Tarkine Wilderness drive (day one), TAS

We found a tourist brochure called ‘The Tarkine Drive’ which is a route through coastal scenery and rainforest in the far north-west of Tasmania. It starts and ends from Smithton which was about an hour from where we were, and so we decided to spend the weekend doing the drive as two seperate day trips.

The drive is all on sealed roads, but nearly all of the sites/walking areas are down gravel roads off the main route, and so it takes quite a long time to get to everywhere. There is a coastal section and an interior rainforest section, and so on the first day we covered mostly the coastal section, with a walk in the rainforest at the end of the day.

On the coastal section, the ‘walking trails’ turned out to be vague descriptions of 4WD tracks and gravel roads that went off into the middle of nowhere from various ‘shack communities’ in the area. The ‘shacks’ were built in the 40s and 50s in coastal areas and used to be wooden huts with no facilities accessed by a rough 4WD track. Nowadays, some of them are very fancy and you can get to them even in a Honda Jazz…

Anyway, there turned out to be no real marked trails, so we just wandered around and the coastal scenery was great and there was generally not another person in sight the whole time. The only official ‘attraction’ was called the ‘Edge of the World’ – because looking out to sea, the next land you would hit would be in Argentina. It turned out to be one the less scenic parts of the coast…

After passing through Bluff Hill point, Arthur River, Nelson Bay, Couta Rocks, and the not very exciting Rebecca Lagoon we headed to the interior for a rainforest walk along the Balfour Track.

The Balfour Track turned out to be a great walk – really dense moss and lichen covered rainforest and not a single other person anywhere in sight 🙂 We got lost for about 15 minutes at the start of the trail, but once we found the ‘hidden’ signpost it was plain sailing…