Tasmania 2001

This is the story of my trip to Tasmania in October 2001.

I went with my parents because Dad wanted to do lots of hiking and Mum wanted someone else to go with him so that she could stay behind in a luxury hotel and eat chocolate.

While there we drank at and bought from the surprising number of wineries. Actually with all the mountains, snow, wineries and sheep you could think you were in New Zealand, except NZ has better cars. Drove though a blizzard (not a very bad one) hiked on a couple of snowbound trails (very slippery) And took many, many photos with a camera that I've never used before so I don't know if any of them have turned out. You can judge that for yourselves.

The first few days were rather easy. We started in Launceston and set off clockwise around the island. The first day we did a tiny little walk to the waterfall pictured..

















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Then we went to Bicheno, a little coastal town with only three things of note. The beach is the site of a penguin colony. . As you can see there are no penguins visible, this is because the adults are all out to sea and only return at night. There are some babies there too but they are underground in burrows. .We got to scramble along the beach at night and see the penguins return from the sea, but as my camera had no flash there are no pictures.

Secondly there is a blow hole. It is a nice reliable one but isn't really a hole so much as a very narrow gully that channels the waves in and sends them shooting up.

Lastly, . there was quite a good park with all manner of Devils, as well as sundry other form of wildlife. As you can see in this next picture, they are very friendly to the point of aggression when if comes to extorting food. .Dad was actually attacked by a kangaroo that was trying to steal his food.















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The next place actually had some walking trails. This involved less hard walking than I anticipated, largely because the first walk was too hard.. This first picture shows wineglass bay as we first saw it. We had to walk up to the mountain pass that the picture was taken from, then down to the beach, then along the beach .and up over all the mountains in the background. Because of some confusion as to which track we were supposed to be on we did not do a 5 hour walk as we had planned, but instead set off on a two day walk around the entire Freycinet (sp?) peninsula.















. Of course, having anticipated a 5 hour walk we only had lunch and some water with us.

So well after 5 hours were up we came to the conclusion that we were in fact on the wrong walk and had to decide what to do. Luckily (or unluckily as things were to turn out) we could stand on a mountain and look down onto a beach on the other side of the peninsula that we were on.

We knew that the return track of the peninsula walk came back along the beach so we figured that if we just cut down to the beach we would shortcut the long walk and hence probably make it back before nightfall. We were encouraged in our foolishness by the bush being open eucalypt country of the sort that is as easy to walk through as if you were on a track. So we set off.







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It was only after we had descended from the mountain into the lowlands that things went wrong. The bush became thicker and thicker until we eventually got into thick spiky bushes were the only way through was to wrap up in our raincoats and then take a run at the undergrowth in front of us. This would force a path for a metre or so and then we would back off and run again. This was very hot work (especially in the raincoats) but we were cooled off by some freezing rain.

Luckily this didn't last for TOO long, and when the way sort of cleared we were able to speed up again. We all got bruised shins from running into the fallen tree branches that were suspended in the undergrowth but there I feel my experience in Tae Kwon Do shin kicks helped me.

We were starting to look at the big hollow trees and wondering how warm they'd be.

Eventually we did indeed make it to the beach, where we collapsed in joy. at being only a few minutes walk from the car park. At this point the sun came out and all seemed OK. Alas we were not on the beach we thought we were on.

After walking up the beach for another two hours (at this point, us being past our return time, Mum called the park rangers but we did not know this at the time) we crossed a narrow point to another beach and we met some other humans, who informed us we were indeed on the path back to the car park but gave us some very confusing advice as to the best way to get there. With the benefit of hindsight and more study of the maps we now know that he was trying to say that the fastest way back was to go back over to the other side of the peninsula (via a track this time) and retrace the start of the track, but at no time did he mention that this method was faster than the so called direct route. We were confused as to why he kept telling us how to go via the scenic route when we wanted the direct route, we just didn't know that the "direct route" was slower than the "scenic route".

Finally at the end of the second beach (another hours walk) we found a path leading into the bush, and a sign saying "Carpark" (Yay!) "2 hours" (D'oh!) Especially as the sun was starting to set. Luckily the far southern latitude meant it was still quite light when we reached the car some 1.5 hours later (30 minutes ahead of time).

So we drove back to the hotel, to find that mum had notified the rangers hours ago, but they hadn't started looking or anything so that was alleft.

However the final result of all this was that Dad had torn a muscle in his leg and so wasn't up to big walks for the rest of the trip. Well it almost got better a week later but then he decided to go for an experimental run and hurt it again.

So...for the rest of the trip we did no walks longer than 2.5 hours, and for that longest one we had mum along so it would really have been a 1.5 hour walk without here. Well we did do one long walk, but that was through the Cadbury's chocolate factory. :)

After that came Port Arthur. which was the site of a very strict penal colony for convicts who kept reoffending. The hotel we stayed in actually looked down on the ruins. This place became a tourist attraction about 3 days after it closed and so they have it all down to a fine art, especially sending the chumps on a totally useless tour of the harbour on a boat. .



















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Then there was Hobart, of which I took no photos because it looks like any other city, with the unusual exception (for Australia) of a snow covered mountain overlooking it all.

Not that snow impressed us for very long, as our next stop was left in the middle of it..Which the footprints of this kangaroo leading to the water clearly show.

Nonetheless we still had walking trails. . which I was able to cope with no problem on foot, though it was a little worrying driving through the driving snow on the way there, seeing as how no-one in the car had ever driven in snow before.



















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There were still incongruities such as treeferns growing in the snow... We also had a good look at the trees. Tasmania has BIG trees. Including mountain ash, and Woolybutts. Respectively the tallest and 3rd tallest trees in the world.

Then that night we stayed in a lovely lodge of some sort, intended for mentally ill people who plan on standing in the icewater up to their waists trying to catch fish when there are perfectly good restaurants nearby. There was the nice features of real log fires (those poor lunatics have to be cared for before their imminant deaths) and at night animals come to take food such as this quoll..Also called a spotted tiger or native cat. Like a small, anorexic devil or a thylacine that got shrunk to 1:3 scale. I didn't see any thylacines.

Though it has been suggested that perhaps I did not take the quoll picture very well, an alternative explanation is that quolls, (and Thylacines) being nocturnal, have evolved a defense mechanism of giving off blinding flashes of light. This overexposes any photo and would blind a nocturnal predator. It also explains why no photos of Thylacines in the wild have been taken for 70 years.

Next stop was at Strahan (pronounced Strawn) on the South West Coast. Though to get there we had to go through Queenstown. .This is a mining town where in a famous example of old fashioned pollution the fumes from the copper smelter (SO2 for those interested) killed off all the vegetation for kilometres. Of course now the vegetation is growing back and annoying the locals by destroying the one local feature that made them stand out. Naturally we wouldn't stay in such a dump so we just had lunch and kept going.

Strahan was orignially the sight of a convict penal settlement for the repeat offenders, but then that was moved on to Port Arthur. Few of the buildings from there survived, except curiously, the underwater ship building ramps which were made from Huan pine, which is very durable indeed.

The next stage of Strahan's history is based on logging, where the valuble Huan pine was cut out of the gullys and rivers in the area, until economic and technological change, and environmentalism, killed off that industry. Nowdays only the stumps and branches left behind from the earlier logging are allowed to be taken.

Then there was going to be a large hydroelectric industry with a damning of the Gordon below Franklin river. But that too was stopped by environmentalism.

Following that the town turned to Mutton birding and fishing. I resisted the temptation to eat a Mutton bird, but I did have some of the ocean trout. Which is trout that is farmed in fish farms in the brackish harbours. Interestingly the harbours, and the rivers and lakes throughout Tasmania, are black. This is because of the large amounts of Tannin that leaches out of all the vegetation especially the button grass. But it's good for farming fish. The fish farms have 1 employee/10 hectares, which is a much bigger ratio than for a normal farm.

Whilst in Strahan I got volunteered for a small part in a play (my only lines were "Arrgh, Aye aye cap'n, arrgh" repeated a few times, but I did get to do a fight scene and get thrown out of a boat (I do my own stunts). The person chosen to play Leslie (a convict pirate) was not well and guess who was available who could fall out of a stage boat without hurting himself?

Then it was on the the North West.. Where we got to see the surprising clear, blue and calm Bass Straight.

Climb the surprising windy Knot.. Where we actually beat the cable car up the mountain. And saved $5 doing so. Mum did NOT come with us for that walk.

And we saw the Tulip fields,. where Tulips are grown for the Dutch offseason, along with Pyrethrium (to make flayspray) and Poppies (to make Heroin and breadrolls).

Next it was off the the famous Cradle Mountain (which I'd never heard of but everyone assures me it is famous.). The lake there is very black indeed, though easy enough to walk around.

We didn't actually stay at the cradle mountain lodge, but at the Lemonthyme lodge, which confusingly enough is at cradle mountain not Lemonthyme (we discovered this when we got to Lemonthyme, which is about 5 km from cradle mountain by air but requires a major backtrack of 40 km by road.

Lemonthyme had the best selection of walks that we'd seen so far,. though as this photo shows, sometimes the bridges had fallen into the rivers leaving us to walk across the moss covered logs.

Only one snake was seen while walking, and this is good, because Tasmania has no non-venomous snakes.

Finally we returned to Launceston where we had started from. This time I got to look at the place, and conclude that it is just like any other midsized Australian city except colder and with more old convict built buildings. There are some nice wineries around though.