Day 7 – Balfour & Corinna     

I am writing this one because Jo’s not feeling well today.  She has a kind of migraine headache and bad tummy thing.  Anyway, we woke up this morning at Sandy Cape, with a view out over the Sandy Cape beach and the lighthouse and rocks.  The weather overnight rained on and off, which was a bit worrying because we both thought there might be more quicksand patches on the beach to run into on the way back out.  But since we both didn’t want to be negative before our beach dash we didn’t really say much about our concerns until later.

During the night, there was scratching around the tent and then one of the guy ropes went ‘doing’, so I got out of the tent into the cold and flashed the torch around, it was a fat little wombat munching on the grass outside.  He ran off into the bushes.

 We packed up the gear pretty quickly, because another patch of rain could be seen approaching from over the ocean, we got in the car to head out, about the same time it started raining.  After taking a few wrong tracks, we ended up at the start of the beach run for the dash across the scary quicksand beach onto the roughish sandy track on the other side.   

The water was a little higher than the previous day.  I drove as fast as I could near the waters edge on the firmer sand.  The problem was all the dips and lumps just above the water line, which threw the car around if you went over them at speed, which meant I had to drive in the sea water quite often where it was flatter spraying water everywhere. Probably because of my nerves and my not wanting to slow down for anything, at one stage I ended up driving into the sea water pretty fast as a wave came in, which slowed the car right down and sent a wave way up over the car, so I couldn’t see where I was going for the water.  I changed down gears, and kept going in the direction I last saw a smooth sandy patch, and was quickly on the other side.   

The other mistake I made was to mistake the mouth of a river for the ocean, because the river outlet had formed a big pool coming out from the beach, and the rain didn’t help either.  So I started driving up the beach towards the softer sand of the dammed up river and potentially quicksand!  So Jo yelled at me a bit, until I figured out I was going the wrong way, and we continued on. 

After a few big bounces later, and running into a half submerged log, ‘bang’, we reached the other side and the relative safety of the sandy track leading out.  A sigh of relief from us both.   I must admit that we were probably never in much danger of getting stuck, but I haven’t really done much beach driving before and was a bit worried about what could happen.  Especially after all the warnings.  Overall the conditions were probably not too bad.

 The next part of the trip was up to Balfour, this time avoiding most of the Balfour track by taking an easier road.  It wasn’t too difficult to get to the old mine site at the end, where we walked down a pretty ferny track to an old grave site from the early 1900’s.  We slipped over a few times on the track because of some fallen trees, but all was OK.  It was getting to about 1200 so we had some shapes for lunch. 

We made our way down towards Corinna along the Heemskirk road.  After a few hours along a fairly isolated windy road (isolated for Tasmania), we ended up at Corinna.  It looked like a beautiful spot set in rain forest, with just a couple of houses, and a ferry to get across the Pieman River.  So we decided to stay here the night in a little cabin, and do a ferry ride in the morning.  Jo was pretty happy to be able to have a shower, especially because she is not feeling well.  The cabin is a nice little wooden thing, with a fire place and modern furniture.  Because of the town’s isolation the cabin uses rain water, solar power and gas bottles.  It’s very nice, especially compared to camping.

After settling into our cabin, we went for a drive out to the McGrath's track where we planned to see an old 100 meter long tunnel dug in the gold mining days in 1931 to divert a river.  By the time we got to the river it was either hailing or raining and Jo was feeling ill, so we decided not to go for the walk.  We found a place to turn around which was difficult on the narrow overgrown track, and crossed back over the river and up the hill.  It was a hilly windy track cut into the side of a mountain, I don’t know what would have happened if someone else came the other way.  Overall it was relatively easy, although you had to be very cautious of the edges, walls and vegetation.  I almost ended up with a wheel in a big eroded hole on the side of the track right next to the drop off which would have made things interesting.

 Back at the cabin Jo was feeling worse, so she lay down on the couch, while I made some spaghetti for tea, mmmm.  Jo didn’t eat.  That reminds me, I should go and do the dishes now.