Nothing But Sea In Front of Me

Apparently Tasmania has decided this is the week to throw down the gauntlet.

Black cockatoos chatter in the trees as I set out from Fortescue Bay on an older, less bank-breaking version of the popular Three Capes Walk, skirting two of the three major promontories on the Tasman Peninsula. The first day is mellow: small inclines lined in shrubbery and deep purple berries give way to an open, undulating plateau as I make my way toward Cape Pillar. I pitch my tent in a buggy, forested gully a scramble and a half down from the newly-established tourist track, thanks to the area’s sole half-guaranteed water source.

Long after night wraps the gully and I’ve crawled into my sleeping bag, the bush around me rustles as a quall scrabbles and pounces, hunting for dinner. Some time later sharp cracks pierce the silence as a tree falls above camp, and I wonder for a quick second whether the inside of my tent is the last thing I’ll ever see.

The next day I manage to cross paths with no fewer than six snakes in the space of a kilometer and a half. I play a bit of hide and seek with a little white-lipped snake after it whips off the path in front of me and give a wary berth to several colossal tiger snakes as they curl like kings in sunny spots just off the trail.

A firetail flits through the shrubbery as I leave the forest behind for bush, crimson rump flashing as rolling terrain in front of me dips down to Cape Pillar’s point. As the cape narrows the trail dances along the cliff’s rim, dolerite pillars plunging down, and down, and down, and down… so far that towering spray at the cliff’s base appears to dance in another world.

At the cape’s far end a single, round block teeters at the end of a slicing pinnacle referred to as “The Blade,” overlooking a frail dolerite spine as it teeters down to the sea. A round, flat-topped island and slender white lighthouse rise from the blue beyond the spine, marking the Three Capes’ southernmost point. A broad, flat rock splays into the water from the island’s base, playing host to a sprawling colony of fur seals.

The next day I break camp and climb to meet the main trail, passing a downed rosella, ferns glittering in morning dew and deep fuscia mushrooms rooted in soft leaf litter. The trail winds along the peninsula’s edge toward Cape Hauy, and every so often I find an opportunity to belly crawl to the edge and peer down to sandstone arches and tunnels carved by pounding surf.

Eventually I drop down onto the cape, leaving my pack behind to navigate some obscene number of stairs as I traverse the land’s serpentine swells. Wind sings as it rushes over the narrow spit of land, pushing me toward the trail’s edge as I crest each hill. When I finally reach the cape’s end I look out over a pair of colossal stacks called the Lanterns, and their somewhat more slender counterpart called the Candlestick. Far, far below me I find the Totem Pole; a slender, storied stack rising from the depths and teetering as the sun shines through to catch it between Cape Hauy and the Lanterns, casting a wavering shadow dark against the whitewater rushing amongst the rocks. At 65 meters’ height, and miniscule in comparison, the stack puts everything around it into perspective.

I return to Fortescue Bay later in the day, napping in the sun next to clear azure water before driving out. I spend my last day on the peninsula ducking into caves and hiking over dunes to a sweeping beach called Crescent Bay, looking out over the ocean to the peninsula where I spent the last few days.

In the evening I drive northward and park my car next to a a flight of twisting, wooden steps leading through a fence, down small dunes smothered in deep green foliage to the beach. I sit at the base of the steps until well after dark. As the light dims, chicks start peeping from burrows tunneled into the sandy bank beneath the road, given away by white, poop-splattered paths worn through the foliage.

The fairy penguins exit the water as a wary, but utterly adorable group. They’re tiny and slightly scruffy; the largest might reach half way up my shin on a good day. Waddling together up the beach, the birds leave behind a putrid stench of fish as they pass me. They hop and climb to their burrows, using stairs as switchbacks to ease their momentous climb home.

One penguin misses its mark as it tries to jump up onto a rock, falling in a summersault backwards down the slope and onto the beach once more. One penguin is just plain lost. One penguin’s burrow is so shallow that its butt actually protrudes as it shuffles wildly in the process of feeding its chicks.

I leave the penguin to shuffle and flap as I return to my car, curling up to sleep before I head west once more.