Wineglass Bay

The first view from the Wineglass Bay lookout is one of those moments that rewrites your mental catalogue of beautiful places: the bay below is a perfect crescent of white sand shelving into water that shifts through aquamarine, turquoise and navy depending on depth and angle, cupped on three sides by dark-green eucalypt forest rising to bare granite domes, and entirely empty of any building or road — a landscape that looks assembled by someone who had only heard descriptions of perfection.

Walking the beach in either direction is a study in gradation — north toward theHazards the sand firms to a crunch of shell fragments and the vegetation closes in with Banksia and Acacia, south toward the headland the shore opens wider and the view back to the granite peaks becomes even more theatrical, and at low tide a broad shelf of granite slabs emerges at the southern end like a natural terrace..

The Freycinet peninsula rewards slow exploration: the track to Wineglass Bay passes through dry eucalypt forest and coastal heath, and a side path leads to a secluded cove where the only footprints are your own.

Wineglass Bay appears on virtually every list of the world's most beautiful beaches, not for the cliché tropical resort experience but for the precise quality of its setting: the contrast between the white-pale-sand crescent and the deep-green forested slopes of the Hazards, backed by pale-pink granite peaks, creates a colour palette found almost nowhere else at this scale.

The bay sits inside Freycinet National Park, Tasmania's oldest national park (founded 1916), which means the surrounding 17,000-hectare reserve is protected from development and the entire coastal wilderness remains intact — you are walking through a landscape that has changed very little since Louis de Freycinet named the peninsula in 1802.