. The rule we had set ourselves was generating a string of nights exactly like this one: short hop, new camp, nobody there, set up, sleep, move on. No walk, no discovery, nobody met, nothing that would survive being described to somebody at a barbecue. The Swan came down slow and brown-green past the bank and made almost no noise doing it. Leaves moved. It got dark early, and the stars turned up in the numbers they turn up in when there is no town anywhere close.
We had been out seven months by then and the novelty had settled into something steadier. Early on, a night like this would have felt like proof of something. By July it was just Wednesday. The freedom was still there, it had simply stopped announcing itself, which is what happens to any freedom you use daily.
In the morning we would move on again, another thirty minutes, another place we had not been. The rule was doing its job. It was turning a stretch of coast we thought we knew into a series of small unfamiliar places, and it was filling the fortnight before Sal's flight with something other than waiting for it.Читать далее
The 30 Minute Rule
22–24 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
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.Читать далее
Solitude's Embrace at Marion Lookout
21–22 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 9 °C
Fortescue Bay had given us what it was going to give us, so we sat in the bus with WikiCamps open and worked north.
The plan was loose. Sal had a flight to Brisbane in three weeks, going up to see family while Anth was at CMAX, and until then the idea was to work our way up the east coast picking off whatever we had not seen. After seven months on this island that was a shorter list than it used to be. Marion Bay Lookout came up on the map about half an hour north, past Dunalley, free camping right at the lookout. We had driven past the turnoff two years earlier on the way to the Three Capes Track without giving it a thought.
Half an hour later we were parked with the day barely started.
There was nobody else there. Not a quiet camp with a few vans in it, nobody. This is what Tasmania does in July: the free camps that are full in January have one bus in them. And a lookout camp is the one place where where you park genuinely matters, because the whole reason the site exists is the view off the edge of it. We spent five minutes getting the angle right so the windows faced out, which you only do when there is no competition for the spot.
Then we worked. The sun in late July has very little heat in it but it was clear and unobstructed and the panels took what there was, which after Fortescue Bay's canopy was a relief. Two laptops, the online business, a long quiet afternoon of the kind of work that has to happen for any of the rest of it to be possible. We would look up, and there was the water, and then back to the screen.
That is a thing worth saying plainly, because these entries tend to be about walks and mountains. Most days are not that. Most days are two people working in a parked vehicle with a good view, and the reason the view is good is that we chose where to park, and the reason we could choose is the work.
The night was clear and the stars came out properly, no town anywhere near enough to interfere.
In the morning we drove on, and turned the drive into a geocaching day. There is a particular rhythm to that: pull over, walk twenty metres, feel around under a guard rail or behind a sign, find it or fail, sign the log, drive on. Some of them had not been signed in months. It is a slow way to cover ground and it makes you stop in places that have absolutely nothing to recommend them, which is the point.
Three weeks until we both left the island, in opposite directions, for a month. Close enough to be a fact and far enough not to think about. We drove north and found small plastic containers hidden by strangers and signed our name in them.Читать далее
Whispers of Adventure: Peninsula Redux
19–21 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ 🌬 11 °C
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.Читать далее
ПутешественникYes - a masterpiece of God's creation. So beautiful. You two have seen the Tasmania not many people have seen.
Echoes of Home on a Nomad's Heart
14–19 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ 🌬 9 °C
North up the channel with Bruny on the right the whole way, through the string of small towns that sit along that shore, and into Hobart for the third or fourth time that month. The city had stopped being a destination and become a place we passed through to get things.
Macpac first, for proper cold-weather gear. We had been getting away with what we brought from Queensland and were no longer getting away with it. Buying serious thermals in July is an admission that you are staying for the winter rather than outrunning it.
Then lunch with Michael and Amanda, a month after Forcett. It was easy in the way that new friendships occasionally are when the calibration happens fast, and they had the local knowledge and the willingness to use it on our behalf, which is worth more than either party usually admits.
Then fifteen minutes to Clifton Beach, and a house.
Somebody needed their place looked after for five nights and we had said yes. The last time either of us had slept in a building was the fourth of January.
You notice the things you have stopped having. A room you can leave and come back to. A door you close behind you for no reason. Space to put something down and not immediately need that space for something else. The bus is well designed and we love it, but every surface in it has at least two jobs, and a house has surfaces that have no job at all.
There was a fireplace and we ran it constantly. And there was Eddy, the cat, who inspected us on arrival and then decided we were acceptable, and who spent the next five nights sitting wherever the heat was, which is a reasonable philosophy.
Halfway through, Anth flew to Adelaide again. Another screening, another possible trial, more money toward Japan in November. So Sal had the last of the house-sit on her own, in a stranger's living room with somebody else's cat, which is a specific kind of quiet. She had done the solo stretches before, but always in the bus, where the walls are close and yours. This was different. There was too much room for one person.
The source of what we wrote at the time says we spent the week getting restless and confirming that the road was who we were. That is half true and it is the easier half.
The harder part is that Sal had been accepted into a Masters of Counselling three days before we walked into that house. She would need to study. Studying takes a table, and reliable power, and internet that does not depend on which side of a hill you parked, and a set of hours that are the same each week. Sitting in a warm room at Clifton Beach with a fire going and a desk available, that was not an abstract observation.
We did not talk about it much. But it was in the room with us, along with the cat.
So both things were true at once, which is usually how it goes. We were ready to leave by the fifth day and we did leave, gladly, back into the bus and the cold and the business of finding somewhere to park. And we also now knew exactly what a house was for, which we had not needed to know in January.
We locked up, left food for Eddy's owners to find sorted, and drove out with the heater on and everything we owned around us again.Читать далее
Between Peaks and Promises
12–14 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☀️ 12 °C
Ten minutes down from the Hartz trailhead there is a car park and a short walk to Arve Falls, which we would have driven past in most moods and did not.
It is a modest thing by the standards of the island: water coming off the plateau over a lip of rock into a gorge below, seen from a platform, twenty minutes of your day including the walk. Tasmania is thick with these. Not more waterfalls than the whole mainland, whatever gets said in the pub, but more per hour of driving than anywhere either of us had lived, and after a while you develop the habit of stopping for the ones with a sign, because the alternative is arriving everywhere on time and having seen nothing.
Then Geeveston, and Huonville for groceries. Standing in an IGA aisle deciding about tomatoes about eighteen hours after Sal had read a university acceptance on the side of a mountain, which is roughly the ratio of ordinary to significant that this life runs on.
Over the Huon and along the north bank, and the day turned out to be the best one in weeks: no cloud, real warmth in the sun for the first time since May, the river doing the thing rivers do when the light is low and behind you.
We were going back to the Gordon foreshore. We had been there in early June, and it was where we met Justin, who was by then back on the mainland having recommended us a cave on his way out. Returning to a camp you have already used is a different arrival to a new one. You are not assessing it. You know which way the door should face.
We took the exact site Anth had used when Sal was in Hobart with Liz and Jan. That felt worth doing, though it took a moment's thought, because that was the week the big gum came down not far from where the bus had been standing. It was still there on the ground, going soft at the edges, on its way to being part of the forest floor. Six weeks had made it look less like an event and more like scenery.
Two nights only. After that we were going to a house.
That was the strange thing sitting underneath the whole day. Somebody had asked us to house-sit, and we had said yes, and it would be the first time since the fourth of January that either of us slept in a building that did not have wheels under it. Six and a half months. We had not planned it or particularly wanted it; it had simply come up, and it seemed daft to say no.
So we sat out for two evenings on the grass above the water with Bruny across the channel, in the last decent weather we were likely to get for a while, and did not do very much at all. The sun went down over the island and the light went long and pink across the water and neither of us said anything worth writing down.
That is most of it, in the end. The walking and the summits and the news on the mountain are what you remember, but the actual texture of the thing is two people in camp chairs on grass they have sat on before, with nowhere to be until Tuesday.Читать далее
A Masters and a Mountain
9–12 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C
Justin had told us about Mystery Creek Cave before he caught his ferry, and that recommendation outlasted him by a fortnight. We met Andy at the trailhead, back from a week working his way along the east coast on his own, with oats on the stove and the day already organised in his head.
The walk in is short and muddy, an old tramway grade through wet forest. Sal did not want to go into the cave. She said so on the way and she was still saying so at the entrance, which is a wide dark mouth in the hillside with a creek running out of it, and then she went in anyway, which is the part worth recording.
Inside it is bigger than the entrance suggests and it keeps going. Headlamps on, the creek loud in the dark and running the length of the passage, everything wet and cold and the footing genuinely poor on the slick rock. We worked our way in slowly. The air got colder the further we went.
Then somebody suggested turning the lights off, and we did.
It takes a minute for your eyes to give up on the idea of ordinary sight. When they do, the roof of the cave is full of glowworms, thousands of them, cold blue and completely still, spread across the stone in no pattern at all. Nobody says anything for a while when that happens. You just stand in a dark hole in a mountain and look up at something that has no interest in you whatsoever.
Andy had wanted to do this since he was a kid, specifically a cave with a living stream running through it. He got that.
We went as far as the marker where the passage becomes proper caving and turned around there.
Outside, back in the daylight and the wet green, the forest was going off with lyrebirds. They are not meant to be here, strictly speaking, having been introduced to Mount Field in the thirties and spread south since, but they are here now and they run through the entire local repertoire including a very good black cockatoo. You stand in a Tasmanian forest listening to a mainland bird doing impressions of the neighbours.
Then Geeveston for laundry, because the ordinary parts of the week do not stop for glowworms, and on to the Hartz Mountains trailhead in the dark. Andy had food ready in the day-use area again. He had been feeding us for weeks.
Rain the next morning killed the Hartz Peak plan, so we walked to Lake Osborne instead, which is short and beautiful and requires nothing of you. Glacial lake, alpine country that felt like Ben Lomond in a different key, and the water dead flat under a grey sky with the mountains sitting in it. Pencil pines around the shore, which grow slowly, live for centuries and burn once.
The following day was still overcast but dry, so we went up.
The track to Hartz Peak runs on duckboards across alpine heath, then rock, then a scramble at the top. The recent rain had put small streams across the path everywhere. Snow appeared in patches as we climbed, then in sheets in the lee of things. Near the summit the wind arrived properly, straight off the Southern Ocean with nothing in the way, and we stopped to put on everything we had.
And there, a few hundred metres below the summit, cold, half-layered, standing on rock, the phones found signal for the first time in days and started going off.
Sal had been accepted into a Masters of Counselling.
She read it standing in the wind on the side of a mountain in south-west Tasmania. There was nowhere to sit down. There was nobody to tell. We had come to this island six months earlier with a bus and no plan beyond the next camp, and now there was a course with a start date and a duration and an end, and a version of the future that had a desk in it somewhere.
She had wanted this for a long time. It is a strange place to receive good news, and it was the right place, because it meant the two things could not be separated: the life we were living and the thing she was going to do next arrived in the same minute, on the same rock, in the same wind.
Then we climbed the last of it.
The summit gives you the whole of the south-west. Ranges going back in layers until they stop being distinguishable, Bruny out east as a dark shape on silver water, and cloud moving over all of it. The wind made staying up there a short proposition. We came down inside twenty minutes.
On the descent we detoured to look over Hartz Lake, and stopped at Lake Esperance which we had walked past on the way up. Andy had a meal on when we got back.
That was the last one. He was heading for the mainland to carry on by himself, having come to Tasmania to try this life on and decided it fitted. Six weeks earlier he had turned up at a bush camp outside Bagdad and got lost on his first walk. He left as somebody who cooked for us most nights and had a bus recommendation of his own to make to the next person who asked.
We stayed one more night at the trailhead, then pointed north for the Gordon foreshore, which is where we had met Justin, whose cave tip had started the week.Читать далее
ПутешественникGood to see your beautiful adventures down the bottom end, keep warm and safe 🫶
Wonders at the Southern Edge
27 июн.–9 июл. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C
The bitumen ran out a long way short of Cockle Creek and what followed was mud, gravel and corrugation, heading south into country that empties as you go. We had aimed at this once already, months earlier, with Grammy and Fran, and had not made it. Weather, timing, the ordinary reasons. It had been sitting on the list since.
Mountains on the right with their tops in cloud. On the left, water appearing and disappearing through the trees as the road turned, small bays, and past them the Southern Ocean doing whatever it was doing that day.
Then the track stopped, and that was Cockle Creek. There is nowhere further south you can take a vehicle in this country.
We found a site and set up with a forecast of high wind and rain sitting over the next few days, which at that latitude in late June is less a warning than a description. The spot was poor for solar and we took it anyway.
What the place does not tell you, standing in it, is how busy it used to be. In 1792 and again the following year a French expedition under d'Entrecasteaux anchored in Recherche Bay, and the naturalists aboard went ashore and did the first proper scientific work done on this continent by anybody, and planted a garden to see what would grow. Later there was bay whaling here, and timber, and coal, and for a stretch of the nineteenth century this dead-end at the bottom of the map had a working population, ships in the bay and a reason to exist. All of that is gone. The quiet we drove into is the most recent thing about Cockle Creek, not the oldest.
The first walk was out to Fishers Point, which involves a beach and a negotiation with the tide. We timed our runs between sets, went hard across the exposed sand and got up onto the rocks before the water came back, which is enjoyable in the way that low-stakes urgency always is.
At the point the geography changes character completely. Recherche Bay behind you is protected water, flat and reasonable. Past the point there is nothing between you and Antarctica, and the swell that has been building across the whole of the Southern Ocean arrives on that rock having been slowed by nothing at all. It is loud and it does not stop.
We turned around at the far end and got the view back, which was the better one: the southern ranges standing up behind us with snow still on the tops, cloud moving across them and breaking, and the afternoon sun coming through the gaps in pieces. Turbulent water at our feet and still white mountains behind. We stood there a while.
The tide had not cooperated on the return. Anth went in bare-legged in a pair of crocs and carried Sal across on his back through water that was well past sensible, both of them making a considerable amount of noise about it, and neither entirely dry at the end.
A day or so later we found a better site and moved: unobstructed views across the bay, decent sun for the panels, and a long-drop to ourselves, which after weeks of sharing facilities counts as luxury. We slept with the water audible from the bed for the rest of the stay.
The pademelons came in at dusk every evening, cautious at the edge of the light, working the grass and keeping one eye on us. Black currawongs went over during the day making the noise they make, which is unlike anything on the mainland. And along the beach we found devil tracks in the sand, unmistakeable once you know them, laid down overnight by an animal we never saw.
The big walk was sixteen kilometres return, out to South Cape Bay. Not the southernmost point of Tasmania, whatever gets claimed for it; that is South East Cape, and reaching it takes days on the South Coast Track. What South Cape Bay is, is where the South Coast Track begins and where the walking public generally stops.
We went out through button grass and then wet forest, boardwalk in the worst of it, mud everywhere else. Halfway along we fell in with a young hiker doing his own version of the island, and walked together for a stretch, exchanging the information travellers exchange. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos worked the canopy above us the whole way, calling to each other, which is a sound that carries a very long distance through wet forest and always seems to be coming from somewhere behind you.
Then the trees ended and the cliff top opened out.
Dark sand a long way below, sandstone and rock breaking the line of the shore, and beyond it the Southern Ocean going out flat and grey and uninterrupted. Nothing between that beach and the ice. We sat down and did not say much for a while. Six months earlier we had left the Sunshine Coast heading south, and this was as far south as the continent goes for anybody without a boat.
We stayed several more days and then packed up and drove back out the way we had come, north for the first time in weeks.
Behind us the bay went back to what it does when nobody is there, which is what it has been doing since the whalers left, and the French, and everybody else who ever thought there was something at the bottom of the road worth staying for.Читать далее
ПутешественникIt was pretty amazing. As good as the Dark Sky Park at the Warrumbungles.
Longley Nights and Southern Dreams
26–27 июн. 2024, Австралия ⋅ ☁️ 10 °C
Hobart for supplies, which by then took about as long as it needed to and no longer. Six months in, a resupply had stopped being a task and become a sequence: same order, same shops, same list mostly held in the head. You get efficient at the things you do fortnightly.
Andy had spent the Pedder week around Hobart on his own and was ready to come south with us, so the afternoon question was where to put two vehicles for the night on the road toward Cockle Creek. That question gets answered on a phone. Both of us sitting in the front of the bus with WikiCamps open, filtering, reading other people's comments about mud and noise and whether the publican minds, which is how nearly every night of this life gets decided.
The Longley Hotel came up. Camping out the back, no fee, on the understanding that you eat in the pub. We sent the location to Andy and drove the forty minutes south.
That arrangement is a good one and worth saying why. A pub with a paddock gets people through the door on a Wednesday in June, which in a small town south of Hobart is not nothing. Travellers get somewhere flat and safe and lit, with a toilet and a meal. Nobody is doing anybody a favour and everybody comes out ahead. We had been on the road long enough to have opinions about this sort of thing.
The three of us ate in the pub, which was warm and busy enough to have a bit of noise in it. Andy had a week of his own to report and we had ours: the naked swim, the dam in fog, Justin gone to the ferry. Country pub cooking, generous rather than refined, exactly right after a day of shops and driving.
Then out to the paddock and the bus, and the cold came down hard the way it had every night that month.
We were away early. Two vehicles again, the bus in front, Andy behind, heading south down the Huon and then further, on the road that runs out of Tasmania.
Cockle Creek is not the southernmost point of Australia, whatever gets said about it. There is land below it and a cape further south again, reachable only on foot over several days. What Cockle Creek is, precisely, is the end of the driving. The bitumen stops, then the gravel stops, and after that the country carries on without any road in it at all for a very long way.
That was where we were going. It seemed like a reasonable place to point a bus.Читать далее
Путешественник
WOW. Interesting find. 👏🏻👏🏻