On the road…
The traveller
Life simplifies when you camp at the end of a rough track
Autumn is now on its downhill run towards winter, and it seems to be accelerating as the season progresses.
We—my partner and I—are still in the morning’s chilly half-light here at the end of the rough track that was home last night and on other nights while we are helping to teach a permaculture design course. The bright yellow light of the rising sun has yet to reach us. It won’t be long. We can see it moving down the walls on the other side of the gorge.
The track is a narrow bumpy passage below a steep slope clad in casuarina forest. It stops at the ruin of a greystone home built in the early decades of the last century and later destroyed by fire. Only the stone walls remain. Local people sometimes walk past the ruin from the dead-end road below to reach a lookout from where they can see along the pools and rapids of the cold water river deep in the gorge. The track where we camped is concealed from the road and is known only to people living further along.
I slide the door open and step out into the fresh morning. Looking around, I see that the trees on the ridge still carry wisps of morning mist. Time to open the van’s rear hatch and fire up the butane stove to brew a cup of tea. As usual, it will be our homemade muesli for breakfast. No fancy cooked meals to start the day for us. We are not campsite cooks. We prefer food that is simple, nutritious and quick to prepare. Muesli is a DIY fast-food breakfast that allows us to get out on the road faster.
The course will extend into winter and I think ahead to the cold season’s short daylight hours and imagine how we will have to set up and take down camp in the dark. Not that doing so is a problem in our van. We only have to unfold or fold the mattress, slide the sleeping platform out or back and stow our stuff ready to get going.
A forest raven makes its raucous call and brings me back into the moment. Other than that it is quiet if I ignore the dull roar of the river in the gorge that was our constant acoustic background through the night. These are magic moments for those who stop to look and smell the refreshing, cool air of the Tasmanian morning.
Campsite
The traveller camped a little further along the track from us. I call him a traveller because he comes here all the way from the Huon so he can attend the course. He is after ideas for the bush block he owns.
He rises, puts on his pullover and beanie against dawn’s chilly air, clasps his hands and raises his arms above his head as he stretches to breathe deeply of the clean Tasmanian air and to welcome another fine autumn morning. He looks to the glow of the rising sun as it moves down the forested ridge across the gorge, speaks to his dog but gets no reply, then turns to prepare a simple breakfast. That done, I watch as he packs his ute so he is ready to start another day. He is one of those quietly-spoken, practical people, befitting of someone who lives in a shack on his rural land.
Wake, look to see what the weather is doing, rise, stretch, prepare a simple breakfast, pack to go. It is the morning ritual of all travellers. It is one that we, too, are used to.
For the traveller camping here at the end of the narrow, bumpy track, the night was as quiet and as comfortable as sleeping in the back of a ute can be. No matter to him, though, a dweller of the backblocks far south of where he is this morning and whose shower is the stream that runs through his land. He is at home in the rough and wild.
This is the story of many a traveller. Unlike the tourist they seek the less-visited places, places like this campsite at the end of the track. They do not need the pricy commercial campsite, preferring the basic surrounds of bush and mountain and the ranging view over the land, or, sometimes, the concealment of the surrounding forest. Their camps are basic, simple. So is the food they cook as the sun sinks low in the sky and as is the breakfast this traveller makes as the sun rises from the horizon.
Writing in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, Robert Louis Stevenson tells us that, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Anita Desai built on this when she spoke about the impact of place: “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
Will this campsite in the bush become a part of the traveller? I think so. The rugged folds of the terrain will see to that, as will watching the sun move down the ridge and the cool, crisp air of the Tasmanian morning. The wildness of the terrain will surely rewild his mind, as it does ours.
Bush camping encourages a simplicity of life by making us focus on those basic things that humanity has always done… rise with the sun, make something to eat, pack and head out.