Day 7 27 February 2010 The Link Road to Strahan

This was a long long day, beginning in the small hours with the roaring 40's wind flapping and worrying at the tent as a change came in, and sleep dissolving as spits of rain seemed to be starting. Just up the beach, tractors with long submersible trailers hauled in the cray boats. It was clearly time to get off the coast and out of a tent. So it was a fast pack-up in the morning light, and off South down the road to Strahan via the white silica link road.

We drove in convoy, with Red Dog at the wheel of the Borough's landcruiser, in two way radio contact with Silver Fox driving the Landrover. Apparently, no-one else on the planet had the same idea at the same time, and we had massive expanses of gasp-making scenery all to ourselves.

This landscape is defined by fire. There are tracts of ancient tall tree forest interspersed with the white skeletons of same where the understory was, perhaps two or five or twenty years post-fire. Then there is heathland, some thick and alive with flowers and birds, and some barely germinating. All of it growing on a thin skin of peat above white gravel above rock. A plant lover's paradise. Celery top pines, banksias, gahnias, paperbarks, epacris, everything.

Near Couta rocks, loping out of the heathland and across the road in the distance, Chris and Robyn saw what they will swear they thought was a thylacine. Too skinny for a tassie devil, too big for a quoll or a cat; dark, maybe stripey on its downward sloping hindquarters – what was that? This was certainly thylacine country back in the days...

At Corinna, you cross the Pieman river, named after, guess what, someone who made pies. The ferryman, who must be paid, is a laconic, skinny bloke with more than one or two yarns in him. And the name of the barge crossing the Pieman? Why, The Fatman, what else.

Corinna is a place we will come back to. There is a pub, a camping ground down the riverbank with every site a delight, walking, kayaking and of course the riverboat Arcadia. There is truth in its advertising as “one of the last wilderness frontiers on the planet”.

And so, we farewell the Tarkine and head for Strahan.