Read Birdbrain for Free Online Page A

— mostly up, of course, clambering up infuriatingly steep slippery banks. For a bit of variety sometimes we have to slide down the hillside or some tree roots on our arses, simply because our legs aren’t long enough or the path has no steps, all the while wrenching our rucksacks free of the bush and scrub, hauling our boots out of the smacking mud and prying our hiking poles from between the rocks with all our strength. Endlessly.
    If Australia is mostly bone dry, this part of Tasmania seems to be nothing but a thin layer of land above a deep heaving quagmire. The crème brûlée of terrains, I’ll bloody tell you. And over the years hundreds of hiking boots have cracked the surface, opening up fissures like black greedy mouths for kilometres ahead.
    At the highest point of South Cape Range, about 450 metres up — Jyrki makes a point of mentioning the specific height, as though it were of some special significance — we start our descent towards Granite Beach. Despite the effort, it’s impossible not to notice the sheer grandeur of the landscape spreading out before us. Some way off, far down the hillside, I can see an overgrown peninsula that we still have to cross, and the sandy, rocky coves extending in an endless series of crescents into the distance. Prion Beach, the place Jyrki keeps mentioning, can apparently just be made out — maybe it’s that dull-golden cuticle-shaped strip on the horizon. I can see the lines of foaming waves : hitting the beach, the turquoise water, and I’d like to think how beautiful it is.
    You can’t argue with that.
    Even though every part of my body is aching, I have to admit that Tasmania is in some unfathomable way both age-old and fresh as the day it was born. Old and experienced enough that it knows how to touche a nerve but at the same time so young that it almost feels as though we are depriving a newborn creature of the peace is has just discovered and needs.
    The bushes rustle and crackle — always to the left, always behind us, incessantly — as though Tasmania itself were following us, invisible, smart enough constantly to devise little pranks and childish enough to carry them out.
     
Jyrki
    The three guys that left Cockle Creek at the same time as us have decided to spend the night at Granite Beach. They’ve already put their tents up. Their sweaty T-shirts are flapping in the trees. I look at my watch.
    She’s about to take her rucksack off when I show her the map. It’s less than two hours to Surprise Bay. Half of the journey is along Granite Beach. I mean, a beach, for God’s sake — what could be nicer than that? Then all we have to do is cross that peninsula and we’ll be there — Surprise, Surprise — just in time for dinner.
    She asks what’s wrong with this place.
    There’s nothing wrong with it, I say, but we’d have to make up the ground tomorrow. It’s only another four or five kilometres. We’ve got ten behind us, so that will make fifteen for the day. If we stay here it’ll be another twenty-one kilometres to Deadman’s Bay. And we have to factor in crossing the river. This’ll even out our daily stretches.
    I don’t tell her that according to the guidebook it should be a twenty-one-kilometre leg split in two with an overnight stay at Osmidirium Beach. But that would mean one of the legs would be only three or four hours long. A complete waste of a day, in other words.
    Another group of travel writers that hasn’t bothered thinking things through properly.
     
Heidi
    Ten kilometres?
    Ten kilometres behind us?
    You’re having a laugh. Ten kilometres in seven hours. Seven hours of unrelenting hellish, desperate trudging and scrambling, and it’s got us only ten kilometres'! In New Zealand we were doing almost thirty kilometres in the same time.
    Oh, only another four 0r five kilometers?
    When we reach the place where we're supposed to descend towards the beach I find it hard to contain my desire to scream.
    Beneath us is an almost sheer