A Lap of Tasmania: Part 2
“Ooh, Ooh, look at that, look at that, look at that”, Helen squealed as we looked out into the waters of Binalong Bay from a local boat ramp. A huge black shape was drifting silently through the crystal clear shallow waters. It turned out to be a pretty massive stingray. It was soon joined by two others and all three circled around the little bay for several minutes. Helen ran back to the van to get our snorkelling camera and I managed to get into the sea enough to get a few shots of one as it made its way in our direction. At one point it was within about a metre of my legs, stuck one of its wingflaps out of the water and appeared to ‘wave’ at us. Pretty thrilling stuff even if it was just coincidence. Then I fell on my arse in the sea…..
Stingray from above
Stingray from below
It was a fabulous end to a day that started with a get up for the spectacular sunrise at Swimcart beach. Our night had been peaceful despite our fears of an all night party kicking off next door and the simple pleasure of watching the day break along with a few silent others spread out along the shore was quietly joyful. Most of the day was spent finding new vantage points on the beach from which to sit and enjoy the surf crashing against the orange rocks, but the tiny village of Binalong Bay beckoned for further ventures along the shore. This was the Bay of Fires at its most scenic and was remarkably quiet despite the packed camping grounds and vehicle parks. Bright, sunny bays with cool winds, a few picnicking families and an atmosphere so chilled it was practically comatose. We almost considered buying a house on the bay front there and then.
Swimcart beach at dawn
Swimcart beach at dawn
Binalong Bay
Binalong Bay
Binalong Bay
Binalong Bay
Moistened pants notwithstanding, the journey out from the bay was bittersweet. We knew we had to opt for a powered site this evening and the only one close to our next destination was at Coles Bay at the edge of the Freycinet peninsula. This was camping at its least appealing, with small sites in a claustrophobic park, sitting cheek by jowl with a multitude of neighbours. But still, we pulled in, took the now obligatory sundowner outside the van and nodded and chatted to the many other campers that passed our way. Very friendly, still beautifully sunny and we were pretty happy with our lot. I managed to make it to the beach for sunset and watched the day close, bizarrely and incongruously listening to naff American pop music blaring out from a beach-based line dancing class that just happened to be on at the time. Seeing sunset whilst subjected to the strains of ‘Cotton-Eye Joe’ was a somewhat strange experience.
Wineglass Bay
Wineglass Bay beach
Hazards Bay
Hazards Bay
Hazards Bay
Coles Bay, however, is merely the gateway to the peninsula with its double beach fronted isthmus known as Wineglass & Hazards Bays. There’s a lovely walk here that ascends a steep pitched path to a look-out point and anyone in the area tends to do it. Thus the walk up is crowded and noisy but with the reward of a superb view over the neck of the wineglass. Venture further though, and the crowds all but disappear. Around 1,000 steps down the other side bring you to Wineglass Bay itself, a wide stretch of pristine white sand and a jungle path across the neck to Hazards Bay and an arguably even better beach. It’s reminiscent of the sands of the Outer Hebrides here (on a good day) – the purest blue waters, immaculate fine white sand, grassy dunes and pretty much no-one else around. We had a small picnic (salami, brie and olive sarnies with capsicum hummus – nice) and set off back, skirting lovely little mini-bays through close and humid forests. Almost on a par with Cradle Mountain…
Another encounter with the wildlife in the carpark where a curious wallaby hopped over to sniff my hands, then onto our next campsite, this time going from the ridiculous to the sublime. There’s a fairly new company in Australia called HipCamp that connects campers to privately owned areas that don’t appear on any other maps or apps. We were pleased it wasn’t just a site for those recovering from replacement joint surgery, nor was it meant for cool kids or those with elegantly trimmed beards. It was, though, a source of some pretty spectacular places you’d never find otherwise. One of these was the Kanyini Camp, nothing more than some mown grass in the middle of nowhere about 10 miles inland from the coast. We arrived following a set of coordinates on google and found the tiniest of signs telling us the deserted field we turned up at was indeed our digs for the night. The presence of 3 rock-ringed fire pits was the only clue to its use.
Kanyini Camp
Kanyini Camp
Kanyini Camp
Not too impressive at first, it turned out to be the best place we stayed at on the roadtrip, possibly even outshining the misty and mysterious Lake King William. Why so? Well the wildlife for one. As dusk approached the surrounding grasslands and the field itself gradually ‘filled’ with wallabies – we counted at least fifty, though none were bold enough to approach.
We also caught three Tasmanian Native Hens (aka ‘turbo-chooks’) hot-tailing it through the grass as if their lives depended on it.
Then there was the fire. We’d picked up a load of discarded wood at Swimcart Beach that seemed to have been discarded by the previous occupants of our pitch (open fires are not allowed there, so we imagined the campers had abandoned the stash as it was no use to them). Even a paltry bag of firewood bought at petrol stations costs a good A$20 here and we must have had 10 times that amount. It had been filling half the floor of the living area in the van for 48 hours and was enough, as it turned out, for 3 or 4 hours of healthy, wine-fuelled bonfire antics. This included the toasting of a whole pack of marshmallows on the end of sticks we’d selected specially for the purpose (carefully picked off the floor at Wineglass Bay and fastidiously scrubbed to accept the squish of a marshmallow on their sharpened ends).
But the best thing about it was the sky. The owners had told us that if we were lucky enough to have a clear night, we’d get as clear a view of the Milky Way as we were ever likely to see. Spoilt as we have been, we were a little dubious – we’d seen the Milky Way in great detail several times with zero light pollution on our trip to Mangistau in Kazakhstan and were rightly convinced it could never be as good as that. But it was still absolutely bloody marvellous. A little the merrier for lots of wine, sitting slumped back in camp chairs staring at the stars, feeling simultaneously immense and insignificant. It doesn’t get much better than that. I had a go at taking a few photographs and as I did so, noticed a strange, slightly lighter patch of sky near the horizon. I took a few slow shots which revealed an incredible mass of orange, green, pink and purple hues, almost invisible to the naked eye, but popping out of the photos with a startling vividity. I’d stumbled, it seemed, on a display of the Aurora Australis, the antipodean cousin of the Aurora Borealis that has a little less green than the latter, but more in the way of other spectacular colours. Amazing stuff. We slept soundly and happily that night….
Kanyini Camp
Aurora Australis, Kanyini Camp
Aurora Australis, Kanyini Camp
Aurora Australis, Kanyini Camp
Aurora Australis, Kanyini Camp
No rest for the wicked though – little sleep and a 5am get up next day for a slow drive, avoiding kamikaze inspired wallabies, down to Triabunna to catch the ferry to Maria (Mah-rye-ah) Island, a small islet off the east coast that was used as a penal colony in the heyday of the convict system. The main settlement here is a tiny collection of buildings known as Davenport, now a small museum exploring the lives and times of governors, wives, chaplains & convicts. There’s also an interesting rock formation, the striated ‘painted’ cliffs and a supposed abundance of wildlife, though the place was not exactly teeming with wombats and wallabies as much as we’d supposed. We’d hired bikes, but Helen was unhappy with the steep and frequent gradients so we handed them back after an hour or so and toured on foot for the rest of the day, which at least gave us more opportunity to seek out the animals. We encountered a rather large Foresters Kangaroo hiding in plain sight on a hillside (we’d thought it was a rock for ages). It allowed us to approach within 2 metres or so, then gave a disgruntled sounding huff and promptly bounded away. This was also the 23rd of March, our 1 year anniversary, and we celebrated with a visit to ‘The Fish Van’ when back on the mainland, tucking in to plump ‘flake’ and chips. Pretty good too. We know how to live…..
Fishing off Maria Island
Maria Island
Maria Island
Painted Rocks, Maria Island
On the only flat section, Maria Island
Maria Island
Pademelon, Maria Island
Foresters Kangaroo, Maria Island
Another ‘Hipcamp’ later that night too, though this one was apparently someone’s grassy back-yard converted into vague parking spaces. We were only there long enough to find our way in, in the rapidly fading light, and sort things out before the heavens opened. That was the end of the lovely weather here and from now on we had much rain and only brief periods of respite.
Despite the forecast and the drizzle we awoke to next morning, we still stuck to our intended plan of starting out before dawn and driving a short distance to the Tessellated Pavement, a largely flat shoreline rock formation that has remarkably straight criss-crossed lines running though it, a strange outcome of fault line shifts in an ancient silt bed. We’d heard the place looks especially fabulous at sunrise as the dawning rays land directly on the pavement. The only thing landing on it today however, was the contents of the ominous clouds permanently moored overhead. Miserable, but moody and magnificent in equal measure.
Tessellated Pavement (with sun!)
Tessellated Pavement
Tessellated Pavement
Tessellated Pavement
We’d intended to do our last hike of the roadtrip today, but changed plans and drove to the Port Arthur historical site instead. At least here there was the chance to learn about the settlement in the dry (or so we thought) whilst the skies continued to empty themselves outside. Port Arthur is a truly remarkable place. One of the most feared and notorious penal colonies in Van Dieman’s Land (as Tassie was known back in the 1800s), no-one was ever sent here unless they were habitual criminals and most, it seems, were largely lost causes. Most buildings survive in some form, despite deconstruction and loss to forest fires, and the whole site is now effectively a museum piece. We started at the penitentiary, a hub-and-spoke style construct built after the fashion of Pentonville and other prisons where a new type of punishment and reform ideology was undergoing experimentation. Here the idea was to keep prisoners in isolation and silence for 23 hours a day, with only brief Sunday visits to the onsite chapel (itself constructed of mini wooden cells to maintain the idea of separation), access to an obligatory bible and an hour in a tiny exercise yard for distraction. The hope was that extended periods in the sole company of one’s own thoughts would bring offenders closer to God, repentance and reform. Unsurprisingly, the majority of inmates went insane after a time. A sanitorium was built next door, but no-one would admit that the system itself was causing the madness and preferred explanations of flawed character instead. Ultimately the entire experiment was discredited and the place was closed down.
Port Arthur penal colony
As well as other buildings like the huge flour mill converted into a prison and the governor’s house, you can also visit a nearby site at Eaglehawk Neck, where the Tasman peninsula thins to a mere 100 metre wide isthmus. A company of soldiers was kept here on a permanent basis to stop any prison breaks from getting any further via a trench dug into the ground in which were stationed fierce mastiffs. The so-called Dog-Line was very effective at scaring the wits out of many a would be escapee it seems. Some dogs were even moored out in the surf on specially made pontoons to prevent anyone from swimming around the trench. Pretty mediaeval stuff.
Fortesque Bay
Cape Huay trek
Cape Huay
Cape Huay
A long drive down a rutted dirt track guaranteed to dislodge any loose fillings brought us to Fortesque Bay and our penultimate campsite for the night, Mill Creek. A lovely wooded spot, though busy as ever and dampened somewhat by the now incessant and fairly torrential rain. Not much choice but to wait it out for the rest of the day and hope the weather would clear enough to do our last hike to Cape Huay in the morning. A window of around 4 or 5 hours allowed us to do it, though it wasn’t quite in the same league as our other walks to be fair, largely due to the majority of it being constant ups and downs on uneven steps through thick woodland when we thought it was across cliff tops. Still, an impressive headland nonetheless.
The last night was spent back at Port Arthur, at the government run campsite, where we were allocated a spacious pitch surrounded by curious rainbow parrots and the sun came out for the final hour of daylight. You don’t need to guess what we did with our time in the gently fading sunshine.
And that was it for Tasmania – possibly our new favourite place. It’s no doubt clear by now that we love Australia, but this was something extra special. A sense of the familiar, but even more laidback than the rest of the country and with, to our eyes, exciting and exotic flora and fauna that continued to enchant and delight. We’re clearly not alone in our opinion. Everyone we’ve met either before or since the trip has waxed as lyrically as we have about it. It’s going on our top 10 best experiences for sure…
Footnote: Life in the van. Grateful as we were to have one, the fridge unit, our barometer of healthy battery power in the absence of properly working gauges (at some point we wondered whether the van was a duffer, so much seemed deficient), was the loudest in existence. Even with pelting rain on the metal roof, the fridge could be heard every 5 minutes gunning into action with a grinding noise that would wake the dead. I lost it at one point, got up and wrenched the thermostat to full. The torment stopped, but unsurprisingly we had a lovely pool of cold water on the floor next morning. You can’t win.
Try as we might, at times we simply couldn’t get the van on a completely even setting on the pitch we had. At our worst site, we had a side-to-side tilt that made water pool in the edges of the sink and kitchenware suddenly and randomly move south. The hated table was a little wonky in any event, but made much worse on these occasions. Our wine glasses, if placed carefully, would stay put, but the slightest knock would cause both to glide doomwards as if possessed by the poltergeist of an abolitionist.
Life was a little better, and battery life extended, due to the little wee camping light we’d picked up in Hobart. Helen liked to go through the settings to get it to the muted sepia tone for romantic meals. I liked to push it on to the red light and hang it up in the window…
Aside from having to work out where the hell to fill up the gas canister to avoid a hefty charge by the rental company, our final act with the van was played out in a suitably disgusting fashion. The final dump point as we left Port Arthur was tackled in the dark at 6am with head-torches and bleary, weary eyes from the night before. Little patience was in evidence as the toilet cassette contents were chugged out and the waste pipe slung into the fetid pit for grey water disposal. The latter took an age and twice appeared to have completed. Only when the hose was removed did the tank decide to release more water onto the floor. Cue hasty, splashy re-attachment procedure with suitable expletives. Eventually finished, I mopped my hands with a paper towel and threw it into the hole. It got stuck on a little grill. Cue futile prodding with the end of the hose pipe. I had to resort to sticking my hand down and freeing it that way. As clean as it tried to get, I was like a blood-soaked Lady MacBeth for hours, wringing my hands in anxiety. Not so much ‘out dammed spot’, more like ‘out dammed sh*t’……
Simon (26th March 2026)
Well yet another wild adventure. I bet saying goodbye to Tasmania was a wrench . Must have been fabulous if you wanted to buy a house there. Where tto next then can’t wait to hear where you end up. Love mum
XX
Looks absolutely stunning!!!