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strengthening current and sighs.
    ‘We’ll never get across,’ I hear myself say, my voice shaking, perhaps even with something approaching relief.
    Jyrki puts his rucksack down on the sands, secures his hiking poles beneath the side straps, and in a single uninterrupted motion proceeds to untie the laces of his hiking boots, take off his socks, stuff them inside the boots and tie the laces together in an overband knot. Then he strips off his shorts, his T-shirt and. even his underwear without batting an eyelid.
    I can’t help but look back towards the edge of the camp, but the border of eucalyptus trees is like a green botanic wall.
    A similar wall faces us on the other side of the rivulet. No, that one’s far darker and thicker, rising up along the high green rocky embankment.
    The woods were unmoved, like a mask — heavy, like the closed door of a prison — they looked with their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence.
    Oh, Joseph, Joseph.
    ‘They’ve seen naked men before, and if they haven’t it’s about time they did,’ Jyrki says. He stuffs his clothes beneath the strap of his rucksack and tightens the buckle to form a secure bundle. He hangs his boots around his neck so that they are dangling across his chest, one on each side, picks his rucksack up from the sand and places it on his head. The naked man then steps into the current.
    The channel deepens so suddenly that after only two steps Jyrki is up to his waist in water. Another step and the water almost reaches up to his chest; the soles of the boots dangling around his neck skim the surface of the rivulet. A step further and the water is once again at his waist, then his thighs, his shins. Jyrki throws his rucksack and boots on to the sand on the opposite shore and without a moment’s hesitation gets back into the water.
    ‘Strip off if you don’t want to trudge around in wet clothes for the rest of the day.’
    ‘The water’ll be up to my neck.’
    ‘Swim. Head diagonally into the current. It’s pretty strong; you can feel it in your legs.’
    ‘How strong?’
    My clothes fall on to the sand; my hands are trembling. Jyrki crosses the rivulet in an instant and stands there naked in front of me, water dripping on to the ground. He takes my boots, which I haven’t had time to tie together, and throws them one at a time across the water. I hear a dull thud as they hit the sand. Jyrki snatches up my clothes and hiking poles, stuffs them under the straps around my rucksack, and with a single graceful pull he has the whole heavy load perfecdy balanced on his head as though he were a robust native woman of some exotic country. He wades out into the brown water, reaches the opposite shore before I can take more than a few tentative steps and throws my rucksack on to the sand. Then he turns around and holds out his hand, a living bridge, and I don’t even need to see whether my feet can touch the bottom as he’s already pulling me towards the other side, steering me along the surface like a child.
     
    Tasmania shows us its true colours the minute we cross the rivulet, as if it knew that after all that dressing and undressing and wallowing around in the potentially life-threatening current we wouldn’t be turning back any time soon.
    This is the point of no return, it seems to be telling us.
    Just climbing up the muddy, stony embankment from South Cape Bay is worse than anything we’ve seen in Tasmania so far. After that we head straight into a thick, damp forest, every now and then reaching clearings dotted with clumps of buttongrass that we have to negotiate. From there we descend creeks fed by networks of brown streams into the tangle of shadowy copses, then up again, this time to a series of rocky ridges. After that we are engulfed by steep stony inclines, the thicket and the darkness of the rainforest.
    The path is nothing but a zigzagging trail of sloppy, shitty sludge. Up and down, then down and up we go