I'M AT: Tasman Backpackers, Devonport, where I lasted just one match in the pool competition - OK and absolutely teeming with carrot-pickers; Cosy Cabins YHA, spotless and set in the bush, surrounded by wallabies and possums; and Launceston Backpackers, where the seriously wearying sarcasm of the manager failed to take the sparkle off of what was a pretty decent place; a tent on the Freycinet Peninsula; and a hostel in Hobart that I fail to remember...it was pretty forgettable.
I didn't know what to expect of Tasmania as the ferry pulled into Devonport.
It had taken me ten hours by boat to get there from Melbourne. The Spirit of Tasmania II was full of beardy old men and their pencil-thin wives. One of the gents I spoke to had a sick wife, basically an invalid, and he'd come here with friends, leaving her at home to give them both a break from the intense caring. He tucked into his ship-boiled hotdog.
The journey passed uneventfully via a mushy lunch and a couple of nice, fruity Cascade beers - brewed in Tasmania - and then we arrived. From the deck it looked like half the town had turned out to greet us. The next day I figured out it was actually all the tourists in the town that had turned out, for there really is nothing to do in Devonport.
I had ten days in Tassie, and it took me almost all of one of them to get my head round the fact that Tasmania's public transport is sparse, to say the least. Infrequent scheduling - the companies make most of their money doing school runs, so it's very tricky getting buses at the weekend - meant I'd have to stay longer than I wanted to in each of the three towns I'd visit, Devonport, Launceston and Hobart, and less time in the National Parks, which was where I really wanted to be.
Getting all the bus connections to work was like a Krypton Factor-type logic problem. I had to ask the squint-eyed woman in the visitor office to verify that I hadn't been maddened by timetables, but in fact she was full of good advice and booked it all for me. Should have gone straight there, really. She said she was jealous of my trip, and I told her to chuck it all in and join me. She squinted back at me.
So, my time in Devonport sank without trace, and I happily hopped onto the Tassielink bus from there to Cradle Village, which is just a few kilometres from the entrance to Cradle Mountain National Park, an alpine glory full of peaks and tarns and lakes and cairns. it's here that the Overland Track starts (it finishes in Lake St Clair National Park, 80km away) but I'd already decided I couldn't be arsed to carry six days worth of food and camping stuff on my back, so opted for day walks.
Cradle Mountain's a great place to be. The parks folk put on a free shuttle bus, operating twelve hours each day, which takes you to various huts and centres in the park. You can walk as little or as much as you want. I went for much. So on day one, I got the bus to the Visitor Centre inside the park and stomped along a 9km boardwalk through she-oak and eucalyptus forests, at the end of which I got my first sight of the Cradle Mountain range, jutting menacingly. I also walked round Dove Lake, which was very popular - overloaded with folk, really. But understandably so. You can drive to the car park and instantly relax into a scene of great beauty. It's a popular place.
I got the bus back after about five hours walking, and it was then that I saw the fire marshals, checking out the evacuation plans of the place I was staying. Mount Remus was burning and the village was under threat. It was all pretty worrying, moreso when you spend a couple of days in a place and get to appreciate the friendliness of the park and hostel staff. Their livelihoods are at risk. On the day I left, the fire was burning so badly that most of the longer walks in the park were closed, including the walk I did just the day before, on day two - up Cradle Mountain itself.
Day two started fairly early, with an 8AM bus to Ronny Creek. From here, a decent track took me up to Crater Lake and to Marion's Lookout, at about a thousand metres, from where you could see all the vast ripples of land, with water sitting in the folds. I got to Kitchen Hut at 11AM and started the climb up Cradle Mountain, which is steep, and had me and loads of others pausing for breath and dragging ourselves across massive boulders, squinting in the sun to try and follow the daubed red paint showing us the way. It's just like being on the beach, I told myself, just like climbing rocks on the beach. But of course it wasn't. So, pretty freaked, and sweating, I arrived at the summit, failed to enjoy it up there, and hurried back down.
It was only on the Face Track, which skirts the bottom of the mountains, that I really got into it. The views down into deep blue lakes, across dry forests, were dramatic, and the path ground its way up and down over itchy rock. I saw my first snake - and shortly after, my second - on this bit of the walk, which was pretty overgrown. Turned out they were Tiger snakes, which, like the other two snakes on Tasmania, are deeply venomous, only moreso. They lived up to their reputation as being shy, though, and made for the leaves as I strode on.
And then, via the Twisted Lakes and over Mount Hudson, next to Hudson Lake, the walk was done, at Lake Dove car park, it had taken about six hours - very beautiful. That night I cooked pasta in the secret kitchen I found, in another building, which was handy as ours had been overrun by a tour group.
So, with news that the Cradle Mountain Summit track had now been closed, and feeling for the Geordie bloke I'd given my map to the night before, who was so eager to get up the thing, I left the place and journeyed to Launceston, which has one big natural attraction - Cataract Gorge. I went to the Gorge twice - the second time at dusk, where it had turned from the idyllic swimming-hole paradise that it had been during the day, into a dervish of bugs and drunks - and then spent the next day doing laundry and sitting in the park reading, watched the macaques in their enclosure, just one of the lazy days you can't avoid.
I had reason to save my energy, though, because a 30km overnight trip round the Freycinet Peninsula was next. The Freycinet droops like a drop of wax off of the East Coast of Tasmania, and is home to Wineglass Bay, which to me looked as though it had been lifted from a St Lucia tourist brochure, so golden and gorgeous it seemed.
Tassielink picked me and the inevitable German couple (German tourists are as numerous as Brits in Australia and when you meet them speak with the same weariness at constantly meeting their own countryfolk, despite being thousands of miles from home) from the station and ferried us, under grey skies with drizzle promised, to the Coles Bay Turnoff. From here we jumped into a small air-conditioned thing and went to Coles Bay itself. I'd planned on getting a 3pm shuttle into the park, giving me a few hours to dump my gear and hire camping equipment to take with me - but as it happened, they gave me a life much earlier, so I had more time to hike. They didn't charge me, either. Good people.
The first day, then, takes about four hours to get to the Cooks Beach campsite. From grey came shine and it was in glorious colour that I hit Hazards Beach, the first taste of this beautiful, beautiful place. Tanned bodies swam and I squinted to make out a gorgeous green island sitting a kilometre or so off the beach. I sat and ate a couple of pittas with a big grin on my face.
And from there I headed into a wilderness of bush, overgrown, thick with bark and tumble - saw two snakes, the second a much larger animal than I'd seen before. It was dark green, saw me approaching, stayed where it was and made a threatening gesture. For the first time, a snake had failed to take off like a scalded cat into the undergrowth. I waited, and sweated, and my heart pounded. It moved, so slowly, baqck across the path, facing me for a time, and then into the undergrowth on my left. Walking past, I could imagine it just feet from my bare legs. In there. Flicking its tongue at the human.
It left me alone, and I walked without taking my eyes off the path, onward to Cooks Beach - past a group of three stoned Aussies, who were walking the opposite way. They offered me a toke but quite frankly I'm not the best at tent-erecting, and attempting it stoned, using unfamiliar gear, just didn't appeal. I could easily see myself spending the first two hours at the campsite looking at the instructions dreamily. Maybe eating a a fork or two of pasta. Gazing at the stuff again. Wondering if I needed a piss or not. Getting stuff out, getting it wrong, panicking, nightfall - death. So I turned them down.
As it was, it was simplicity itself, so I settled in, had a wine, walked out to look down the empty beach, saw clouds over the sunset, went back into my sanctuary, put the stereo on, ate my cold dinner and slept, huge ants walking over the inner sheet. There was a heavy storm, casting pink lightning into the night air, but by and large it stayed where it was, across the foaming ocean, and we just had a light shower. In the morning it was calm as I ate a gentle breakfast, listening to the frupp frupp frupp of the resident wallaby's tongue as it licked rainwater off my flysheet, two small paws clawing gently at the fabric.
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