Driving a Tesla Through the Wild is the Best Way to Do Tasmania

“Close your eyes, take a breath deep into the bottom of your belly and try to find a meditative state,” says sauna master James Ross. “There’s something about the cold water that gets you into that stillness almost instantly. If you can stay there, it’s like nothing else on earth.”

A magpie’s warble and the creak-shuffle-thud of a swaying wooden dock are the only soundtrack as I lower myself into the 10°C water, a frisson of shock dissolving the boundary where my body ends and Lake Derby – a former tin mine now home to platypuses – begins.

I catch my breath. Somewhere behind my eyelids, pink sparks fire and a welcome numbness begins to replace the biting cold. A minute in, the world drops away. More time passes and I become vaguely aware that I might never have felt this peaceful before. I peel open my eyes. Ross, an ex-mainlander who now calls Tasmania home, peers down at me from the dock, his face haloed by sunlight. As the world rushes back in, so does the sensation of cold. It clutches at my muscles as I scramble up the ladder before sliding back into the sauna where a wall-mounted thermometer reads 85°C. Inside the glass-fronted cedar box, my skin reacts to the temperature change by sending tingling endorphins up my arms and legs. Outside, a playful pair of swallows loop and dip at their reflections on the cool, still water.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I heard about the Lake Derby plunge for the first time. Tucking into a homemade crab-and-lemon sandwich, my 82-year-old seat neighbour on the flight from Brisbane told me how the lake’s chilly depths and the famous floating woodfired sauna had made her a winter-swimming convert 18 months before. “Detour through Derby on your way from Lonnie to the coast,” she instructed. “It’s not the quickest route but you’ll get to see some magnificent scenery along the way.”

I’m in town to do just that. The Tasmanian Tesla Traverse is a six-night road trip between lutruwita’s two biggest cities by way of its wildly beautiful east coast. I pick up my brand-new wheels at Launceston Airport and have nothing but unplanned hours to fill between overnight stays at three of the state’s most luxurious lodgings: Stillwater Seven in Launceston; the Piermont Retreat, in the Swansea bush; and The Tasman in Hobart.

I navigate the first short drive to Stillwater Seven, perched on the edge of Cataract Gorge, with a warning from the cheerful attendant who briefed me on the car ringing in my ears: “The acceleration will throw you into the back seat if you’re not used to it!” To my relief, the Tesla and I seem to be simpatico (quiet and in no real rush).

My room’s moody exposed timber and industrial steel framework provides a time-capsule glimpse at the building’s past life as a flour mill, while soft milky light pours in from a sash window framing the Tamar River. There’s a hidden surprise, too: a gleaming Art Deco cabinet carved from Tasmanian blackwood opens with a flourish to reveal what co-owner Chris McNally has dubbed “the maxi-bar”: a cornucopia of local delicacies alongside the fixings for tomorrow’s breakfast. Soul music – based on my personal preferences – plays from the TV speakers as Chris returns with a pot of tea. Even as I marvel at the unstructured time stretched out in the days ahead, the temptation to dice it up into logical itinerary chunks tugs at my mind.

I set off from Launceston and wind soundlessly through a flipbook of shapeshifting country: rolling hills tufted with bunches of wild daffodils; high-altitude forest around the border of Ben Lomond National Park; and Mount Barrow, one of the state’s highest peaks.

Outside the Derby Fire Station (where a public EV charging station hints at the shifting tourism demographic of this historic mining town), I park and follow the signs along a gravel path through the wattle to meet Ross and that icy-cold water. When talk turns to my ride, he mentions how much he loves electric vehicles. I expect him to launch into a tyre-kicking appraisal of the Tesla Model 3’s specs that I’ve come to expect in my brief time driving one but he surprises me. “I love them because they force you to take a beat along the journey. You have to plan to switch off and recharge, literally.”

Warming up later with a steaming bowl of chicken and corn soup at Two Doors Down, Derby’s café and mountain biking shop, I weigh up the options for my next stop. There’s postcard-perfect Little Blue Lake, a 25-minute drive up a heavily wooded road out of town, or the Blue Tier Giant Walk, an easy 15-minute amble near Weldborough, where Ross promises I’ll find a Tolkien-esque forest in which grows Australia’s widest tree, a majestic eucalyptus regnans that has a base equal to the arm span of 15 people.

Little Blue Lake wins the coin toss and after a brief intermission to watch an echidna shuffle across the road to its mossy burrow, I’m looking out on a Gatorade-blue expanse, fringed by red-ribboned limestone and overhanging scrub. A sign warns against swimming due to the water’s high mineral content – the reason for its vivid colour. While there’s not much else to do here but sit and absorb the view, I see other visitors on the sloping rock that surrounds the lake doing exactly that. People here, I’m beginning to realise, understand the power of the pause.

So, too, does the seafood. “We really slow them down in the river,” explains Cassie Melrose, co-owner of Melshell Oyster Shack in Dolphin Sands, where I’d been told the creamiest morsels on the coast are served from a turquoise caravan. Nestled among tens of thousands of sun-bleached shells, stacked in piles and wedged into wire cages to create a retaining wall, the shack is the public-facing outpost of a family-run farm that’s been in business since the 1980s. It’s barely past noon on a weekday and already the plastic chairs parked around tables by the river are filled with locals sharing trays of fat, glossy oysters paired with glasses of Tassie riesling. “If you rush them,” says Melrose, “the shells become too porcelain and they open up too easily, giving them a shorter shelf life. Oysters really thrive when you let them take their time.”

“It’s one of the best things about the produce here: it’s slow, considered, perfected,” agrees Calvin King, head chef at Piermont Retreat’s Homestead restaurant, where I enjoy a lunch of beer-steamed mussels and anchovies draped over house-made bread. We’re standing on the back terrace of the Bannisters alum’s breezy, sun-drenched dining room, looking out to Freycinet across Great Oyster Bay. King is name-checking producers on his roll as though they’re singers in his favourite band. “Muscovy ducks from Lone Goose Farm. Grass-fed pure black striploin from Cape Grim. Oysters as big as your palm from whoever is harvesting that week. The farmers care a lot and the animals are happy.”

As if on cue, a pod of dolphins leaps out of the water about 15 metres from shore. “We planned this just for you,” says Susan, a regular who’s stopped to let King pat her dog. She’s en route through the grounds of the estate, which fringes the mouth of the bay and is dotted with a mixture of rammed-earth and stone cottages and newer glass-fronted lodges that hug the coastline. “Sometimes, my husband and I have this entire bay completely to ourselves. Now that’s a magical feeling.”

The next morning, keen to capture some of this magic, I take my coffee down to the water’s edge. It’s 8°C on land. The ocean is a balmy 12°C or 13°C. Yesterday’s Mediterranean blues have been replaced with steely-grey and greens, interspersed with flashes of amber as the sun begins to hit the windows of the cottages beyond the seagrass. I peel off my puffer jacket, wriggle out of my trainers and stand shivering in my swimmers, the sea gently lapping my feet. I pause, take a breath into the bottom of my belly and wade out into the salty stillness.

By the time I slide into a buttery leather booth at Peppina, the culinary jewel in the crown of The Tasman hotel in Hobart (nipaluna), I realise that perhaps a little of that stillness has settled into my bones. Upstairs, drowsy and full after dinner of scallops baked in chilli almond butter and an overloaded plate of paccherri tossed in slow-cooked Wagyu shin and pork belly, I flop down on the bed, which is dressed in Frette cotton. I drink in the velvety silence. Unhurried luxury, it seems, is something of a tautology.