In this small island state, forgotten at the bottom of the world, is ‘untouched’ wilderness (if we forget the inhabitants that lived there for 35,000 years) – mossy rainforests, rugged mountains, alpine meadows, buttongrass moors, perfumed eucalyptus forests, thundering waterfalls. In the 1930s, a 65km walking track was created through the middle of this, the Overland Track. It has become Tasmania’s biggest tourist attraction and is now too popular for its own good. You have to pay to do the walk half the year round, and the other half of the year is so crowded with hikers you’ll meet more people there than in the centre of Hobart. But when the sun goes down and everything is in darkness, or when someone sprains their ankle, or when it’s snowing and everything is wet and the only heat is what comes from your camping stove, there’s still a pang of remoteness, of isolation and vulnerability.

With side trips and not enough money for the ferry at the end (but that would be cheating anyway), my eight day walk covered 106km. There were a few scrambles up mountains, a lot of slipping over tree roots, sloshing through puddles of mud, and one famously horrendous climb with a chain to pull yourself up, but a surprisingly large amount was delightfully easy boardwalk (which prompted the best line of the trip, in a thick Irish accent – “I’m going to do a Pope!” – getting down to kiss the boardwalk).

Although I was walking alone, there were two other women also doing it on their own, and it was impossible not to be extremely sociable. I watched in envy as my new vegan friend cooked up dehydrated vegan feasts of tempeh, tomatoes, seaweed and split peas, and the Ned Kelly gang of bearded Adelaide hipsters drank their two litres of port, lovingly hauled for days, and spent the evenings giving each other massages. There were couples from Sydney comparing this walk to their last one in Machu Picchu and debating Gore-Tex and UV water purifiers. There were young men ticking mountains off their to-do list, ignoring any snow or cloud (“I just want to say I’ve done Ossa. I don’t care about the view”). Afternoons and evenings were spent lying in sleeping bags in old wooden huts, or sitting around in red headtorch light, playing cards, listening to stories of life in Egyptian gold mines, surviving the Nepalese earthquake, being a Hungarian refugee queuing up for food, and life in emergency departments in the Northern Territory (how can a man with no legs and no arms go missing from ICU? A woman comes to the hospital with an itchy head – it’s the maggots on the festering wound from where her husband beat her skull in last week), taking it in turns to recount shark encounters, recreating the sound of crocodile jaws snapping shut, longing for iceberg lettuce and gambling for chocolate and fresh carrots. The final evening was spent with a group of 11 obese Tasmanians who had decided that they cheated last year by taking the ferry at the end, so were coming back to finish the walk off properly. They were really bush, somehow, despite their rolls of fat.

The landscape is ancient, a memory of an Australia that no longer exists. Mountains that bear the scars of the ice age and plants from the old world of Gondwana that the rest of the world has forgotten. Huge trees that grow just a millimetre or two a year, encrusted with layers of lichen and covered in slimy moss. Warm, friendly hillocks of yellow buttongrass scattered among small pools of black water.

I could see the rhythm of the track going on forever – looking up at the stars each night, waking up and heading outside into the frosty morning, taking water from streams, feeling the weight of my pack sink into my back, slipping my feet into wet boots, bumping into a pademelon feeding her joey, eyeing up whether a currawong is going to try and break into my bag, just stopping to sit on a tree trunk I’m climbing over, falling into leech-infested waters in Frog Flats, fighting through bushes and branches. But each day was also a countdown to a shower and a real toilet, a night without snoring, real food.

The final day of 17km through rainforest felt like the longest walk of all, but as I trudged triumphantly into the Lake St Clair visitor centre, to celebrations of beer and chips, I was so sad it was all over. We Overlanders were bonded by a kind of pride and shared exhaustion. We drank Boags and champagne and sheltered inside a hut by a large log fire, watching the promised rain finally come down, discussing the rumours of who had been airlifted out and how you could walk for two days on a snapped ligament – the subject of this rumour soon arrived and actually showed us his impressively black swollen leg. The others started comparing their aches and pains. I sat silent, feeling awkwardly smug in having nothing to contribute.

If I could, I would have turned round and walked back the way I’d just come. Rainforest fatigue is far better than traffic jams.

The rainwater tanks offered us, quoting Auden, a new motto for the week: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” It was a strange blend of survivalist independence and highly managed tourism. It was wilderness without feeling harsh or too wild; cramped and sociable and smelly, but with a beautiful, simple, all-absorbing freedom in walking.