This week’s travel dream: Trekking through wild Tasmania

Compared with many other tourist destinations in Australia, Tasmania has always “flown beneath the radar,” said Nathan Borchelt in The Washington Post. But once I began a guided multiday trek through the island’s Freycinet National Park, I felt glad I had opted for Australia’s “mythical road less traveled.” The park is a 65-square-mile expanse of unscathed land on Freycinet Peninsula, which curves off the eastern edge of Tasmania “like a question mark.” From a distance, the peninsula casts a striking profile: “two knuckles of rock separated by a narrow isthmus of sugary sand.” Most of the terrain is granite—“with patches of black mica and white quartz and massive deposits of feldspar colored a creamy pink.”

For the next four days, I would traverse this raw, breathtaking landscape, from the 2,500-foot peak of Mount Graham to the “superlative-inspiring” shores of Wineglass Bay. Five other guests had also signed up for the Freycinet Experience Walk, and our base was a tin-roofed lodge discreetly set 100 yards inland from Friendly Beaches. Each morning we were “transported by boat, bus, and our own two feet throughout the park.” Each night, our group returned to the lodge for a “mammoth feast” of locally grown cuisine. We ate abalones we’d plucked from the sea, talked late over cream-slathered scones, then settled in for “a blissful night’s sleep.”

Across those days, I trekked the entire length of Freycinet’s 23-mile spine. I tramped through “dense bush land and across deserted beaches that squeaked underfoot.” I “peered over vertiginous cliffs,” fed friendly wallabies fruit, rock-hopped coastal boulders, and “sank my toes” into Wineglass Bay’s “gentle froth of surf.” On the day we explored Bluestone Bay, an area where we had access to trails created by the Aborigines who’ve inhabited the area for more than 20,000 years, a “gentle drizzle was falling, barely penetrating the canopy of native pines, banksia, and wattle.” As I hiked the trails past “giant grass trees, rare flowering plants, and Aboriginal artifacts,” I felt as if I’d fallen off the map. That night, we walked to Friendly Beaches “to watch the light fade into star-scattered darkness.” It helped us forget that we ever had to leave.

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