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I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace

I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace

Courier-Mail18 hours ago

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Many guided walks will show you amazing scenery but less common is one that makes you feel different.
We've not long started when the first sense of peace is seeded. Bare feet sink into sand so white it seems to glow, wild bays are bookended by striated fins of granite dusted in orange lichen, and the rush of waves is soothing. Then I spot some Tassie devil footprints. My body gives a little sigh.
Northeast Tasmania's Bay of Fires spans 50km of coastline, the southern end of which was this year awarded Best Australian Beach by beach expert Brad Farmer for Tourism Australia (12,000 beaches were surveyed in the process). It's famous for the brilliance of its silica sand, clear blue water and granite coast, whose colours can be blinding when the sun is out. That isn't today – graphite clouds hang low and the wind has whipped the ocean into messy waves – but it's beautiful regardless, and having it all to ourselves feels a rare treat.
Hikers at the Abbotsbury Beach stretch of the Bay of Fires. Picture: Laura Waters
Obvious tracks and signage are minimal around these parts. However, we're being guided by 'B' (Bryony) and Zac from Tasmanian Walking Company. Rather than a point-to-point hiking mission, our three-day itinerary will be a relaxed affair of easy rambles with a dash of kayaking, based at their award-winning eco-lodge, tucked in casuarina woodland and overlooking the ocean. It's an invitation to abandon any goals and just 'be'.
Our first afternoon has us wandering long beaches barefoot, crunching over dinky bays metres thick with washed-up seashells, and rock-hopping granite headlands colliding with an emerald interior. The pace is slow and it's hardly exhausting yet we're rewarded with a peppermint foot bath and a glass of bubbles on arrival at the lodge anyway, prepared by angelic and softly spoken spa attendant, Jess. I feel calm just looking at her.
The Bay of Fires Lodge overlooking the renowned beach. Picture: Tourism Australia
You often hear of architects wanting to build something that connects with the landscape and makes people feel something, and this lodge achieves both in spades. Two long timber and glass pavilions feature so many soaring louvred windows I almost feel outside when I'm in. You can see the stars from bed, the ocean from the shower. Wallabies drink from rock hollows in the garden.
It's off grid, using composting toilets, rainwater and solar power, and the mild inconvenience of only being able to charge my phone in the library is a deterrent from mindless scrolling. It's a disconnection from everything that doesn't matter and a connection with everything that does: nature, conversation and the sharing of good food, of which there is plenty.
Kayaking on Ansons River. Picture: Laura Waters
Our second day is heralded by the sun's lemony glow rising from the ocean, in full glory by the time we slip into kayaks for a morning paddle on Ansons River. Dark tannin waters mirror the blue skies, trees and occasional dolerite wall. A white-bellied sea eagle accompanies us for some time, pausing to swoop on a black swan in a David Attenborough-level display of nature.
The return to the lodge is on foot, across pink samphire saltmarsh and expansive rolling dunes – a white mini-Sahara – that Zac says look different every time he visits. 'First time I came through there was a big sand bowl here. Now it's held together by grasses,' he says. 'It's the kind of place that reminds you how connected everything is and what an impact other factors have, including us.' No one can resist running and rolling down the dunes in squeals of laughter – a tactile, simple pleasure. Another little surrender.
Walking from Ansons Bay towards the dunes. Picture: Laura Waters
We might have eschewed some aspects of modern life, but we're not short of creature comforts. Returns to the lodge are met with freshly baked cake leading into pre-dinner canapés (the garlic-butter scallops are a hit) and local wines served by a crackling fire. Dinner is kunzea braised lamb, but first there's time for a bath.
I wasn't entirely sure about stripping off outdoors in a windy 14C, but the tub, resting on a small deck tucked in the trees and overlooking the ocean, is sheltered, and the water deep and hot. In the distance, Eddystone Point Lighthouse flashes its beacon at me. Or am I flashing it? Anyway, it's a blissful indulgence.
The outdoor bathtub, surrounded by spectacular views. Picture: Laura Waters
On the third morning, the ocean has calmed like my mind. I attempt some yoga in the library – windows open for the ocean soundtrack – but end up lazing face down on the mat like a lizard in the sun.
The lodge team has seen it all before. 'I breathe the air and drink the water down here and I feel my body suck it in,' Zac says. Team leader Katie says, 'Some people break down during the end-of-tour reflection we invite guests to share in.' For three days, I've enjoyed a bubble of peace. I simply want to stay.
The writer travelled as a guest of Tasmanian Walking Company and Tourism Tasmania.
Stunning scenery near the Bay of Fires Lodge.
How to join a Bay of Fires guided hike
The three-day Bay of Fires Long Weekend with Tasmanian Walking Company starts at $1995 and includes lodge accommodation, guides, all meals (including beer and wine), and transfers to and from Launceston.
An alternative five-day Signature Walk covers more ground and includes a night in eco tents. Trips run October through May, plus a sprinkling of winter departures.
Originally published as I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace

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One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style
One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style

The Age

timean hour ago

  • The Age

One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style

Along a spiralling mountain trail on a morning when the air's so chilled and dry your breath feels ragged before it even leaves your diaphragm, I note that neither burgers nor beers from the night before are an ideal preparation for a 70-kilometre-or-so walk along South America's most famous hiking trail. 'Nothing in Patagonia is flat,' my guide, Patrick Smith (despite his notably Anglo moniker, he's very much a Chilean) warned. 'Even flat places in Patagonia are not flat.' And how about the notoriously wild, windy weather we may encounter here, amid one of the planet's last great icy wildernesses? 'The only thing I'm sure about the weather in Patagonia is that I'm never sure about the weather in Patagonia,' Smith says. Today it's windy but not 'Patagonia' windy. It's blowy enough for me to lose my hat, but Smith tells me an Irishman blew right off this mountain trail we are hiking. 'And last summer,' he says, 'I caught a Brazilian lady in the air and tackled her to the ground like a rugby player.' This is my first full day on the W Hike in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. One of the world's most beautiful walks, it's a five-day, 74-kilometre journey that traverses valleys, glaciers, mountain lakes and the tallest peaks in southern Patagonia. It has long been the domain of the hardened hiker, one who camps along the way, or sleeps in dorm rooms within refugios (basic mountain huts), and who wakes at dawn to line up at buffets for cornflakes and scrambled eggs. But I'm doing the W differently. Global adventure company Guided By Nature, in partnership with Australian operator Tasmanian Walking Company, has launched a new seven-day, six-night luxury guided hike which makes one of the world's most revered adventure challenges accessible to a wider range of hikers. We'll hike almost the entire trail and return all but one night to boutique lodgings that serve three-course gourmet meals with matched Chilean wines. DAYS TWO TO THREE: Of scrambled eggs and fresh legs Just because our scrambled eggs are fluffier, doesn't mean our hiking trails are shorter, Smith and fellow guide Juan Ignacio Rios Villablanca (now there's a proper Patagonian guide's name) says at a pre-hike briefing. They tell us we will walk an average of 16 kilometres, between seven and 10 hours, each day. The W Hike can be completed west to east or east to west. We're going east to west, so the most challenging, steeper section of the trail is earlier in the trek. We can hike it with fresh legs. My fresh legs will tackle a 22-kilometre slog up and down 800 metres of elevation to the base of Torres del Paine National Park's most iconic landform: Torres del Paine, three jagged granite peaks carved out by glaciers and erosion over millions of years and rising to almost 3000 metres. This section of the W Hike is the busiest, particularly in summer. Most of the 250,000 hikers who visit each year descend on the park between December and March. Guided By Nature's guided hikes are offered in November and April and the park is relatively deserted today as I traverse a dusty dirt road. Guanacos, a species of camelid native to South America and closely related to the llama, feed skittishly by the roadside. They're like hamburger patties to the park's most celebrated resident, the puma, though Villablanca says puma sightings are rare, even though we are moving through an area with the world's highest density of the creatures. They hunt mostly at night and are notoriously stealthy. 'If you're lucky enough to see a puma,' he says. 'It has already seen you 10 times.' But five minutes into our hike, three pumas run right across the trail in front of me, chasing a herd of doomed European hares. Villablanca shakes his head and grins. 'It's all downhill from here,' he says. He's wrong, of course. It's so uphill that my muscles begin to feel like fraying rubber bands. I climb on rocky trails up and across the sheer sides of mountains, through lenga (beech) forest, along suspension bridges over the glassy Asencio River, giving way to locals carrying supplies on horseback. The trail gets perpendicular near the top (fortuitous that I found the hiking shoes I'd stashed in a box in my storage shed after my last hike, around 2019). But there's a reward for those who push through pain to get to the top: one of the world's most famous alpine vistas. Across a jade-coloured lake distorted by glacial 'flour', produced when rocks are ground down by glaciers across millions of years, lie the Torres Del Paine. The first tourist to see these, a 24-year-old Scottish travel writer named Lady Florence Dixie who travelled here by horse in 1879, described them as 'three tall peaks of reddish hue and in sharp exact facsimiles of Cleopatra's needles'. Her accounts provided the outside world with its first glimpse of a wilderness at the end of the world. Going downhill requires an entirely different set of muscles. Gravity helps, at least initially, and then it turns on me as I discover delicate tendons necessary for braking on the outside of both knees I never knew I had. By the end of the trail, I hobble into the carpark like I'd just fought a war. I slept in a tent when I climbed Kilimanjaro; I used Asia's sketchiest squat toilets on a trek in the Indian Himalayas; but now a van is here to transport me to my private lodge. The lodge's lounge looks out to a calm lake and there's a log fire burning. A bottle of Chilean Carmenere, which looks to have my name on it, and a meal of grilled prawns, local lamb and calafate berry ice-cream follow. Through floor-to-ceiling windows I wouldn't dare cover with curtains, I see the snow-capped mountains of the Paine massif lit by a smudge of twinkling Milky Way. I fall asleep under my duck-down duvet long before I get to ponder if I've gone soft in middle age. DAYS FOUR TO FIVE: A dorm is now the norm Adios chef Valeska, ciao linen sheets. Today I hike to a refugio and a shared dorm room. Torres del Paine may be famous for winds that can reach 180km/h and beyond, but on this brisk, blue-sky April morning, I can't feel a breath of it. So I ride on the deck of a catamaran across Lake Pehoe, the mountains reflected on its surface. Today we hike the western edge of the W trail to Grey glacier, the last leg for those walking east to west. It's a shorter trek and a respite after yesterday's skip the central valley for now: that's the power you yield when you dissect an arduous hike like this to make it more user-friendly. I love the flatness of this trail, staring up at mountains that dazzle with refracted sunlight. Then it climbs and climbs and climbs. Now I scramble along a narrow rocky crest between the park's tallest peak, Cerro Paine Grande (2884 metres) and Grey Lake below. Cascades from Paine Grande gush out, feeding the tiny creeks I cross. Straight ahead is Grey Glacier, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world's second-largest extra-polar icefield, which once covered all of southern Chile and Argentina. Beside it is Grey refugio, a two-star hut with room for 60 hikers. Inside I find a bar with a five-star view of the mountain range, a worthy spot to rest hamstrings, quadriceps and calves that have been forced to eccentrically contract to prevent a tumble down the mountain paths. Dinner's a passable buffet of pasta and grilled chicken at a table in the corner, where I see the mountain in sunset turn a shade of lilac. Later, I'm reminded of what it's like to share a dorm room: the race to get to sleep to beat the other snorers, the shuddering on your bunk as your upstairs neighbour sneaks off to the toilet at 2.30am. I'm totally OK that we're doing it for just one night. Next morning, I take a Zodiac to the edge of Grey glacier, passing icebergs along the way. The glacier's as blue as it is white – air bubbles squeezed out of the glacier across hundreds of years make it appear bright blue. I wear crampons to grip the slippery surface and use an ice axe for stability to walk across the ice, stopping at a lagoon as turquoise as any in the South Pacific. I pick at the edge of the water and place the tiny shards of centuries-old ice into my mouth. Below the surface, there are caves. I descend into one along a rope attached by a guide. Below, water flows through a chamber within the cave, just like a waterslide. The landscape changes as the ice melts, creating new lagoons and caves between which the guides build new paths. Melts can reveal hidden wonders. In 2022, palaeontologists unearthed fossilised remains of a dolphin-like creature – an ichthyosaurs – from within the boundaries of the Torres del Paine National Park. These creatures are thought to have existed between 90 and 245 million years ago. We leave the ice and retreat to a grey-sand beach to catch a catamaran to where our van driver waits for us. Tonight, I don't wear thongs in the shower. DAY SIX: In a world of shock and phwoar Today we're returning to the centre of the W, but where two days prior we walked west to Grey glacier, now we're hiking east, to the French Valley. Today there's even less wind than days four and five and the stillness makes the landscape look surreal. I bug my hiking companions with random adjectives – sometimes just sounds – round most corners. 'Phwoar'. But you should see this place. In a park of plenty, here's the most plentiful. The head of the French Valley is a cirque formed by tall cliffs. Huge walls two kilometres high punctuate the western region, while the eastern face could be the planet's largest cathedral. Suspension bridges, which allow for just two to cross at a time, provide access to the valley across the clearest river I've seen, Rio del Frances. All around me, firetrees catch the autumn sunlight, providing the illusion that its evergreen vivid red flowers are actually igniting. While Chile is ineffably peaceful, it's not silent. The W Hike never is. Water gushes from everywhere: waterfalls, creeks and rivers; birds cry out; and sometimes I hear drumming as Magellanic woodpeckers search for insects in the trees of the surrounding forest. The path's much flatter in the French Valley. During the practice hike on day two, one of my fellow hikers – a grimacing, but jolly, Utahn with a dicky knee – surprised me when he smiled through his moustache and declared to no one in particular: 'I'm in that zone.' Is this what he meant? I'm seeing butterflies I'm not sure are really there. I'm hearing sweet, soft music in my head. And I'm grinning as if it's happy gas I'm sucking from my hydration pack, not water with the extra electrolyte tablet I add each morning because I think it makes me walk faster. We walk higher and higher up the valley wall through what looks like a Japanese ornamental garden. Below, Rio del Frances sparkles where it turns into rapids between its grey rock banks. Above, glaciers hang over the edge of the Grande glacier, like layers of icing oozing off a fresh-baked cake. DAYS SIX TO SEVEN: No pain, no gain We'll have a long, last dinner tonight, a final chance to bond, since we won't get to clean our teeth together in a communal bathroom next morning. How do I feel that I didn't do the W hike in one go, completing it like all the rest: east to west, or west to east? (We miss 13 kilometres of the W, a section east of the French Valley that connects with our first-day hike to the Base of the Towers). Well, I feel tired. Really tired. I hiked 68 kilometres. I walked for 30 hours, a lot of it uphill, a lot of it downhill. My legs ache and my blistered big right toe doesn't seem to care that I slept in my own room, not a shared dorm. On my return to Australia, a friend asks why I didn't camp along the trail to feel like I really did the hike. He told me of his journey with his 70-year-old father. Their tent nearly blew away one night in a violent storm; his hiking shoes disintegrated on the second day so he walked in the trainers he brought for the plane. They both suffered diarrhoea from drinking contaminated water. 'Maybe you answered your own question,' I suggest. Five other hikes to tackle in relative comfor t Haute Route, Europe Hike for nine days from Chamonix in France to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, sampling gourmet cuisine of the three countries (Italy, France and Switzerland) along the way. Numerous travel companies provide luxury guided tours with boutique accommodation in mountain villages. Loading Milford Track, New Zealand The iconic Kiwi hike, a 54-kilometre trek to Milford Sound on the South Island's wild west coast, can be done in comfort across four or five nights, staying in luxurious mountain lodges with gourmet meals and private rooms between November and April. Travel companies offer various experiences. Machu Picchu, Peru Take a seven-day fully guided tour of the lesser-known valleys surrounding Machu Picchu, such as the Lares and Sacred valleys, staying in boutique mountain lodges along the way. You'll still get to end your tour at this well-known wonder of the world, but you'll avoid the often booked-out Inca Trail, a four-day hike requiring nightly camping. Camino de Santiago, Europe Many travel companies offer all-levels-of-luxury tours hiking a portion of this 800 kilometre pilgrimage trail across (mostly) Spain. There are tours of between four and 30-days duration with accommodation everywhere from Benedictine monasteries to five-star private lodges. Appalachian Trail, US Dozens of luxury tour companies offer the opportunity to hike a portion of America's most famous hike, which begins in Georgia and ends in Maine, passing through 14 states and covering 3540 kilometres. Tours include inn-to-inn hiking, staying in the best accommodation available with meals at restaurants. The details Loading Tour Guided By Nature's seven-day/six-night guided tour of the W Hike in Torres del Paine National Park, with all meals included and accommodation at Kau Rio Serrano Lodge, from $9895 a person departing in November and April. See Fly Qantas ( and LATAM ( fly from Sydney to Santiago four times a week from $2500 return, with onward connections with LATAM to Puerto Natales (where guests are met).

One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style
One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style

Sydney Morning Herald

timean hour ago

  • Sydney Morning Herald

One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style

Along a spiralling mountain trail on a morning when the air's so chilled and dry your breath feels ragged before it even leaves your diaphragm, I note that neither burgers nor beers from the night before are an ideal preparation for a 70-kilometre-or-so walk along South America's most famous hiking trail. 'Nothing in Patagonia is flat,' my guide, Patrick Smith (despite his notably Anglo moniker, he's very much a Chilean) warned. 'Even flat places in Patagonia are not flat.' And how about the notoriously wild, windy weather we may encounter here, amid one of the planet's last great icy wildernesses? 'The only thing I'm sure about the weather in Patagonia is that I'm never sure about the weather in Patagonia,' Smith says. Today it's windy but not 'Patagonia' windy. It's blowy enough for me to lose my hat, but Smith tells me an Irishman blew right off this mountain trail we are hiking. 'And last summer,' he says, 'I caught a Brazilian lady in the air and tackled her to the ground like a rugby player.' This is my first full day on the W Hike in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. One of the world's most beautiful walks, it's a five-day, 74-kilometre journey that traverses valleys, glaciers, mountain lakes and the tallest peaks in southern Patagonia. It has long been the domain of the hardened hiker, one who camps along the way, or sleeps in dorm rooms within refugios (basic mountain huts), and who wakes at dawn to line up at buffets for cornflakes and scrambled eggs. But I'm doing the W differently. Global adventure company Guided By Nature, in partnership with Australian operator Tasmanian Walking Company, has launched a new seven-day, six-night luxury guided hike which makes one of the world's most revered adventure challenges accessible to a wider range of hikers. We'll hike almost the entire trail and return all but one night to boutique lodgings that serve three-course gourmet meals with matched Chilean wines. DAYS TWO TO THREE: Of scrambled eggs and fresh legs Just because our scrambled eggs are fluffier, doesn't mean our hiking trails are shorter, Smith and fellow guide Juan Ignacio Rios Villablanca (now there's a proper Patagonian guide's name) says at a pre-hike briefing. They tell us we will walk an average of 16 kilometres, between seven and 10 hours, each day. The W Hike can be completed west to east or east to west. We're going east to west, so the most challenging, steeper section of the trail is earlier in the trek. We can hike it with fresh legs. My fresh legs will tackle a 22-kilometre slog up and down 800 metres of elevation to the base of Torres del Paine National Park's most iconic landform: Torres del Paine, three jagged granite peaks carved out by glaciers and erosion over millions of years and rising to almost 3000 metres. This section of the W Hike is the busiest, particularly in summer. Most of the 250,000 hikers who visit each year descend on the park between December and March. Guided By Nature's guided hikes are offered in November and April and the park is relatively deserted today as I traverse a dusty dirt road. Guanacos, a species of camelid native to South America and closely related to the llama, feed skittishly by the roadside. They're like hamburger patties to the park's most celebrated resident, the puma, though Villablanca says puma sightings are rare, even though we are moving through an area with the world's highest density of the creatures. They hunt mostly at night and are notoriously stealthy. 'If you're lucky enough to see a puma,' he says. 'It has already seen you 10 times.' But five minutes into our hike, three pumas run right across the trail in front of me, chasing a herd of doomed European hares. Villablanca shakes his head and grins. 'It's all downhill from here,' he says. He's wrong, of course. It's so uphill that my muscles begin to feel like fraying rubber bands. I climb on rocky trails up and across the sheer sides of mountains, through lenga (beech) forest, along suspension bridges over the glassy Asencio River, giving way to locals carrying supplies on horseback. The trail gets perpendicular near the top (fortuitous that I found the hiking shoes I'd stashed in a box in my storage shed after my last hike, around 2019). But there's a reward for those who push through pain to get to the top: one of the world's most famous alpine vistas. Across a jade-coloured lake distorted by glacial 'flour', produced when rocks are ground down by glaciers across millions of years, lie the Torres Del Paine. The first tourist to see these, a 24-year-old Scottish travel writer named Lady Florence Dixie who travelled here by horse in 1879, described them as 'three tall peaks of reddish hue and in sharp exact facsimiles of Cleopatra's needles'. Her accounts provided the outside world with its first glimpse of a wilderness at the end of the world. Going downhill requires an entirely different set of muscles. Gravity helps, at least initially, and then it turns on me as I discover delicate tendons necessary for braking on the outside of both knees I never knew I had. By the end of the trail, I hobble into the carpark like I'd just fought a war. I slept in a tent when I climbed Kilimanjaro; I used Asia's sketchiest squat toilets on a trek in the Indian Himalayas; but now a van is here to transport me to my private lodge. The lodge's lounge looks out to a calm lake and there's a log fire burning. A bottle of Chilean Carmenere, which looks to have my name on it, and a meal of grilled prawns, local lamb and calafate berry ice-cream follow. Through floor-to-ceiling windows I wouldn't dare cover with curtains, I see the snow-capped mountains of the Paine massif lit by a smudge of twinkling Milky Way. I fall asleep under my duck-down duvet long before I get to ponder if I've gone soft in middle age. DAYS FOUR TO FIVE: A dorm is now the norm Adios chef Valeska, ciao linen sheets. Today I hike to a refugio and a shared dorm room. Torres del Paine may be famous for winds that can reach 180km/h and beyond, but on this brisk, blue-sky April morning, I can't feel a breath of it. So I ride on the deck of a catamaran across Lake Pehoe, the mountains reflected on its surface. Today we hike the western edge of the W trail to Grey glacier, the last leg for those walking east to west. It's a shorter trek and a respite after yesterday's skip the central valley for now: that's the power you yield when you dissect an arduous hike like this to make it more user-friendly. I love the flatness of this trail, staring up at mountains that dazzle with refracted sunlight. Then it climbs and climbs and climbs. Now I scramble along a narrow rocky crest between the park's tallest peak, Cerro Paine Grande (2884 metres) and Grey Lake below. Cascades from Paine Grande gush out, feeding the tiny creeks I cross. Straight ahead is Grey Glacier, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world's second-largest extra-polar icefield, which once covered all of southern Chile and Argentina. Beside it is Grey refugio, a two-star hut with room for 60 hikers. Inside I find a bar with a five-star view of the mountain range, a worthy spot to rest hamstrings, quadriceps and calves that have been forced to eccentrically contract to prevent a tumble down the mountain paths. Dinner's a passable buffet of pasta and grilled chicken at a table in the corner, where I see the mountain in sunset turn a shade of lilac. Later, I'm reminded of what it's like to share a dorm room: the race to get to sleep to beat the other snorers, the shuddering on your bunk as your upstairs neighbour sneaks off to the toilet at 2.30am. I'm totally OK that we're doing it for just one night. Next morning, I take a Zodiac to the edge of Grey glacier, passing icebergs along the way. The glacier's as blue as it is white – air bubbles squeezed out of the glacier across hundreds of years make it appear bright blue. I wear crampons to grip the slippery surface and use an ice axe for stability to walk across the ice, stopping at a lagoon as turquoise as any in the South Pacific. I pick at the edge of the water and place the tiny shards of centuries-old ice into my mouth. Below the surface, there are caves. I descend into one along a rope attached by a guide. Below, water flows through a chamber within the cave, just like a waterslide. The landscape changes as the ice melts, creating new lagoons and caves between which the guides build new paths. Melts can reveal hidden wonders. In 2022, palaeontologists unearthed fossilised remains of a dolphin-like creature – an ichthyosaurs – from within the boundaries of the Torres del Paine National Park. These creatures are thought to have existed between 90 and 245 million years ago. We leave the ice and retreat to a grey-sand beach to catch a catamaran to where our van driver waits for us. Tonight, I don't wear thongs in the shower. DAY SIX: In a world of shock and phwoar Today we're returning to the centre of the W, but where two days prior we walked west to Grey glacier, now we're hiking east, to the French Valley. Today there's even less wind than days four and five and the stillness makes the landscape look surreal. I bug my hiking companions with random adjectives – sometimes just sounds – round most corners. 'Phwoar'. But you should see this place. In a park of plenty, here's the most plentiful. The head of the French Valley is a cirque formed by tall cliffs. Huge walls two kilometres high punctuate the western region, while the eastern face could be the planet's largest cathedral. Suspension bridges, which allow for just two to cross at a time, provide access to the valley across the clearest river I've seen, Rio del Frances. All around me, firetrees catch the autumn sunlight, providing the illusion that its evergreen vivid red flowers are actually igniting. While Chile is ineffably peaceful, it's not silent. The W Hike never is. Water gushes from everywhere: waterfalls, creeks and rivers; birds cry out; and sometimes I hear drumming as Magellanic woodpeckers search for insects in the trees of the surrounding forest. The path's much flatter in the French Valley. During the practice hike on day two, one of my fellow hikers – a grimacing, but jolly, Utahn with a dicky knee – surprised me when he smiled through his moustache and declared to no one in particular: 'I'm in that zone.' Is this what he meant? I'm seeing butterflies I'm not sure are really there. I'm hearing sweet, soft music in my head. And I'm grinning as if it's happy gas I'm sucking from my hydration pack, not water with the extra electrolyte tablet I add each morning because I think it makes me walk faster. We walk higher and higher up the valley wall through what looks like a Japanese ornamental garden. Below, Rio del Frances sparkles where it turns into rapids between its grey rock banks. Above, glaciers hang over the edge of the Grande glacier, like layers of icing oozing off a fresh-baked cake. DAYS SIX TO SEVEN: No pain, no gain We'll have a long, last dinner tonight, a final chance to bond, since we won't get to clean our teeth together in a communal bathroom next morning. How do I feel that I didn't do the W hike in one go, completing it like all the rest: east to west, or west to east? (We miss 13 kilometres of the W, a section east of the French Valley that connects with our first-day hike to the Base of the Towers). Well, I feel tired. Really tired. I hiked 68 kilometres. I walked for 30 hours, a lot of it uphill, a lot of it downhill. My legs ache and my blistered big right toe doesn't seem to care that I slept in my own room, not a shared dorm. On my return to Australia, a friend asks why I didn't camp along the trail to feel like I really did the hike. He told me of his journey with his 70-year-old father. Their tent nearly blew away one night in a violent storm; his hiking shoes disintegrated on the second day so he walked in the trainers he brought for the plane. They both suffered diarrhoea from drinking contaminated water. 'Maybe you answered your own question,' I suggest. Five other hikes to tackle in relative comfor t Haute Route, Europe Hike for nine days from Chamonix in France to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, sampling gourmet cuisine of the three countries (Italy, France and Switzerland) along the way. Numerous travel companies provide luxury guided tours with boutique accommodation in mountain villages. Loading Milford Track, New Zealand The iconic Kiwi hike, a 54-kilometre trek to Milford Sound on the South Island's wild west coast, can be done in comfort across four or five nights, staying in luxurious mountain lodges with gourmet meals and private rooms between November and April. Travel companies offer various experiences. Machu Picchu, Peru Take a seven-day fully guided tour of the lesser-known valleys surrounding Machu Picchu, such as the Lares and Sacred valleys, staying in boutique mountain lodges along the way. You'll still get to end your tour at this well-known wonder of the world, but you'll avoid the often booked-out Inca Trail, a four-day hike requiring nightly camping. Camino de Santiago, Europe Many travel companies offer all-levels-of-luxury tours hiking a portion of this 800 kilometre pilgrimage trail across (mostly) Spain. There are tours of between four and 30-days duration with accommodation everywhere from Benedictine monasteries to five-star private lodges. Appalachian Trail, US Dozens of luxury tour companies offer the opportunity to hike a portion of America's most famous hike, which begins in Georgia and ends in Maine, passing through 14 states and covering 3540 kilometres. Tours include inn-to-inn hiking, staying in the best accommodation available with meals at restaurants. The details Loading Tour Guided By Nature's seven-day/six-night guided tour of the W Hike in Torres del Paine National Park, with all meals included and accommodation at Kau Rio Serrano Lodge, from $9895 a person departing in November and April. See Fly Qantas ( and LATAM ( fly from Sydney to Santiago four times a week from $2500 return, with onward connections with LATAM to Puerto Natales (where guests are met).

I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace
I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace

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time18 hours ago

  • Courier-Mail

I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace

Don't miss out on the headlines from Lifestyle. Followed categories will be added to My News. Many guided walks will show you amazing scenery but less common is one that makes you feel different. We've not long started when the first sense of peace is seeded. Bare feet sink into sand so white it seems to glow, wild bays are bookended by striated fins of granite dusted in orange lichen, and the rush of waves is soothing. Then I spot some Tassie devil footprints. My body gives a little sigh. Northeast Tasmania's Bay of Fires spans 50km of coastline, the southern end of which was this year awarded Best Australian Beach by beach expert Brad Farmer for Tourism Australia (12,000 beaches were surveyed in the process). It's famous for the brilliance of its silica sand, clear blue water and granite coast, whose colours can be blinding when the sun is out. That isn't today – graphite clouds hang low and the wind has whipped the ocean into messy waves – but it's beautiful regardless, and having it all to ourselves feels a rare treat. Hikers at the Abbotsbury Beach stretch of the Bay of Fires. Picture: Laura Waters Obvious tracks and signage are minimal around these parts. However, we're being guided by 'B' (Bryony) and Zac from Tasmanian Walking Company. Rather than a point-to-point hiking mission, our three-day itinerary will be a relaxed affair of easy rambles with a dash of kayaking, based at their award-winning eco-lodge, tucked in casuarina woodland and overlooking the ocean. It's an invitation to abandon any goals and just 'be'. Our first afternoon has us wandering long beaches barefoot, crunching over dinky bays metres thick with washed-up seashells, and rock-hopping granite headlands colliding with an emerald interior. The pace is slow and it's hardly exhausting yet we're rewarded with a peppermint foot bath and a glass of bubbles on arrival at the lodge anyway, prepared by angelic and softly spoken spa attendant, Jess. I feel calm just looking at her. The Bay of Fires Lodge overlooking the renowned beach. Picture: Tourism Australia You often hear of architects wanting to build something that connects with the landscape and makes people feel something, and this lodge achieves both in spades. Two long timber and glass pavilions feature so many soaring louvred windows I almost feel outside when I'm in. You can see the stars from bed, the ocean from the shower. Wallabies drink from rock hollows in the garden. It's off grid, using composting toilets, rainwater and solar power, and the mild inconvenience of only being able to charge my phone in the library is a deterrent from mindless scrolling. It's a disconnection from everything that doesn't matter and a connection with everything that does: nature, conversation and the sharing of good food, of which there is plenty. Kayaking on Ansons River. Picture: Laura Waters Our second day is heralded by the sun's lemony glow rising from the ocean, in full glory by the time we slip into kayaks for a morning paddle on Ansons River. Dark tannin waters mirror the blue skies, trees and occasional dolerite wall. A white-bellied sea eagle accompanies us for some time, pausing to swoop on a black swan in a David Attenborough-level display of nature. The return to the lodge is on foot, across pink samphire saltmarsh and expansive rolling dunes – a white mini-Sahara – that Zac says look different every time he visits. 'First time I came through there was a big sand bowl here. Now it's held together by grasses,' he says. 'It's the kind of place that reminds you how connected everything is and what an impact other factors have, including us.' No one can resist running and rolling down the dunes in squeals of laughter – a tactile, simple pleasure. Another little surrender. Walking from Ansons Bay towards the dunes. Picture: Laura Waters We might have eschewed some aspects of modern life, but we're not short of creature comforts. Returns to the lodge are met with freshly baked cake leading into pre-dinner canapés (the garlic-butter scallops are a hit) and local wines served by a crackling fire. Dinner is kunzea braised lamb, but first there's time for a bath. I wasn't entirely sure about stripping off outdoors in a windy 14C, but the tub, resting on a small deck tucked in the trees and overlooking the ocean, is sheltered, and the water deep and hot. In the distance, Eddystone Point Lighthouse flashes its beacon at me. Or am I flashing it? Anyway, it's a blissful indulgence. The outdoor bathtub, surrounded by spectacular views. Picture: Laura Waters On the third morning, the ocean has calmed like my mind. I attempt some yoga in the library – windows open for the ocean soundtrack – but end up lazing face down on the mat like a lizard in the sun. The lodge team has seen it all before. 'I breathe the air and drink the water down here and I feel my body suck it in,' Zac says. Team leader Katie says, 'Some people break down during the end-of-tour reflection we invite guests to share in.' For three days, I've enjoyed a bubble of peace. I simply want to stay. The writer travelled as a guest of Tasmanian Walking Company and Tourism Tasmania. Stunning scenery near the Bay of Fires Lodge. How to join a Bay of Fires guided hike The three-day Bay of Fires Long Weekend with Tasmanian Walking Company starts at $1995 and includes lodge accommodation, guides, all meals (including beer and wine), and transfers to and from Launceston. An alternative five-day Signature Walk covers more ground and includes a night in eco tents. Trips run October through May, plus a sprinkling of winter departures. Originally published as I hiked the Bay of Fires with Tasmanian Walking Co, and found peace

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