Nights 359 - 365: Finishing Tassie

NIGHT   359  -  STITT PARK, ROSEBERY.

It’s been a while since the landscape has startled us.  I guess you become desensitised to beautiful scenery.  The feelings of awe go missing, replaced by the blinkered desire to get from one place to another.  Then, maybe you go around a corner or come over a rise, something radically different comes into view.  You become recharged all over again, prodding each other, pointing your fingers, “whoa…look at that!”

We’re heading down to Strahan, down to Tasmania’s ‘wild west’.  It’s mountain goat country, full of narrow winding roads with hairpin bends.  Dark tunnel-like canopies knot together and hang over the road, deceptively higher than they appear.  The ‘bago requires 3.3mtr of height clearance.  Sometimes Shana and I both duck involuntarily, sure that a tree branch will reach down and slice the air-conditioner off the roof. 

We plummet and ride the brakes down the steep descents and crawl embarrassingly slowly up the other side, a nightmare for the inevitable line of more nimble vehicles impatiently lined out behind us.   We pullover when we can, let them pass, but safe places to pull over are uncommon, and by the time we pull back out and gather speed there’s another line forming.  I change the gearbox to manual and the engine howls as I continually change through the gears attempting to keep the turbo in high revs.  In a lumbering lump like the ‘bago, this drive isn’t that pleasant.

But the scenery remains jaw-droppingly spectacular and the clean mountain air seems to enter through different pores than ‘normal’ air.  It blows gently across the skin and seems to linger, like a lover’s breath whispering gentle promises into your ear.  Amidst the noise of the howling engine, the ever-changing gears, the creaking of the cupboards, the rattling of the plates, the impatient tooting of horns from behind, it is the mountain air that blows across my face and reminds me to relax.  It points me toward the scenery and away from the rear-view mirror.

Rosebury is a mining town beside a lake surrounded by clouds and hills.  Apparently Tasmanian author Richard Flannigan lives here but I couldn’t see where or imagine why.  It’s pretty enough as small mountain towns go, but feels too enclosed to me.  For us it offered a free camp close to Montezuma Falls, a waterfall walk that had been recommended.

Stitt Park is a carpark beside the highway, a creek running beside it, a playground beside the creek.  It had a toilet but no flat area.  We made the best of it and slept on an angle, rolling into and unrolling away from each other throughout the night.   Four other vehicles pulled in beside us and we assume their occupants did the same.

 

We give Stitt Park 2 stars out of 5.  It brought us closer together, but at 2am in the morning (and 3am, and 4am, etc).

NIGHT 360 - OCEAN BEACH CARPARK, STRAHAN.

Montezuma Falls presented us with a moral dilemma.  It was articulated to us by an elder couple while standing beside their 4WD car and off-road caravan in the carpark.  According to the old woman, what loomed could be a life or death situation.  The old man was more circumspect though, less concerned.  Either could have been right - what action where we prepared to take?

We’d just finished the walk, a fairly arduous 8km to the falls and 8 km back.  The walk follows an abandoned railway line and so doesn’t involve a steep gradient, but little of it is flat.  You are always walking uphill or downhill. Plus it’s often wet underfoot, the sticky mud refusing to release your feet.  The waterfall, while tall, was unspectacular.  There was little water flowing and there was no swim pool at the bottom.  By the time we’d reached the carpark we were bodily tired and glad it was over.

 

It was there that the old lady asked us had we seen anybody else walking the trail and could they still be in there somewhere?  We’d passed three separate groups who were still on the track, we told her, a middle aged couple on mountain bikes, a twentyish couple all giggles and noise, and two older people who we think were together, although the man was a lot further along the track than the woman when we passed.  “In fact”, we said, “the woman appeared to be struggling and out of breath.  She asked us how much further it was to the falls and we told her that she was three-quarters of the way.  She was leaning on a walking stick “.

Hearing this the woman in the carpark became more agitated.  The struggling woman was her sister, and she shouldn’t be in there.  She had health problems and shouldn’t engage in anything too strenuous.  Worse still was the probable belief by her sister that she only had to make it to the waterfall – that is, only go one way - because, according to the original plan, she would be picked up from there.  The original plan was that the 4WD couple would drive to the falls – there was a 4WD access track on along the other side of the mountain.  This track, however, had been closed.  They couldn’t get the 4WD through.  So there would be nobody picking her up.  And, although she had a phone with her, there was no reception along the track so they couldn’t even let her know.

 

Mmmm.  What to do?

They were much older than us.  It was mid-afternoon, perhaps four hours of light left.  The man, although he couldn’t really say how, was convinced everything would be all right.  But the woman was becoming more frantic. 

There seemed to be three possibilities open to us.

Should we 1/ volunteer to go back in, walking the hour and a half in an effort to help the woman back out, or 2/ call 000 or some similar rescue service - leave it to the professionals, or 3/ wish them well and continue on with our journey?

We chose option 3, but not without prolonged discussion and thought.

We figured that, with regards to option 1, there were already two other groups of people on the track.  The bike riders would meet the old woman on the way back.  The young people were behind her and would catch her up.  Her husband was fit looking and seemed capable of helping.  If she was in distress then there were already enough people to assist.

Regarding option 2, we offered our phone.  The carpark couple said they had one.  They weren’t ready to call rescue just yet.  I wondered the logic of that.  It was only going to get darker and colder.  Things would only become more grim as light faded.  But the truth of the matter was that it wasn’t our decision to make.

 And so we said goodbye and wished them well, walking awkwardly away.  The old man remained untroubled, the old woman offered a wan smile.  We heard nothing on the news, saw nothing in the papers.  We assume it was a happy outcome.

We then drove the rest of the way to Strahan, thankful that the hairpin bends and rollercoaster hills had flattened out after Zeehan.  We drove straight out to Ocean Beach hoping to score a dodgy free camp.  There were several cars in the carpark when we arrived, a dozen or so people looking out across the large swell to where the sun had started setting.  Ahh the west coast – sunset over water.  The sky was soon slashed orange and purple and pink.  It was sumptuous.  20 minutes later all the colour had vanished and we alone remained in the carpark, ‘bago positioned facing into the wind that blew in strong gusts throughout the night.

 

We give Ocean Beach carpark 1 star for the flat area it afforded us and 5 stars for the sunset.

NIGHT  361  -  WARATAH CARAVAN PARK,  WARATAH.

Everyone gets told to go to Strahan - “If you are in Tassie, then you must go to Strahan”.  Shana and I don’t know why. 

Strahan offers very little for the budget traveller.  It does offer rides on an old steam train and cruises along the river, but they charge big, big dollars.   There’s a wood work workshop and display area that smells amazing when you walk in, and it’s free to look, but it’s basically a shop set-up to sell their wares.   So, after exactly 1 hour and 20 minutes of wandering the town we’d driven hundreds of mountainous kilometres to get to, we found a petrol station atop a hill, fuelled up, and drove back out again.  And we drove back out grumpily.  Among all the pretty buildings that lined the foreshore, among all the business struggling to survive, there wasn’t a single sit-down café opened at 9:15 on a Monday morning.

Perhaps it’s more about the journey than the destination.

That evening a bitterly cold wind blew over the mountains and across the open fields in front of the Waratah Caravan Park.  It blew across the little lake and through the BBQ area and thumped into the first vehicle it met, which was us.  We’d closed all the windows, battened down the hatches (well, wound them down), rustled through the cupboards for warm clothing untouched since being packed almost a year ago.   We went to bed early, slid in under the doona.

It was the coldest night of the trip so far.

 

Waratah was a ‘maybe’ place that became a definite when an orange light glowed menacingly from the ‘bago’s dashboard.  “Jesus”, I said, “What’s that light mean?” Shana consulted the VW manual.  She read aloud that it was an oil light and, if red, then stop immediately. Orange was a warning that the oil was low.  She read that we didn’t have to stop immediately, but we had to stop soon and top the oil up.  There was no indication given of any time period other than ‘soon’.  We had no spare oil and, at 22kms away according to GoogleMaps, Waratah was the closest town.  We hoped that 22 gently driven kilometres didn’t over-extend our motor’s understanding of ‘soon’. 

As we drove Shana read further from the VW manual.  I’d prided myself on being a pretty good driver so far.  We’d almost lapped the country and had no mechanical mishaps.   It was because I’d kept an eye on things I reckoned.  I was rigorous with servicing, rigorous with changing the oil.  In fact, I knew we were due for a service in 2000kms or so.  We’d intended getting one when back in Melbourne.

What I didn’t realise, and what Shana read aloud to me, was that hard driving – driving like we’d done down to Strahan and back from Strahan, using the gears in manual, the motor screaming up and down hills – consumed oil at a fast rate. That surprised me.  I’d thought that in modern vehicles oil didn’t get ‘consumed’ at all.  I knew it got thick and sludgy due to continuous use so that it stopped lubricating properly.  That’s why it gets changed at regular intervals.  But, unless there was a leak somewhere, I didn’t think any oil actually went anywhere.  I thought it was simply recirculated over and over and over until the time came to change it.

That’s why I never carried any spare oil.  And that’s why I had to make a frantic phone-call from the service station in Waratah to a VW service centre in Hobart, seeking advice about which of two bad options was less likely to lead to disaster.

The old bloke who owned the servo watched my phone-call from his doorway, shaking his head.  He had oil, but it was in a 44 gallon drum, old stuff that had been there for years.  “Any oil is better than no oil” he kept telling me.  He’d shared an anecdote about a woman who was recently in the same predicament as we were.  She wouldn’t put the oil he had in her car.  Her husband had told her to only get a certain type of oil, which he of course didn’t have.  She drove away, and her engine blew up 10kms down the road.  “Any oil’s better than no oil” he said again at the end of this story.

I didn’t think it was that simple.  The now well-thumbed VW manual warned against using the wrong oil.  DOING SO COULD CAUSE PERMANENT DAMAGE – it said in capital letters.  What we needed was lightweight synthetic oil.  In the drum was heavy weight organic oil.  We needed 5 weight, the servo had 25 weight, which is obviously 5 times thicker.  It was black and white really – the oil was totally wrong and the only other option was to drive 70 or so km to Burnie.  So what was the better option?

The voice from Hobart echoed that of the old man.  I think he actually said the same words – “any oil is better than no oil”.  The engine blowing up scenario was real he said.  If the light turned from orange to red then the engine had to be switched off immediately.  IMMEDIATELY.  There was not enough oil left.  “And”, he said ominously, “nobody can say how long that will take.  You might get to Burnie but I wouldn’t risk it”.

The old man smiled as he pumped the handle on the side of the oil drum.   The honey coloured liquid shot into the glass bottle in spurts.  He didn’t say it again – didn’t have to.  He patted me on the back when I returned the oil bottle, a paternal gesture, acknowledging a passing of wisdom from one generation to another.  “Thanks mate” I said as I shook his hand.  I think we were both genuinely happy that at least the motor wasn’t going to blow.  Now all I had to do was find a VW service centre, and soon.  The advice from Hobart was to get the oil in and then get it out again as quickly as possible.

The town of Waratah has a waterfall in the centre of town.  It’s a pretty good one, offering a strong water-flow over a longish drop.  It even has a decent pool at the bottom where you could swim if it wasn’t so cold.  And there’s a platypus or two in the lake.  We actually saw them.  They were away from the bank and we were surprised at how much they reminded us of crocs.  Like crocs they float on the surface, looking like sticks to the unwary.  And like crocs they use their side flippers to steer themselves when floating.  We’d have loved to see them up close but, despite several attempts at a platypus mating call, we couldn’t entice them any closer.

 

We give the Waratah Caravan Park 1 ½ stars out of 5.  It has a strange layout and very few powered sites.  We had no power, so in effect paid $22 dollars for two showers. 

NIGHT  362  -  MERSEY BLUFF CARAVAN PARK, DEVONPORT.

 I could have kissed him.

He was the manager of the service centre at Gowans Volkswagen, Devonport.  Their books were full for at least a week, he’d said, and they really couldn’t fit us in.  I explained the situation, explained how thick old-school oil was now coursing through our slick modern motor, explained to him what the guy from Hobart had said.  Whether it was my boyish bonhomie or my voice-quaking desperation I’ll never know, but he relented.  He booked us in for tomorrow, but we had to be there at 7:30am.  We hadn’t intended going back to Devonport yet – not until the night before we shipped out.  Well we were going there now, and thankful to be doing so.

We remained wary for the 120km drive to Devonport.  A part of me expected the motor to react badly and make us suffer.  We drove slowly.  Nothing unusual happened.

I love Mersey Bluff Caravan Park.  It’s carved into a hillside (Mersey Bluff) and overlooks Bluff Beach, the main surf beach of Devonport (not that there was anything surfable).  The park is made up of tiers so that, even when at the back of the park, you still have an unrestricted view of the beach over the vehicles on the tier below you.  We were at the back but felt like we had ‘dress-circle’ views.

 

During the day there is animal poo everywhere. Not being scientific types, we weren’t sure what animals had left it, but they’d left a lot of it. (We watched amused as a new arrival older couple spent over an hour sweeping and raking it away from where they wanted to erect their annex, making sure they got every bit).  At night, the animals appear.

Morrissey became exited as the animals appeared.  I think he thought he’d enjoy chasing a few, but he soon changed his mind.  We watched his demeanour change from when he saw the first rabbit.  Then he took on his attack stance.  But he soon saw another rabbit and seemed to become confused as to which one to chase.  Then, as his eyes adapted to the dark, he saw three more rabbits, then another couple, then perhaps ten more, then a paddymelon, then another paddymelon, then a few more rabbits and a couple of wallabies.  There were animals everywhere, all grazing in the dark and showing no fear.  Moz gave up, did his wee and went back inside.  He looked totally overwhelmed as he lay agitated in his kennel.  Admittedly it was a cloudy but, that night, you could have counted more native animals on the ground than you could stars in the sky.

We give Mersey Bluff caravan Park 4 stars out of 5.  It was relaxed and friendly and offered a lovely view.  There was lots of animal poo though.  It made us more aware of leaving our thongs outside.

NIGHTS  363 &  364  BOAT HARBOUR BEACH, BOAT HARBOUR.

There are several places in Tasmania that we’ve liked so much we’d already love to return.  We wont get the chance to revisit them on this trip though, except for Boat Harbour.  Boat Harbour was one of our favourite places and is close enough to Devonport to spend our last two Tasmanian nights there.  Now that the ‘bago is freshly serviced and flowing clean and content with synthetic oil, we happily headed back along the north coast.

It’s Labour Day weekend, though, and we expect Boat Harbour to become packed.  We pull in at midday on Friday.  There six RVs already set up.  As you can imagine, they’ve taken the best spots. We pull in alongside the tidal bay, around the point from the surf break.  But everything’s within walking distance – the toilets, the beach, the surf-club with it’s restaurant and fish and chip café.  We’re still in a beautiful spot.  During the afternoon another five RVs pull in and set-up alongside and around us.  It’s no problem though.  Everyone remains conscious of each other’s space.  With common sense, there’s still plenty of room.

 

Saturday dawns bright and sparkily.  There’s a swell coming in and people are surfing.  I don the wettie and paddle out too.  The waves aren’t great – in some ways it’s more frustrating than fun – but it is what it is and I chat to people and try to jag a clean wall.  The sun feels good and the water is impossibly blue.

The place fills further during the day.  A motorhome has pulled in in front of us, and a coaster bus has pulled in behind.  It’s still okay though.  Free camping is about sharing.  I imagine there’s an unstated social contract between us all, a sense of decency that allows everybody the right to a comfortable amount of space.  I imagine that people are like us and that, if a place is full, then fair enough, people got there before you and good luck to them.  Surely it’s understood that nobody who travels to beautiful free-camping places desires becoming crammed together like the worst caravan parks.  

A Britz hire 4WD pulls in between us and the coaster bus behind us.  Even though they remain perpendicular to us it borders on unacceptable.  Technically they shouldn’t even be here – the only rule is that all RVs should be self-contained as the toilets shut between 11pm and 7am.  It’s definitely not self-contained.  “Whatever”, Shana and I say to each other, “free-camping is about sharing”.

Then, just on dusk, a 4WD ute pulled alongside us and a young couple with two boys got out.  They marched to the water, between us and the Britz 4WD, and proclaimed “Perfect.  This’ll do us”.  We couldn’t believe it.  They then proceeded to pull their swags from the ute and set them up.  Totally unconcerned they abutted the slide-out kitchen of the Britz 4WD on one side and, on the other, and I swear this is true, the edge of their swag was beneath the Vespa on our back bumper. 

I was outside, cooking dinner on the weber.  The guy looked across at me and, without a skerrick of belief that he was doing anything that might irritate others, said “How good is this place?”  I wanted to say “It was lovely until you dickheads cramped it up”.  I wanted to say “I can see several other less intrusive spots where you could set up, how about you piss off over there?”  Actually I wanted to rage at him and his lack of spacial awareness with a series off well directed and stinging swear words.  Instead I opted for passive aggression. “Yep” I said, barely opening my lips to let the word out, my eyes remaining fixed on the kebabs cooking before me.

He either didn’t understand my subtext or didn’t care because it made not a whit of difference.  He continued setting up camp, along the water’s edge, less than a metre from the weber.

I remained fuming and turning kebabs.

Then I got over it.

I didn’t like it but what could I do?  Free-camping doesn’t involve the grid followed by most caravan parks.  You don’t pay for an individual space that’s exclusively yours because, well, you don’t actually pay for anything at all.  I still thought the guy was an arrogant dick, but he remained unaffected.  The only one affected really was me, and what was the point of that?  I had no desire to be the grumpy old man. 

“Those swags look comfy” I said, and so initiated a conversation between me and the family camped beneath our bumper bar.

Boat Harbour isn’t really a camping ground.  It is just a mown patch of grass and an encouraging group of locals who welcome RVs and the income they generate. It is policed only by the common sense and decency of those who use it.  I’d give the family camped beneath our bumper bar 0 stars out of 5.  To me their arrogance was startling.  Boat Harbour though – the place and the people – deserves full marks, 5 stars out of 5.

NIGHT  365  -  THE SPIRIT OF TASMANIA, BASS STRAIT.

This night marks one full year on the road – 365 nights.  There’s a certain sense of symmetry generated by spending it on the ferry between Tasmania and the mainland.  There’s a feeling of completion generated by the image of a ship sailing into the setting sun, we three aboard it, the ‘bago secured in the hold.  It could be seen as a metaphor for the completed journey, except the journey has yet to be completed.

Our original plan was to take a year off to do this trip.  The plan changed along the way though.  We don’t want to return to Newcastle just before winter.  We didn’t want to finish just because of an arbitrary time constraint.  We are lucky enough that we don’t have to, and so we aren’t.  We don’t exactly know what we will be doing, or where we will be going, but the trip continues.  It has to now.  We’ve just paid all the bills again for another year – insurances, storage costs, rates, etc.  We hadn’t factored the cost of doing another year into our original estimates.  It looks like we might have less ice-creams this year.  Finding work is paramount.  We’ve informed the tenants they can continue renting the house.

On the Spirit of Tasmania we were a bit excited to be out of the ‘bago, sleeping in a cabin.  That excitement lasted until we opened the door.

It was a 4 berth cabin, 2 double bunks along two walls, about 900mm of floorspace between them. It had a window (porthole, although it wasn’t round?) out to the ocean, a robe and a cubicle containing a shower and toilet.  There was a shower curtain present, but it hung uselessly, too short to serve any purpose.  The water flowed out under it, welling in a pool around the toilet, drowning the mat and any clothes left on the floor.  Shana took the first shower.  She trusted the curtain.  She shouldn’t have as her sad and soggy jeans never left that cabin dry again.

We folded the two top bunks up and into the wall.  Doing so at least gave an illusion of space.  It made it feel more like a room to be shared by adults rather than like a kid’s dormitory at school camp.

There room had a loud, irritating rattle.  Shana hunted for it like a detective, pushing against walls and shoving wads of paper into cracks.  Nothing worked.  The rattling followed a cycle.  It would be quiet for a minute or so, almost peaceful, then, without fail, it would rattle for 5 full minutes, then go quiet again.  We tried to go to sleep, relishing those minutes in between.  We mostly failed.

At 12:30 am I had a rare thought.  The beds.  Could it be the stupid top bunks?  Why else would they be left down?  I’d put them up, unsecured against the walls.  I got up, pulled both bunks down, the rattling stopped. I held my breath.  Perhaps the cycle was just going through its quiet period.  But the quiet remained. At that moment I became a hero to myself.  Sleep was now possible.  It could have been bliss were it not for the previously less obvious vibrations that shuddered up through the room from the motors below. 

A wake-up call came through the speakers at 5:40 am.  Too early to be awake really but it did wake me up, which meant I’d been asleep. We dressed, gathered our things into bags.  We then joined with the boat load of passengers herded like sleep-deprived cattle until allowed access to our vehicles.  We exited down a ramp, into a Melbourne morning, Melbourne weather and rapidly building Melbourne traffic.

Possibly the worst cruise ship ever, the Spirit of Tasmania offers less comfort than the average tent.  It gets you from point A to point B, across dangerous water, and for that it is a brilliant machine.  But it sucks as a place to rest.