NEXT STOP, ANTARCTICA
Have you ever wondered what the very bottom of Australia looks like?
It’s a large pocket of World Heritage-listed wilderness and a marine reserve in the south-west of Tasmania that is so rugged and isolated, the only way to get there is by foot or by boat. There are no roads.
The region is dominated by a harbour — more than twice the size of Sydney Harbour — with seemingly endless waterways full of dark, rusty water. It’s as if Mother Nature made a cuppa and left the tea bag in too long.
All around are buttongrass plains, jagged quartzite ridges rising straight out of the Southern Ocean and layer upon layer of tall mountain ranges reaching into the clouds and fading off into the distance.
We were on board the Odalisque in Bathurst Harbour, a 20m ‘floating hotel’ moored in protected Clayton’s Corner and, thanks to some clever manoeuvring by our skipper Pieter van der Woude, there wasn’t another soul in sight.
Pieter built the and started boat charters in 2015 after spending decades as an abalone diver as well as a master of vessels working off this southern coast of Tasmania and resupplying Australian Antarctic bases. He knows
