Tasmania is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It’s a place I could back to , over and over, and still feel like I haven’t seen all of it.
I could spend months there, happily exploring. Abandoned farm houses. Wild, untouched rainforests that are brimming with cute, fat wallabies and undiscovered secrets buried beneath a carpet of moss. Quaint, contented sprinklings of towns with names like Nowhere Else and Savage River.
Tasmania is a hundred different shades of rolling green. The air is so clean. The strange, smooth sweetness of breathing in tastes like a cool glass of water does when you’re parched with thirst.
People are laid back and chilled, friendly and self-depreciating. There’s a happiness here I can’t quite put my finger on. Towns are tiny, but don’t seem to be struggling. People work hard but don’t seem bitter. Tourists are accommodated for but not grabbed at nor begrudged.
Amongst all this untamed forest, there’s an inherent contentment. Things tend to work like clockwork. and if they don’t, nobody’s seems too fussed at all.
***
“The Tarkine rations nothing. It gives its all in a fury of excess that is raw coast,
mountain ranges, dark gashes of gullies and the benediction of unbroken tracts
of old man rainforest.”
‘Tarkine’, a book by WWF Australia, edited by Ralph Ashton.
***
The rainforest of the Tarkine is an enchanted fairy place.
It reminds me of Borneo, but it’s wetter, greener, colder. The canopy is like a thatched green roof that drips against you every time you brush against it. The floor is a carpet of squelchy, vibrant green moss. The forest is furnished with gnarled trees covered with lichen. Decaying stumps and rotting logs crunch underfoot.
It smells like a necrosis of organic jungle things. We cross over tiny waterfalls, clean cold water burbling over smooth rocks. Almost everything is covered with tiny fronds of fungi. The rocks; the decaying, fallen trees. Long green tendrils of green moss drip from trees, silly string from a fairy party.
The Whyte River is swollen and brown, rushing and foaming with tannin. Platypuses live here, but they are hiding today. It rained just yesterday and the river is full of wrath, swollen and angry.
Away from the river it’s quiet. The forest sounds are muffled. It’s like stepping inside the glass of the last surviving wilderness. it’s silent here, but not. All around is the sound of things growing, of microscopic pieces of life regenerating and feeding. The sound of things growing and living on terms of their own.
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I love what you have written about my home. I too love Tasmania and all it has too offer – I am so happy that during your visit you have seen the beauty and magic that some tourists (or expats) seem to miss… Thank you Lori.
So glad you guys had a getaway =) Sounds magical.