Tasman Peninsula

The Tasman Peninsula is where Tasmania stops performing wellness and starts performing something else — something wilder and more vertical. The drive down from Hobart passes through Eaglehawk Neck, where the peninsula narrows to barely a hundred meters of land between Arthur and Pirate’s Bay, and here the isthmus has a geological drama about it, water on both sides, wind rearranging itself through the gap. Then the peninsula opens south into one of the most extraordinary coastlines in Australia.

Port Arthur is on this peninsula, which people know. What fewer people realize is that the coastal geology surrounding it is in a different category entirely.

Cape Hauy

The walk to Cape Hauy from the Fortescue Bay campground is a three-hour return that I would put in competition with any walk I’ve done anywhere. It climbs through dry sclerophyll forest — stringybark and peppermint, the ground littered with bark, the smell of eucalyptus oil constant — and then reaches a headland where the land ends in two dolerite columns rising from the sea. The Candlestick and the Totem Pole: two natural pillars of 65-million-year-old rock, around 60 and 45 meters high respectively, standing in the surf. Rock climbers come specifically for these columns from around the world, which tells you something about the quality of the stone.

I stood at the edge looking down at the swell breaking around the base of those columns and had the specific sensation of scale collapsing — the columns were large and far below me, the horizon was further, the sky above all of it was enormous. I sat down because standing seemed like the wrong relationship to have with that much space.

Tessellated Pavement

Before or after Port Arthur, the Tessellated Pavement is fifteen minutes off the Arthur Highway and entirely worth the detour. A flat shelf of mudstone at the water’s edge has fractured, over geological time, into near-perfect rectangular tiles — regular enough to look hand-cut, which they emphatically were not. The tiling pattern is precise and strange, and the fact that the ocean is lapping at the edges of these self-made tiles makes the whole scene feel like a garden feature at enormous scale.

The platform is tidal, so the experience shifts with the time of day. At low tide, the full geometric surface is exposed. At high tide, the sea covers parts of it and leaves pools in the lower sections. I went at low tide in early morning and had the place to myself for twenty minutes, walking on the tiles and touching the right-angle corners, which were real and hard and completely improbable.

The Blowhole and Tasman Arch

The coastal walk near Eaglehawk Neck visits three geological formations in close sequence: the blowhole, the Tasman Arch, and Devil’s Kitchen. The blowhole is a collapsed sea cave with a vertical shaft — when the swell is running and the tide is right, the water forces up through it with enough pressure to be heard before it’s seen, and the vibration comes through the ground. I arrived on a day with a decent swell running and felt the pulse of it in my feet before I saw any water.

The Tasman Arch is a natural rock bridge formed by the same process: cave, collapse, remaining span. It stands over a churning channel and the structural logic of it — that this thing is still standing — seems provisional. It has been standing for a very long time and will presumably continue. But standing on the viewing platform above it, you feel the contingency.

Fortescue Bay

The campground at Fortescue Bay sits inside the national park at the end of a gravel road and offers the kind of camping that justifies camping: clean water, basic facilities, and a beach with water so clear and cold that swimming in it is an act of minor bravery. The bay is enclosed enough to kill the worst of the swell. The forest comes down to within meters of the sand.

I camped here for two nights and each morning woke to the sound of seabirds I couldn’t identify and the smell of eucalyptus warming in the early sun. On the second morning, a pademelon — a small wallaby — came to the edge of the camping area to graze in the dawn light and paid me no attention at all.

When to go: September through April for the best walking conditions. The Three Capes Track — a four-day lodge-based walk taking in Cape Hauy, Cape Pillar, and Cape Raoul — runs October through April and is the finest way to experience the peninsula’s full coastline, but needs to be booked months in advance.