Yesterday – or was it the day before? – in our perambulations, D and I realized we were playing a game: as we navigated down the lower reaches of kunanyi (Mt. Wellington), I said “Topanga Canyon,” and she nodded. Earlier in the day had been “Marin headlands,” and then at various points in the afternoon, as we wended our way north to Launceston, “Petaluma”, “eastern Nevada” and half a dozen other places evoked by the shape and color and temperament of whatever landscape we were driving or strolling through. It’s a thing we humans do, isn’t it? Anchor and name and define a place in the terms of what other place or places it reminds us of.

It’s easy to get carried away, of course (“And was Jerusalem builded here, amid these dark satanic mills?”). But this must be how it starts.

We didn’t quite get an alpine start the morning we left Hobart, but the day was promising, and we decided to take the long’ish way north to where we were to meet Ann and Jack that evening. I’d say I knew Ann from college, but only indirectly: we were only introduced last year by a mutual friend and classmate of ours during my last Tassie trip.

But the way up – as I said, was a pastiche of western landscapes from our collected histories, trying to find some familiar memory or sensation we could anchor these experiences to, so as to not let them slip away. Of course, those handy cell phones do help, but you have to be very good, or a little bit lucky (or better: both) to capture the sensation of a place on an itty bitty screen.

Still we tried. Swerving over to stop at pull outs all the way up through the Great Western Tiers, sometimes lured by a sign – “Local Honey”, “Fresh Blueberries”, “Scenic Overlook” – and sometimes just because the whim caught us in the form of an evocative tree standing alone against a windswept prairie. There were unexpected sculpture gardens, wilderness boardwalks, ducks, skinks – all sorts of excuses to stop and contemplate.

It was as we were approaching the Central Plateau that we ran out of comparatives. The broad and rugged mountain rose ahead of us, swathed in dense, lush foliage, but at the same time haunted throughout by a dense army of gray, skeleton-like eucalyptus, their bare, branching arms reaching out above the green to the empty blue above. It was like…it was like no place we’d seen before.

Of course I tried a photo or two, but I was not good enough, or lucky enough to be able to put a frame around the sight or the sensations it evoked. We slowed, nodded in agreement, and drove on silently for a while after.

Evening and morning: dinner with Ann and Jack and a good snooze at their place, then north and west, then south and west. Then just west.

North and west was to The Platypus House out on a wharf on the Tamar River, because we were gonna see platypuses. Er, platypi…platypods? Venomous duck-billed beaver things, damn it. We’d failed to encounter any in the wild, but for about thirty Aussie bucks we got to observe four of the adorable/terrifying little evolutionary aberrations cavorting around their tanks.

And! And as a bonus there was “the echidna garden.” Now, I don’t know about the “garden” part, but we got to hang out in a partially vegetated room while four of the incongruously cute little spikeballs waddled around, poking their tongues into bowls, under doormats, and everywhere else they could looking for treats.

Weirdly, the Platypus House is adjacent to The Creation Discovery Centre, dedicated to exposing the lies that science is using to discredit the Biblical Word of God. No, we didn’t go in – we figured there we better uses of our time that afternoon…

…which consisted of heading southwest and west bit more to Marakoopa Caves, outside the deceptively charming town of Mole Creek. Managed to catch up for a beer with a charming amateur geologist who’d befriended me my last time through at the town saloon. Then dinner at an improbably charming little “chef’s table” restaurant next door, and on to the charming little campground just west of town. Do you see a pattern here? Mole Creek – who would have guessed?

But I’m two days behind now. This morning we’re in Strahan, out on the west coast, preparing ourselves for a boat cruise up the Gordon River. In what is forecast to be driving rain. Which is okay, in the grand scheme of things. After yesterday’s driving rains, west Tasmania is now firmly in “Not Currently On Fire”, territory, which is more than anyone could have said yesterday morning.

Left: dawn over Cradle Mountain. Right: about an hour later, when the smoke moved in.

The drive west was lovely, if a bit rainy and smokey, and by the time we reached the western terminus of the river and bay at Macquarie Head, rain and smoke had both cleared to give us a mottled blue/gray sky spilling out from the fine sand beach into the south Indian Ocean.