Tasmania - The Overland Track

I'd wanted to walk Tasmania's Overland Track for as long as I could remember – which left a peculiar feeling that I'd wanted to do it my whole life, ever since I was born.

It was only once my friends and I were traipsing the moors on our first of six days that I questioned my desire to be there. I'm a part time bushwalker at best. I play sport for the game, not the exercise. And yeah, I like views. A bit. My mother still quotes me, aged ten, cursing to the whole Flinders Rangers that "if you've seen one tree, you've seen them all".

The first day of the Overland Track is hard. We plodded uphill with our 20kg packs. I absentmindedly plucked at tall sprigs of buttongrass, then guiltily checked if anyone had seen me vandalise a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And I felt guilty too because this was my trip, my plan. If the views were subpar, the distances too far, the weather too foul, the dehydrated food inedible, it was all my fault.

But the days went by well enough. Certainly there were beautiful views, short distances as well as long, fair weather along with the sleet. (The rehydrated meals, regrettably, were wholly unappetising.)

We met other hikers at the communal huts and campgrounds: the photographers with 25kg of camera equipment apiece; the tourists who didn't expect to need wet weather gear; the fanatics doing the whole hike in three days. Hi, what's your name, where are you from, what's been your highlight? I dodged the last question.

So, what makes a good trip? The sum total of happy moments? Returning home after a week by a beach drinking your weight in piña coladas, satisfied you fulfilled society's every criterion for the dream escape? Being able to say you saw or conquered something "because it was there"?

Let me tell you about the moment that made the Overland Track for me.

I am sitting on an elevated camping platform – slatted wood to protect the underbrush and my city-soft skin – as daylight fades. Those last technicolour rays hit the gums on the horizontal. Beyond lies a serene lake and further off, the Bluff. I am quiet. It is still. And this visual spread lay here for days, weeks, months, years, millennia before I arrived. It sits here through world wars, stock market crashes and property booms. It is here when my job is a mess of hectic late nights and my boss is a jerk. It will be here tomorrow, after I am gone. And it reminds me that there are countless other sublime scenes waiting for me to discover them.