After my thoroughly enjoyable morning at Jeanneret Beach, it was now time to drive to my next spot: historic Port Arthur, where I was going to spend the night. Port Arthur is about 300 km / 180 miles south of Bay of Fires, about 4 hours away given what Tasmanian roads are.
The sun was out now, so I was happily slalom-ing the Toyota Yaris around the sharp curves and abrupt elevation changes of the Tasmanian Highway (which sounds big but is two lanes). Music on the radio, air conditioning cooling my inevitable sunburn, beach sand between my toes: feeling good.
Suddenly, as I’m gently rounding some particularly serpentine curves, I heard a loud BAM! and the car immediately became harder to handle. Since I already wasn’t going very fast, I didn’t lose control, but I did have to make my way through a few more road bends before I could find a patch of gravel to turn onto.
The front passenger-side tire (driver’s side tire if you’re in the US) had completely blown out. (In the photo, you can see a tear from the wheel rim to the tread on the right side of the tire.) According to Google Maps, I was somewhere in the midst of a forested nature preserve, nowhere close to any crossroads, let alone towns. If it were nighttime, I’d be in the first scenes of a horror film.
Now, I can change a tire, and the rental Yaris had a spare. However, it’s not my car. I figured the rental company might have something to say about me attempting to repair their car. Also, the car was on a slight slant, tipped toward the side with the ailing tire. And I was in the wilds IN AUSTRALIA, which meant that wandering into the grass two feet away could incur the wrath of deadly snakes or also-deadly jumping ants or presumably-deadly rabid wallabies*.
* After typing that, I asked the mighty internet if wallabies could get rabies. They apparently can get rabies, but they don’t, because Australia does not have rabies in its wildlife populations. But! Australian bats can get Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) which is basically also rabies.
I called the rental company. They did not want me to fix the car myself, so they summoned roadside assistance.
After about an hour, roadside assistance showed up in the form of a guy who looked like the Steve Irwin of roadside mechanics, complete with khaki wardrobe. He was very nice and chatty. Of course, when he learned I was American, he asked how I felt about [a certain current US president] and I told him that I was on vacation and didn’t want to think about that.
Soon, the spare tire was on the car. I asked what I should do about getting a real tire on the car, and he said that the closest reasonable place would be about 200 km down the road. Somewhere in the back of my brain, my residual memories of driver’s ed and my fledgling ability to convert metric to imperial got together and had a conference. 200 km was too long to drive on a spare, right? Roadside Assistance Man shrugged politely. It’s not like I really had much of a choice, considering where I was.
I soon continued down the road, driving slower and ensuring I didn’t take any curve at full speed. The best I could do was be gentle with the car and the spare. I reflected with a bit of relief that every Tasmanian road that I’d seen to this point, even in the ruralest of rural areas, had been immaculately paved. Potholes don’t seem to exist here.
A few more kilometers down the road, I started to think about things other than flat tires and thus realized that I was hungry. It was mid-afternoon by now.
As if on cue, a solution presented itself: a seaside town named Bicheno, where I found a joint on the water called Lobster Shack. I figured that any place that married two songs by the B-52s into one restaurant should be thoroughly examined.
This place was a mighty operation indeed! It had a fast-food / pub food format (order at the counter then pick-up), plus an ice cream counter, a coffee counter, and a place to buy seafood to take home. Upon much thought, I decided that I should probably eat a vegetable (thus, a Greek salad) as well as luxuriate in fresh oysters.
I sat on the back balcony of the Shack, which had an excellent view over the ocean to go with the delicious food. The one drawback was that I had to mind the ever-present gulls on the roof, who were ready to shiv anyone who dropped a morsel of food.
Also, I drank this, which was very tasty:
Once I had safely stowed the food inside my stomach, I walked back to my limping Yaris. It seemed to be looking out at the ocean, like a old-timey person at a tuberculosis spa.
I hopped in and continued to drive south.
As I drove, I started to become concerned about what time I was going to arrive in Port Arthur. Tonight’s hotel had check-in until 9pm, but I have seen enough roadkill in the last three days to know I definitely did not want to drive on any Tasmanian road at night. It looked like I would make it just fine, even with driving a little slower, but you know how my adventures tend to go.
As I continued south, the region became more and more remote. My phone lost signal entirely. (Past Melissa was thankfully wise and downloaded all of Tasmania’s map datas onto the phone before leaving the US.) I drove through more and more wilderness reserves.
Suddenly, the immaculately paved road turned into gravel.
And there was a sign that said something like “gravel road for the next 50 km”.
Oy gevalt. I briefly imagined the spare tire shredding on the gravel and me not having a phone signal. I also wondered if I had enough camera gear to properly photograph all of the nocturnal animals that would undoubtedly come out to make fun of me.
I considered backtracking to a different route, but that also didn’t seem like a good idea. Sometimes the best way out is through. I started slowly down the gravel road.
The first 15-20 km were fine as long as I didn’t go very fast. The gravel was well-maintained and didn’t have many patches of washboard ridges, plus there were nearly no other cars to worry about. It was still a long while before sunset. I just had to concentrating on driving down this road that was walled in by trees.
Note: in the video below, I was only driving about 10 mph and wasn’t looking at my phone while driving. (I just stuck my hand out the window.) There were no other cars, and I knew from the map that the road was fairly easy in that area. I just needed to make a document of what I was doing before the not-rabid wallabies got me.
As I progressed deeper into the forest, I became more concerned, and I drove even more gingerly. The gravel road started to get rougher. I drove past another car parked off the side of the road, with the hood propped up. I eventually saw a rusted gas station pump just sitting by the side of the road without anything around it but a rusted piece of farming equipment.
The road steadily became rougher and curvier and higher up the mountains. I caught glimpses of peaks disappearing into low clouds. The situation wouldn’t have been particularly bad if I had four good tires, but here I was, still driving, because I didn’t want to be stuck here.
And then the sun suddenly broke through the clouds and I came upon this vista:
The fact that I had to wait for roadside assistance meant that I was just hitting this wild, gorgeous, remote area right at the photographer’s sacred golden hour. Every so often, the trees would open up again and reveal valleys full of trees, rippling hills, dark peaks in the distance, and the ocean peaking through the gaps. It was ridiculously beautiful, like Haskell Wexler came up and punched you in the face with a reel of Days of Heaven.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of creeping along, Google Maps (offline) alerted me that a turn was coming up, onto a road that had some sort of official-looking number code. Did this mean this was the end of the dreaded gravel? Was I safe?
Of course not. The dreaded gravel road turned onto another dreaded gravel road. I parked at the turn and got out of the car, just to walk off some tension. Then I looked back the way I came.
I took a deep breath, re-centered myself, and made the turn. Thankfully, the new gravel road was extremely well maintained and led out of the forest into hilly farmland. The golden evening light turned every cow and sheep into the cover of a 1970’s folk music album.
Eventually, the gravel gave way to pavement and the sun dipped behind the hills to the west. I still had some ground to cover, but the worst was behind me. I wound my way down the coast, across a narrow strip of land called Eaglehawk Neck, and onto the peninsula that housed Port Arthur.
True dusk arrived just as I pulled up to my hotel, a strange little motor-inn that looked pretty much like every old American motel you’ve ever seen in a movie, with rows of exterior doors leading to individual rooms and parking in front of the doors. The major difference was that this little hotel not only looked out over the ocean, but it also overlooked the historic site of Port Arthur, one of the old convict settlements of Tasmania.
When I rolled up to check in, I also found that the place was hopping with activity. The motel’s bar and restaurant was clearly the local hangout. Kids were running around, people were vaping outside the bar, folks were playing pool inside. As I walked up to find the registration desk, a very very drunk man came out and told me that if I locked myself out of my room that I should call him and he would get the master key and help me out. I thanked him and told him that I hadn’t even checked in yet, and therefore haven’t had the chance to lock myself out. “But if you DID lock yourself out, you tell me and I’ll fix everything.”
At that moment, a young woman with facial piercings, blue hair, and a vape pen walked past and deadpanned, “Don’t listen to him, he’s drunk and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
I eventually got registered and managed to get into the motel restaurant just before they shut down the kitchen. They hooked me up with a beer and seafood schnitzel.
It wasn’t the most spectacular food I’d had in the last couple days, but I sure did earn it.
