The Bay of Fires Walk is eco-hiking for softies. Say goodbye to those trail boots and say hello to your trainers: this is wilderness without the wild. Sure, you'll still have to shoulder a rucksack for two days. But that's a small price to pay for an access-all-areas pass — only Bay of Fires Walkers get to camp in these remote areas — to the coastline of the Mount William National Park on Tasmania's northeastern tip.
And what a coastline. The Bay of Fires has wow factor even in a nation that knows a thing or two about world-class beaches. Broken only by sculptural headlands splashed by orange lichen — evidence of the air's exceptional purity — its quartzite sands are a dazzlingly white silky powder. The sea is an implausibly tropical turquoise. There's even something insouciant about the way the surf crumps lazily onto the shore.
Kilometre after kilometre of pristine sandy nothingness stretches beyond the start at Boulder Point, in the north of the national park. Yet you are not alone; not quite. At dusk marsupials graze behind Forester Beach Camp, your timber-floored, canvas-roofed home for night one, 9km from Boulder Point. And there are ghosts if you know where to look — the shell mounds of Aborigines who occupied the area for thousands of years before British explorers saw their cooking fires and coined the bay's name.
The goal of the 23km walk is the Bay of Fires Lodge, a glass-lined solar-powered outpost of eco-chic buried into a hilltop 20km from its nearest neighbours. During nearly two days here, your reward for a hard day of swimming in private bays, dipping a paddle into the Anson River or just gazing at an ocean which seems to lap your window is a hot shower plus cuisine that would not disgrace a top Sydney restaurant. Wilderness has never been so aspirational.
Need to know The four-day Bay of Fires Walk (bayoffireswalk.com.au) runs twice a month from October to April.
Great Escapes by Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith is published by Rough Guides, £12.99. To buy the book visit roughguides.com. For more green travel ideas, see greentraveller.co.uk.
