Stories of the road…
Southwards bound, looking back
Reflections on our life on the road in 2019 and into 2020.
THE RAIN COMES with first light. Not a heavy rain, more a medium fall that patters on the roof. Consistent. It is accompanied by a wind strong enough to buffer the van.
It’s early summer and we’ve been living in our minivan here in the caravan park by the beach since spring. The camp kitchen offers a different place to sit and cook than out of the back of the van. It is the convivial space, a place to prepare food, eat and talk with people living at the caravan park and with those who are here for only a short time. The foreign backpackers, most of them here to pick fruit, keep to themselves. There were perhaps eight of them last week and the caravan park manager asked them to keep the noise down when they partied late into the night. These past days their number has been few. It has been quieter.
The wood heater in the camp kitchen is going. A bedraggled-looking group from the Blue Mountains dries their clothing in front of the fire. They are in tents, the man says as one of the women brushes wet mud from her pack. Even though it is the southern summer we still have days when temperatures plummet—this is Tasmania, after all, the island bisected by the 42º South latitude and that is in the path of the powerful maritime winds known as the Roaring 40s. They bring the low temperatures and rain.
Camp kitchens are neutral territory where strangers share the bonhomie of people on the road. There is no need for introductions. You just start talking to whomever in in the kitchen. Talk is usually about where people have been and where they are going. Some ask for advice about places they would like to visit. When people have been at the camp for awhile you get to learn a little about their lives. That is the story with small, out of the way caravan parks like this one but seldom the story in those big tourist parks with all their attractions. Sure, this is far from a five star caravan park. Amenities are basic but adequate. It is cheap to stay here. We are happy to call it home for awhile.
A farewell
Late this morning the rain is still coming down when Nathan, Jenny and their young son, Louis, come over to say farewell. We’ll stay in touch, they say, referring to the mutual Instagram connection we set up. Their car and camper trailer, laden with kayak and bicycle, drives off into a grey and rainy of the early summer morning. They’re off to explore other parts of the state before taking the ferry across Bass Strait and turning westward towards South, then Western Australia. Theirs’ is a deliberately chosen life on the road that extends into the foreseeable future.
We’ve spoken with other who have come and gone. There was the young couple in a Toyota van that they had nicely lined with wood and built a sleeping platform above large storage draws. The man explained that after finishing the fit-out he traced the smell of petrol to a hole he accidently drilled into the fuel tank. There is also the family in their renovated T2 Kombi we first encountered at the VW Day event at Turners Beach on the Bass Strait coast. Tasmania is like that—small enough to bump into people we have met elsewhere.
Two young French travellers sit at the table in the camp kitchen looking at their mobile phones and chatting. He’s tall with unkempt dark hair. She’s short of stature, softly spoken, her hair neatly tied in pigtails. She wears a gold nose ring. Both wear rain parkas. Why so many French? They outnumber other fruit pickers.
These people, they’re going in different directions in life. Some are living here at Seven Mile Beach Cabin Park longer-term. There’s the woman in her camper trailer looking to buy a house; the young French woman who bases herself here in her swag, a type of small tent, and comes and goes for fruit picking work; the man and woman who have been living here in their car camping tent for months; the tall blonde woman with two young daughters and young son living in a small caravan. Then there are the travellers spending their last night here before flying out and who leave their surplus food on the communal food shelf in the camp kitchen. The van park is an overnighting stop for many, a temporary home to others.
Some of these longer term residents live with a sense of insecurity about their future. The tall blonde woman with her children, for instance. She has a partner but he is working in the mines over in Western Australia, a long way from here. She would like to find a house to rent, but rentals in Tasmania are in very short supply and, consequently, expensive. For the man and woman in their car camping tent their residence is a means of avoiding high rents while he studies and she works. They can see an end to their tent life, but when, they don’t know. Then there is Paul and his teenage daughter. They live in a small car camping tent they have pitched near their old car. Paul is a pensioner. They were forced out of their rental accommodation by the landlord. Paul can’t afford Tasmania’s high rents, so the caravan park is now their home for as long as they can manage to stay here. His daughter does her schooling online, five hours a day, five days a week.
It’s like this on the road. People come into our lives for awhile before they or we continue our journeys. Most are faces in passing. With others we make a deeper connection. Living this way we accept people at face value. We have to do that because people with different life experiences and different beliefs and attitudes are thrown together at campsites. Acceptance is a coping strategy for living in close proximity to strangers. We share our stories of the road. Where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you heading? Meal times bring us together. We talk, carefully exploring each other’s story. It’s about finding that balance between the conviviality of the camp kitchen and the guardedness of not revealing too much.
Paul comes in and adds wood to the heater. With the fire going the kitchen becomes a refuge on these cold and rainy days. Come the mornings or late afternoon, we walk the long strand of Seven Mile Beach and watch the sun rise or set.
I look up at the sound of birds. The rain has stopped and the wind is stilled. It is cold but there is a lightening to the sky. Maybe, just maybe, the weather will improve. I hope life does the same for some of those living in this place.
How long on the road?
How long have we been on the road now, living out of our compact minivan? Close on eight months, I guess. We set out one afternoon in the May of 2019, the start of winter here in the southern hemisphere. We drove away just as the removalists were finishing loading half of a small container with the belongings that survived our decluttering blitz. Our destination that first day was Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. It was cold. It was cold on the other days and nights we camped there too as we went about our intention of walking some of the bush tracks up there.
The weather became warmer as we turned north to follow the winding secondary road through Colo National Park and into the Hunter Valley, then on to Gloucester, across to the coast and up to Wauchope where we were to stay with a relative for a week or two. Our destination, that at the end of our travels, was south, far south, and it was in that direction that we turned after visiting friends living at Byron Bay on the far North Coast.
Avoiding Highway 1 as often as we can, and after spending a few freezing nights up in the canyonland of Tia falls in the coastal mountains of the Great Dividing Range near Walcha and then heading north to visit friends at Byron Bay, we track south along the coast, stopping to camp at beachside national parks and in the excellent Waves campground with its surfing vibe in a bushland setting across the gravel road from the beach. We like it here and stay a few nights, walking over to the deserted beach to catch the sunrise.
Gloucester Tops National Park draws us into the mountains again to follow tracks and to overnight at one of the basic campsites off the gravel road. The land, the vegetation of scattered eucalypt trees amid yellow grassland higher up at Gloucester Tops reminds me of Tasmania’s Central Plateau. It is a visually invigorating landscape across which the winds surely whip when winter’s weather comes in. Fortunately, that wasn’t while we were there.
We make camp for a couple days in a low-key commercial camping area at the foot of the mountains, a place thankfully devoid of the gloss and distractions of some of the big-chain caravan parks. Here there are permanent shacks that create the impression that we are in some backwoods village. One man, a bird enthusiast who shows us around his shack, tells us of how he spends half of the year here and the other half at another caravan park where he also has a shack. It is a different sort of life that carries a strange sort of appeal to me. Why, I am not sure. Perhaps it is the simplicity that comes with living in a shack. Perhaps it is the surroundings of bushland and mountain.
Southwards the asphalt strip unfolds as we travel its length. Soon we are back in the Blue Mountains but this time we don’t stop at Katoomba. Kanangra Tops calls and we follow the narrow, winding road down into Jenolean Caves before overnighting in the caravan park in Oberon, highest town in the Blue Mountains. We meet a middle-aged man here who is touring on his motorcycle, a modern copy of one of the classic bikes. He’s in no hurry to be anywhere but tells us he, too, is Tasmania-bound although he is following no timetable and no particular route to get there.
Some people live the free life, the open ended life, like this lone motorcycle traveller. We meet them at cmapsites from time to time and I come away envying their way of life. We had been in the city for too long. My partner had a long-term project to finish before we could leave. I didn’t, so my life became a little aimless. Sure, I liked our urban life not far from the beach and the occasional walk in the national park on the edge of the city, and I enjoyed the things that only cities can offer, but knowing that we were destined to leave created this sense of temporariness about our lives there. And, then, there we were one day, speeding towards the mountains and away from the life that was. Sure, we were headed into a future unknown, a time of uncertainty and movement, but there was a sense of freedom in doing that that propelled us forward.
Our camp for the next couple days is in Kanangra-Boyd National Park. We walk the foot tracks of the heath covered sandstone plateau known as Kanangra Tops to the lookout at the edge of the high cliffs from where we gaze into the hazy distance over ridge, mountain and deep valley. The cliffs are superb, vertical, and the valleys they fall into deep and clad in forest. Then it is over to Dance Floor Cave—a large overhang in the sandstone cliff where, a long time ago, people actually built a timber dance floor that has long ago rotted away. It was built as a place to socialise while travelling the old stock route.
Who were those people who travelled that stock route and how was stock moved along these narrow mountain tracks? They were here, and the dance floor was built in the 1890s. Perhaps the landscape was different then—nature quickly reclaims the works of people and their mark upon the land quickly disappears.
This is spectacular country. We follow the tracks with that feeling you get when you have wanted to visit some place and you are finally here. For some time I have harboured the desire to come here and now, at last, here we are.
The weather is holding out as we drive into the Illawarra, the industrial region south of Sydney with its long strip of surfing beaches. It continues fine and mild as we stop to visit a friend in coastal Kiama before tracking down to Bega and Pambula where we stay with Robyn, a friend who publishes Pip magazine. Her partner is an avid surfer and she a recent convert. We check out the board shaper and his shop in town where Robyn had her board made, Jed Done’s Switchfoot Boardstore. Here in Pambula we attend an event in town where we encounter a Sydney friend, Costa Georgiardis, who hosts ABC TV’s Gardening Australia. He was as surprised to see us as we him. A quick visit to another friend, John Champagne, a permaculture educator who lives in the hills, as we set off on the road southwards again.
Cann River is one of those small towns on a crossroad which lives off of the passing traffic. That passes north or south along the main highway, or branches off westwards into the Victorian mountains. We are driving south into East Gippsland, keeping track of the massive bushfires which are raging to the north. They followed us all the way from the NSW North Coast, enveloping us with their thick smoke and the stench of burning forest when there were three burning around where we were taking a break in Wauchope and on the coast at Port Macquarie. Soon, they would sweep through East Gippsland, devastating bush, farms and in some cases parts of the towns. The fires had already trashed the Blue Mountians. This was big.
Through winter we travel, first up then down the coast with a few excursions into the Blue Mountains and Barrington Tops, then down the southeast coast through East Gippsland. It is coming into spring when the coastal town of Seaspray greets us with long beaches and powerful winds. We stay only one night before heading off along the highway, diverging to visit beaches and towns on the way. Finally, Wilsons Promontory, the far southern tip of Mainland Australia. We thought that we might walk some of the tracks through the coastal mountains. We did manage one windy, overcast daywalk but the heavy showers and wild weather coming through over our days here put an end to further exploration even if the wombats wandering through the camp pay no attention to it. This is a place for future bushwalks.
On to Torquay on the south coast, Bells Beach and a little further along the Great Ocean Road. Here in Torquay is the headquarters of legendary Australian surfing apparel and equipment company, Rip Curl, established back in the 1970s when the new wave of surfing was young. Across the road, Patagonia, a relative newcomber to the Australian surfing, climbing and bushwalking scene.
The big city. We spend a couple days in a Melbourne campground before boarding the Spirit of Tasmania, the ferry that carries us across Bass Strait to Devonport. Tasmania at last.
After visiting friends in Penguin and Launceston it is down the Midlands Highway to Seven Mile Beach, just 30km from Hobart. We wander the beach of mornings and late afternoons and venture out to other places from time to time, however Seven Mile Beach Cabin Park will be home for the remainder of spring and summer.
A few things learned
Living out of a minivan and traveling through places desiccated by drought, deluged by heavy winter rains, pungent with the smoke of bushfires, blasted by cold winter winds and blessed by warm, sunny winter days by the beach taught us much. We weren’t tied to a schedule. Our plan was loose, more like a vector to follow first north, then south. It was more like drifting. Side trips to towns, into the mountains, to visit friends and beaches at the end of narrow gravel roads pulled us well off the highways.
There is only so much you can pack into a minivan. We soon learned we had surplus and packed it into boxes and posted them to a relative in Tasmania. Our clothing had to cope with the mild days of a North Coast winter, the icy blasts of the mountains and a Tasmanian summer. We packed a warm puff jacket each, a windproof jacket, a light merino sweater, waterproofs, fleece pullover, button-up shirt, thermal base layer for the cold mountains, Tshirts, sneakers, walking shoes, cap, sun hat and beanie, gloves and, optimistically, sandals and board shorts.
The bushwalking equipment we carried was something that not all travellers would need to pack. Our minivan has a German-made VanEssa kitchen box at back equipped with a 12 volt, 35 litre refrigerator powered from a 40Wh lithium ion battery charged either by the alternator or by a 120W fold-out solar blanket when staying somewhere for a time. We cooked mainly on the kitchen box’s single-burner butane stove other than occasionally using our Jetboil Minimo bushwalking stove to brew a roadside coffee. Nights were spent on the van’s retractable sleeping platform, below a warm sleeping bag in cold places, with storage in 35l plastic boxes below. We carried our compact two-person hiking tent in case we wanted to sleep out of the van. Insect mesh covers attached by magnets to a side door and the rear hatch kept the mossies out. Being prepared for mossies is something that experience has taught us.
Space was tight but we managed, as have many others traveling in minivans. Wet days were the most trying. They confined us to the van. We would tramp water in. When it wasn’t water it was beach sand. A brush and pan came in handy.
We found that the secret of minivan travel is taking the minimum of clothing and equipment needed to lend a modicum of comfort in the seasons we travel through. It is also mentally adjusting what we think of as comfort to the seasons and weather. Comfort is being warm and dry in the wind and rain of winter and being as cool as we can be in the heat of summer. It is being free of the buzzing and biting of voracious mosquitoes.
Our minivan was adequate for two people travelling with only the necessities. With a place to sleep, a one-burner stove to cook on, a sink in a drawer to wash up in, long life food in the storage drawer of the kitchen box and some in the refrigerator, clothing adequate for the variable temperatures and weather we encountered and bushwalking equipment so we could get out on the trails, we had the basics for independent travel. In future we might add our inflatable Advanced Elements kayaks, boogie board and wetsuits to the Thule cargo pod on the roofrack. An awning provided shade and shelter to erect our folding table and chairs below on both warm and cold days and offered living space outside the confines of the van. A tent shelter pitched over the open rear hatch provided a sheltered cooking and sitting space when we stopped somewhere for a few days. Our clothing we carried in pack bags over the rear side windows, making use of space that otherwise goes unused (VanEssa brand from KombiLife in Campbelltown, NSW).
Summer’s end
It is now the last month of summer. Ten months. Ten months since we closed the door on our Sydney apartment and left it to the new owners. Ten months, most of them in our minivan, the latter in this caravan park here by Tasmania’s cold seas, other than the times we drive off to some other part of the state.
As spring became summer the weather warmed, but this is Tasmania so there were cold snaps, and wet days too. Then, towards the end of the season comes the news, first as a trickle and then more frequently. There is some kind of virus somewhere in China. Over the weeks I watch the news as the virus spreads. I imagine that, were the virus to appear here, it could quickly spread through the caravan park. As a precaution we start using hand sanitiser when visiting the shared facilities. Should we be wary of the Chinese tourists here? The chance of them carrying the virus seems low. Still, we take extra care when it comes to hygeine. Suddenly, it seems, the Chinese tourists stop coming. We have weathered the bushfires on our road trip. Now it seems we might have to weather a virus. It is spreading.
Leaving
It is a strange feeling to be leaving the caravan park for the last time. After spending the season here I say a silent farewell as I look around on driving out for the last time. There is a sense of finality. Sure, we knew our stay here would be temporary, that there would be an end to it, nevertheless the place feels like a home although it was more a base from where we sought a place to live. As we drive out I look over to the man and his teenage daughter living in their tent. What will their story be from now on? They have nowhere to go. And the woman in the camper trailer looking for a house to buy? She found one just before we left.
We drive out that morning to travel to another part of the coast not all that far away. There, we will have a permanent roof over our head and space that seems so large after life in a minivan.
We arrive just in time. Within two weeks of moving in the virus appears in north-west Tasmania. The state government locks-down the region. It spreads to other parts and the state goes into an early lockdown in an attempt to halt its spread. Tasmania was now isolated from mainland Australia and there is no unnecessary movement. It is successful. Tasmania would soon be Covid-free and we would be moving freely around our island while the mainland is still in lockdown.
We stand in the living room of the house looking out over the bay. No, we don’t have so spend another winter in the minivan. We realise the exceptionally good timing of our finding somewhere to live just before Tasmania locked-down. What would we have done if we were still at the caravan park? That was a challenge faced by others living in their vehicles.
As we settle in my mind goes back to those months on the road. I gaze down at our minivan and wonder… when again?
More road and track on PacificEdge…
