Reserve a Tasman Peninsula walking trip in Tasmania

To reserve a Tasman Peninsula walking trip is to ask us to hold four separate things on one set of dates: a bed for eight nights, two places on one of the guided starts the operating company runs inside a single named week of November, seats in the vehicle that covers the sixty miles southeast out of Hobart, and the crossing that puts you on the gravel beach where the walking begins. We ask for the week first. The operating company fixes it, and everything else is built around whichever start inside it comes back confirmed.

The peninsula hangs off the bottom right corner of Tasmania, which hangs off the bottom of Australia. It runs about forty miles, tied to the rest of the island by a sand isthmus roughly a hundred feet across, and its eastern face is a wall of dolerite that the Southern Ocean has been prying apart column by column. Stand on the top of it looking the right way and the next land is Antarctica. The booking puts you on that edge for four days.

Four of the eight nights are in lodges no road reaches. The other four are in a guesthouse room at the isthmus with its own bathroom, a window on the water and dinner at seven. Your overnight bag goes forward without you on walking days, so you carry a day pack, three liters of water and a shell, and that one arrangement is why walkers in their late sixties come off this route in the same condition as walkers in their thirties.

The rock and what it does to the walking

Dolerite cooled underground in vertical columns and it still breaks the way it cooled, straight down. The cliffs on the eastern side run for miles with no beach beneath them and no ledge partway, and at the high point of the route the ground stops and does not start again for something close to a thousand feet. Columns six feet thick read as matchsticks from up there, and the scale only arrives when a white bellied sea eagle crosses in front of them and turns out to be the size of a thumbnail.

That geometry writes the itinerary. There is no shortcut down to the water and no way to trim a day by dropping to a beach, so the line stays high and the distances are what they are. Most of the surface is laid gravel and cut stone step, which sounds gentle until the last morning, when it goes up 1,580 feet over a wooded hill and down the far side to the bay. Off the built line the heath comes to your waist, it is wiry, and jack jumper ants live in it, which is most of the reason nobody strays.

At the north end the isthmus is narrow enough to see water on both sides at once. In the 1830s a row of chained dogs stood across it to stop men leaving the penal station down the road on foot. On the beach beside it, low water uncovers a shelf of rock cracked into rectangles, some worn hollow into shallow pans and some standing proud like loaves; it is under water most of the day, so on the first evening dinner is set around the tide rather than the tide around dinner.

Four days out, and the hours inside them

On foot the trip runs just under forty miles across five days, with four nights spent on the route. The days are 2.5, 11, 10.5, 8 and 7.5 miles, and their shape matters more than the total: a short first afternoon that is all climb, a flat exposed second day, the long one, the hill, then a spur of stone stairs before you walk out. Two guides work each start, one setting the pace at the front and one staying behind the last walker, and the pace at the front belongs to whoever is slowest that morning.

Nobody walks in the dark and nobody walks alone. If the weather shuts the exposed section the guides hold the group at the lodge and take the spur the next morning instead, which is why the middle two days carry a spare half day inside them. The lodges have gas heat, a drying room that actually dries, bunk rooms of four with mattresses, tank water and hot showers. There is no lights out, but the generator stops and after that it is only the wind on the roof.

November at this latitude

Hobart sits at 42.9 degrees south, about as far from the equator as Milwaukee, and November there does roughly what May does here, with thinner air overhead. Sunrise comes at a quarter to six and there is usable light past half past eight, fourteen and a half hours to work with and no reason to start before breakfast. Highs on the exposed sections run near 63 degrees and the lodges drop into the low forties before dawn. The sea alongside you holds about 57 degrees all month and it will not be warmer in February either, because that water came up from the south.

Wind decides how a day feels far more than temperature does. A westerly holding thirty knots for six hours is an ordinary day, and it arrives across open water with nothing in the way to slow it down. Rain falls on about twelve days of the month, usually in bands of twenty minutes. The ozone at this latitude is thin in spring, and on a clear morning the ultraviolet index reads ten by eleven o'clock, which is not what a Missouri November prepares anyone for.

Short tailed shearwaters that spent the northern summer in the Bering Sea are back in burrows along these headlands, and they lay their single egg in the last week of November; at dusk they come in fast and low and land badly. Bennett's wallabies and pademelons work the grass around the lodges after seven. Humpbacks move south past the peninsula through October and November, a long way offshore, and plenty of days go by without one.

Getting there and getting back

This office sells no airfare, so the flight to Australia is yours to book and yours to hold. What we do is fit the ground to whatever you manage to get: the transfer meets the flight you name, and if you land the night before we hold the guesthouse room an extra night at the operator's own rate. From the airport at Hobart to the isthmus is about seventy five minutes by road, most of it two lane, the last twenty minutes with water on both sides.

The crossing to the start of the walk is a short passage across the bay and it belongs to the operating company. That company holds the licence for it, runs it with its own crew and bills for it inside its own contract. We carry nobody anywhere. This office owns no vehicles, no lodges and no boats; every bed, seat and mile on this page belongs to somebody else, and our part is to hold it against your names.

The same company writes the contract, sets its own terms for changes and cancellation, and sends the bill to you under its own name. Nothing is paid to us at any stage. We do not advise on entry documents or on medical cover.

Send the week you can leave, the full legal names of both walkers, twin or double, and anything about knees, backs or ankles the guides should know before day six. Costing a specific set of days against real beds and getting the figure back in writing takes two to four working days, and if the week you want will not work we say so in the same message rather than later. Write to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com. If a trip we booked has gone sideways while you are inside it, corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com reaches the person who can change something, and +1 (816) 525-2846 is answered in working hours; we do not call anybody who has not asked to be called.

The name on the confirmation is Third Coast Dispatch, the entity behind it is Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC, and the office is at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302, Lee's Summit, MO 64063, under the law of Missouri. Most people who book this walk live within a two hour drive of Kansas City, MO, and a fair number put the day maps on our table before they commit to four days of it.