Tasmania shows us its true colours the minute we cross the rivulet, as if it knew that after all that dressing and undressing and wallowing around in the potentially life-threatening current we wouldn’t be turning back any time soon.
This is the point of no return, it seems to be telling us.
Just climbing up the muddy, stony embankment from South Cape Bay is worse than anything we’ve seen in Tasmania so far. After that we head straight into a thick, damp forest, every now and then reaching clearings dotted with clumps of buttongrass that we have to negotiate. From there we descend creeks fed by networks of brown streams into the tangle of shadowy copses, then up again, this time to a series of rocky ridges. After that we are engulfed by steep stony inclines, the thicket and the darkness of the rainforest.
The path is nothing but a zigzagging trail of sloppy, shitty sludge. Up and down, then down and up we go — mostly up, of course, clambering up infuriatingly steep slippery banks. For a bit of variety sometimes we have to slide down the hillside or some tree roots on our arses, simply because our legs aren’t long enough or the path has no steps, all the while wrenching our rucksacks free of the bush and scrub, hauling our boots out of the smacking mud and prying our hiking poles from between the rocks with all our strength. Endlessly.
If Australia is mostly bone dry, this part of Tasmania seems to be nothing but a thin layer of land above a deep heaving quagmire. The crème brûlée of terrains, I’ll bloody tell you. And over the years hundreds of hiking boots have cracked the surface, opening up fissures like black greedy mouths for kilometres ahead.
At the highest point of South Cape Range, about 450 metres up — Jyrki makes a point of mentioning the specific height, as though it were of some special significance — we start our descent towards Granite Beach. Despite the effort, it’s impossible not to notice the sheer grandeur of the landscape spreading out before us. Some way off, far down the hillside, I can see an overgrown peninsula that we still have to cross, and the sandy, rocky coves extending in an endless series of crescents into the distance. Prion Beach, the place Jyrki keeps mentioning, can apparently just be made out — maybe it’s that dull-golden cuticle-shaped strip on the horizon. I can see the lines of foaming waves : hitting the beach, the turquoise water, and I’d like to think how beautiful it is.
You can’t argue with that.
Even though every part of my body is aching, I have to admit that Tasmania is in some unfathomable way both age-old and fresh as the day it was born. Old and experienced enough that it knows how to touche a nerve but at the same time so young that it almost feels as though we are depriving a newborn creature of the peace is has just discovered and needs.
The bushes rustle and crackle — always to the left, always behind us, incessantly — as though Tasmania itself were following us, invisible, smart enough constantly to devise little pranks and childish enough to carry them out.
Jyrki
The three guys that left Cockle Creek at the same time as us have decided to spend the night at Granite Beach. They’ve already put their tents up. Their sweaty T-shirts are flapping in the trees. I look at my watch.
She’s about to take her rucksack off when I show her the map. It’s less than two hours to Surprise Bay. Half of the journey is along Granite Beach. I mean, a beach, for God’s sake — what could be nicer than that? Then all we have to do is cross that peninsula and we’ll be there — Surprise, Surprise — just in time for dinner.
She asks what’s wrong with this place.
There’s nothing wrong with it, I say, but we’d have to make up the ground tomorrow. It’s only another four or five kilometres. We’ve got ten behind us, so that will make fifteen for the day. If we stay here it’ll be another twenty-one kilometres to Deadman’s Bay. And we have to factor in crossing the river. This’ll even out our daily stretches.
I don’t tell her that according to the guidebook it should be a twenty-one-kilometre leg split in two with an overnight stay at Osmidirium Beach. But that would mean one of the legs would be only three or four hours long. A complete waste of a day, in other words.
Another group of travel writers that hasn’t bothered thinking things through properly.
Heidi
Ten kilometres?
Ten kilometres behind us?
You’re having a laugh. Ten kilometres in seven hours. Seven hours of unrelenting hellish, desperate trudging and scrambling, and it’s got us only ten kilometres'! In New Zealand we were doing almost thirty kilometres in the same time.
Oh, only another four 0r five kilometers?
When we reach the place where we're supposed to descend towards the beach I find it hard to contain my desire to scream.
Beneath us is an almost sheer drop, ten metres high. Attached to a gnarled tree and the rocks is a frayed-looking blue-and-green nylon rope dangling down the jagged cliff face.
‘No.’ I hear my hollow voice rising from the bottom of my lungs.
Jyrki either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to hear me.
‘Are you going first or shall I?’ he asks.
It’s a rhetorical question; he’s already let go of his hiking poles, which are now dangling on the end of his arms by their wrist straps, and tugs at the rope to check that it’ll hold.
‘It’ll be easier for you to come down when I’m there to help you.’
Jyrki takes hold of the rope, wraps it around his right arm for added support, then starts lowering himself backwards down the slope. OK, it’s not exactly a sheer drop — now that he’s started moving downwards you can see it slopes a bit — but it’s still bloody steep.
Jyrki only occasionally looks down at his feet — choosing instead to rely more on the rope itself and wedge the points of his boots into the small fissures in the rock — and descends the slope as nimbly as a monkey, jumping the last, couple of feet to the ground. His rucksack yanks him backwards, forcing him to take a few steps to steady his balance.
‘Right then.’
I take two deep breaths and pick up the rope as gingerly as if it were a venomous snake. I decide to copy Jyrki and wrap it around my arm for extra security and grip the nylon rope so tightly that I can feel it digging into my fingers. I back up towards the edge of the cliff and, with my right leg fumbling around, start to make my descent.
‘Over there, there. One centimetre to your left.’ I can hear Jyrki’s voice from below. I move my foot slightly to the left and find that there is, after all, a small tongue of rock beneath my foot to take my weight. ‘Right, and another, straight down, a bit more. There you go.’ And with that the grooves on the bottom of my left boot find something to latch on to. ‘Then the next one, a bit further to the right, good. Now move your hands down the rope. You’re doing fine.’
I’m soaked with sweat by the time I feel someone taking hold of my hips — those strong arms, their firm grip on both sides of my hipbone.
'Jump.’
I release the rope and land on Granite Beach. It’s almost as if I’d arrived on the surface of the moon, Jyrki’s hands helping me to defy gravity for a brief moment. I look up, and the slope I have just come down seems to rise halfway up into the sky.
Granite Beach. A beach, for God’s sake. What could be nicer than that? Yeah, rigbt.
This ‘beach’ consists of boulders, eroded by the sea into more or less
spherical blocks varying from the size of a child’s head to that of a widescreen television.
The path forces you to balance on and between the rocks because there is simply no alternative: on one side there is the ocean; on the other the steep cliff face. And because the tide flushes and moves these boulders on a daily basis they’re not firmly fixed in one place, so they constantly wobble, rolling and clunking beneath your boots. The tide is coming in now, too, the waves washing against the shore, slamming the rocks against one anodier only a few metres away from us. Our poles are no use either, as they just skim across the curved surfaces of the boulders with a grating sc
reech and end up stuck in between them. It would be suicide to rely on your poles here; at best they are only a half-decent indicator of how wobbly the next stone is.
The rucksack’s centre of balance somehow always feels wrong; the stone that looks stable wavers the most. I look between the boulders and think of them as giant meat mincers.That’s what they are: if your leg slips down there and your own weight comes crashing down on to the rock, your shin and thigh bones would be smashed with a convincing crunch.
If your leg gets stuck down there, the next thing to contend with would be the tide.
Every muscle in your body has to be alert. Every fraction of every second you have to be aware of all the possible vectors and trajectories that the fine balance between your rucksack and your leg, the stone and your weight, might draw through the air, as you balance there between your body and the surface ol the rock.
Hop! Jump over! Don’t fall! Leap as soon as you feel yourself stumbling! Anticipate that feeling of ‘Oh my God, I’m going to lose my balance’ . . .Then hop again!
When a more level stretch of sand comes into view and every muscle is reeling from the constant exertion, there comes an almost religious sense of relief upon finding a real, glorious pathway. And it's only once that path is finally underfoot that the knowledge that this means well over two hours of trudging through the undulating valley-hill-creek-lowland terrain slowly begins to seep up to your brain. That and the fact that the setting sun will be relentlessly and malevolently beating down on you every step of the way.
Dripping with sweat, I crouch down in one of the relatively few brooks here that are shaded by the overhanging bushes; I’m beyond caring about getting my arse wet — so long as there’s shade and water. Water. I scoop it right into my mouth without giving a flying fuck about its colour.
The air is buzzing with enormous flies, so large and fleshy that you wouldn’t want to swat them: you can just imagine their insides oozing something nameless and disgusting.
Thankfully our final uphill stretch before arriving at Surprise Beach is almost shady, and the sun is already so low in the sky that it doesn’t burn directly down upon us.
Once the tent’s been put up, the beds laid out and we’ve had a wash, it’s already dusk, and I want nothing more than to consume something and to collapse.
He desired to have kings meet him at railway'-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
HELSINKI
September 2006
Heidi
Jyrki had taken a temporary job helping to set up a trendy new nightclub for the rich and famous in Helsinki. He had the day off, and we were sitting in the Bruuveri Bar sipping local microbrewery ale when he dropped his bombshell.
‘Six months, give or take. Departure around Christmas time when it’s the height of summer down under, then back here before the beer gardens open for the season. January in New Zealand, then on to the hiking routes along the Australian coast and maybe even Tasmania; then in March, when it starts getting cooler, back to mainland Australia for some bushwalking in the outback. Then in April maybe fly to the States, go to the Appalachians and trek until the summer. You’ll only need a tourist visa for the couple of months there.’
‘Six months?’
‘When you travel that far, you might as well go round the world. For some fucked-up reason it works out cheaper that way.’
Bloody hell, the man was deadly serious.
‘And spend the whole time in the bush?’
Jyrki nodded. ‘Of course, you have to move from one place to the next and work out public-transport connections to the different tracks and all the rest of it, so spending the odd day in town is unavoidable. But there are plenty of backpackers in New Zealand and Australia; cheap accommodation is an industry all of its own. You can get a berth in a hostel for twenty bucks or so.’
He described the typical backpackers' hostel: dormitories with shared kitchen and facilities. If you wanted to throw some money around you could book into a private double room, and lfor real luxury some places even had en-suite rooms, but they cost almost as much as a cheap hotel. Jyrki would be happy with the dormitory.
He had been saving up for two years. Even with the skiing season in Lapland there was always less work during the winter. If he wanted to take a take a long holiday, it made perfect sense to do it over the winter months.
The solution to the winter-hiking dilemma was simple: although the thought of the carbon emissions from a flight to the other side of the world was cause for serious concern, he had always wanted to visit the Antipodes. He had asked his staffing agency some cautious questions to test the water and to determine whether his taking for six months off would cause them a headache of astronomical proportions, but apparently he would always be welcome back on their list.
Operation Down Under, he’d started to call it.
There was something about his distinctly uncharacteristic display of garrulousness that gave me the feeling something unpleasant was just around the corner. And, believe me, it was.
He offered to give me back my freedom.
It sounded like a line from a Victorian novel. A man and a woman have entered into a hasty engagement, it will be years before they can get married — not before the groom has been ordained or the bride received her family inheritance. More to the point, one or both of them realizes that they have made a terrible mistake, and, even though it would be rather scandalous in the eyes of society at large, the only way to avoid the marriage would be to offer to give the bride back her ‘freedom’.
Didn’t he want to keep me waiting for six months?
Either this was a way of showing you really cared about someone, or it was the complete opposite.
Paranoia set in straight away: could someone really come up with such a farfetched scheme as nothing but a smokescreen, a seemingly honourable way out of a relationship that had started to bore him?
Jyrki had said he enjoyed being with me specifically because I hadn’t tried to tie him down or restrict him too much. I hadn’t insisted on him settling down, let alone suggested moving in together.
On my part it hadn’t even been a tactical move. It suited me just fine that we saw each other when we could and when we felt like it. Or so I’d thought.
In any case, clinging on to someone out of a sense of duty was never my idea of a functional relationship; I’d seen enough of that at home before my mother finally upped and left.
There couldn’t be someone else, could there? Bloody hell.
It wouldn’t have surprised me. Jyrki met legions of women every day, most of them dressed up to the nines, out looking for company — and drunk. He had told me he never took advantage of that particular perk of the job and that I’d been the exception that proved the rule. Of course, he could just have been spinning me a line.
I had to know, and there was only one way to find out.
I looked at him coyly from behind my eyelashes.
‘You haven’t even asked if I want go with you,’ I heard myself saying.
Jyrki
I had to laugh. It wasn’t exactly polite of me.
Her lower eyelids rose up across her eyes, the lashes almost catching on one another. I remembered some of the stories she had told me, how she’d had to fight at work not to be seen as the girl who makes the coffee or the girl who does the photocopying just because she was the young and pretty new recruit; how she had to prove that she had brains, too.
Brains, yes — but guts and stamina? The idea of her coming along hadn’t even crossed my mind. But when I gave it a moment’s consideration, it didn’t seem all that crazy after all.
Travelling the world in pairs has its advantages. You don’t have to carry all your stuff with you every time you go anywhere; the other one can stay behind and keep an eye on things. Dividing the load means having to carrying much less: we would sleep in the same tent, sh
are the same cooking equipment, the same toiletries and first-aid kit and the hefty guidebooks and maps.
We’d known each other for a couple of months. We hadn’t exactly practised living together, if you don’t count spending the odd night at one another’s flat. Because I didn’t know where I’d be working from one day to the next, the idea of settling into a traditional relationship took some getting used to. Perhaps I was more a ‘girl in every port’ kind of guy.
But as I started getting more and more work in the capital and around southern Finland, before we knew it we’d started acting like a couple. A few times I’d even deliberately chosen a gig down this way instead of somewhere in Mikkeli or Joensuu. After all, why not? On the face of it she had all the right credentials: she was smart enough and quite a tiger between the sheets. But how would we get along shoulder to shoulder, quite literally, twenty-four-seven?
She flicked her thick dark hair, and I tried to imagine her ponytail stuffed beneath a baseball cap. I wasn’t convinced she knew quite what she was getting herself into. Women normally have a fit at the idea of not having an opportunity to wash their hair for a week.
Heidi
I had learnt long ago that there was more to Jyrki than met the eye — an everso slightly arrogant, exceptionally good-looking cocktail waiter. He had spent several years studying art and media in Tampere. He’d taken a summer job at a pub owned by a friend of a friend and decided that he liked being face to face with a random flow of people. When the friend’s pub closed down he had registered with a staffing agency and started working across the country. It was then that he discovered his inner nomad, as he put it, and realized that working as a barman was the perfect way to combine a life on the move with practical social psychology — his words, not mine.