Day 6: 26 February 2010 Deeper in the Tarkine

Breakfast, nestled behind a mere sand dune for shelter from the great Southern Ocean - but that wasn't a problem because this was the one day in about 365 that was warm and beautiful with no wind.

Let no-one convince you that Western Tasmania is too cold and wild for swimming. Chris and David frolicked in the early morning surf like puppies, then later in the morning at Sundown Point nearby, Sue succumbed to the urge to skinny dip like the old days. None of the children were there to be appalled, so why not?

The main business of the day was to explore deeper into the Tarkine, so with reverent expressions, we headed south to do the Tarkine Forest Drive. This self-drive treat takes you to a variety of sites, each celebrating one aspect of this extraordinary part of the world.

At Sumac lookout the Arthur River's rainforest corridor with its leatherwoods, myrtle beech and sassafras, then on the ridges the massive stringybarks.

At Julius River we had a fairytale enchanted forest experience, walking on springy, mossy paths littered with leatherwood petals, beside ferns and weird fungi and under the deep shade of huge ancient myrtle beech trees. Chris, a forester, had one of those “revelation” moments on noticing that many of the trees had clearly begun life as a seed lodged well above the ground on the trunk of a tree fern. Later, Wikipaedia reveals these are known as “hemiepiphytes”

From there to Lake Chisholm, which is a permanently filled sinkhole making a little mirror in the middle of the forest. No doubt most visitors are content to take artistic reflection photos and respect the faintly sacred ambience, but not me...sorry. This was clearly swimmable, and it had to be done.

The temperature stratification was dramatic, from warmly tepid at the surface to icy at the feet, and the deep tannin stained colour equally dramatic. But no-one else could be lured in, they were all busy admiring some rare looking frog on some rare species of native rhododendron type plant...the oddly named”whitey white” plant.

That evening, witness the sad plight of the dongle wallah, a low status person assigned the task of holding the dongle while the sahib checks the daily email or posts a blog.