Beach Dreaming at Bicheno

At Bicheno, our next stop after Ross, we spent two nights in Sandpiper Cottage, just a few steps away from a gorgeous beach populated by the cottage’s namesake birds.  Bicheno is a popular seaside resort on the east coast of Tasmania, attracting many tourists in the summer.  This being late autumn, tourists were thankfully noticeable by their absence.  There is something about the beach out of season.  It’s a world apart from its hot, sandy, noisy and crowded summer counterpart and for that reason vastly more appealing to me. 

 When I was a teenager, going to the beach was what you did unless you wanted to be thought of as weird.  In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I was weird but just too cowardly to advertise it to my peers.  So, although I knew from bitter experience that spending a day basting myself on the sand in the blazing heat of summer would be an agony of embarrassment and discomfort, I went along meekly for the ride.  The bane of my life back then was my fair, freckled and sunburn prone skin, most of which I still have, apart from a few chunks sliced off by dermatologists over the years.  Ignorance about the effects of sun damage was our excuse of course.  Even if we’d known however, I suspect that in the spirit of the times, we wouldn’t have cared.  Not only had the word melanoma not entered the lexicon, the precautionary principle was as foreign a concept to us as safe sex.  Back then, being brown was not only fashionable it was mandatory.  Cocoa was the shade of preference. Toffee, coffee, honey and gold were okay options as well.  You could possibly scrape by with an orange fake tan if it wasn’t too streaky or smelly.  Failing all else, shades of lobster or tomato would do.  What you could never be was white.  Forget sun bathing, you had to fry.  Covering up was not an option, unless it was with oil.  Oily and tanned is an okay look I suppose.  Oily, white and skinny is not, unless you’re an oven ready chicken.  In my case, after an hour or so of baking, liberally anointed, the chicken turned to frazzled bacon. 

 In quest of the body bronze or as near to it as you could get, the routine was to hit the sand along with the rosy fingers of dawn and stay there immobile until the golden rays dissolved into dusk, along with your fried brains.  Apart from anything else, it was boring, sweaty and gritty and left me with a lasting loathing of the beach in summer.

 The beach we discovered outside our back door at Bicheno was nothing like that.  It was an enchanted vista of silvery water, brooding sky, softly shadowed sand, and blessed isolation.  No people, no pressure to be black, brown or brindle and thank goodness no oil.  The only sounds were those of the waves, the birds, and the breeze rustling the sea grass. 

 Apart from a few trails of footsteps and paw prints, there was nothing to show anyone but the birds frequented this lovely place.  Each time we walked along it we didn’t encounter another soul.  That is unless sandpipers have souls, and there’s no reason to suppose they don’t.  It was funny to watch these little fuss budget birds, a constant whirl of motion, as they fossicked busily, pecking, probing and darting from one spot to the next.  So quickly did they scamper along the tide line, their little legs twinkling, they seemed to skim like miniature skaters across the surface. 

You can see forever on a beach like this, as far as you want to look, ahead, behind, above, down at your sand covered feet, or away to the far-off point where the distant hills fold away into the sky.  There’s scope here in the vast tranquil space, to just be, to let go what's gone and surrender yourself to what's to come.  There seems for a brief while at least nothing else to want or need.  For us, Sandpiper Cottage at Bicheno was a special place - one of the highlights of our trip.