Tales from Tasmania volume 2

G'day

Hopefully you enjoyed the first installment of Tales from Tasmania - if not, you probably want to stop reading now. If you did, then read on as there's plenty more to tell (and plenty more photos for those of you with short attention spans).

So we'd arrived in Strahan for the first night and to put off the dreaded sharing a dorm with complete strangers I suggested we went out for a bike ride (free with the hostel) to search out platypuses. The plan was for maybe a couple of people to come along and scour the riverbanks but in the end around a dozen fellow travellers came along, making loads of noise and reducing our chances of seeing an elusive platypus (they're very shy) to zero. And so it turned out.

The whole sharing a dorm wasn't as bad I'd thought though, though the snoring from one of the guys was so loud it sounded like a wild animal had broken into the room and was trying to get back out. Next morning it was a slow, tired start but we were soon on the road again and discovering more of Tassie's wonderful sights.

Ocean Beach, Tassie's west coast. Nothing between this beach and Argentina, thousands of miles across the Southern Ocean. I'm actually pointing out Argentina but you can't really see it.

Henty Dunes. Massive sand dunes north of Ocean Beach. The bits of wood are trees from the surrounding forest that have already been swallowed up by the sand.

Indiana Wilkinson takes to the slightly wobbly bridge over the gorge by Montezuma Falls

Montezuma Falls, as seen from the slightly wobbly bridge. The walk there was through a lovely rain forest in which it was, appropriately, raining.

Cliff at the beginning of the hike up Cradle Mountain (in the mist behind). Before he fell of a boardwalk along the way and twisted a muscle in his side. And banged his elbow. And broke his watch which fell off into a puddle but he didn't realise for twenty minutes and then had to go back to fish it out of the puddle. Enough to wipe that grin off my face.

Getting closer to the top (actually, we were aiming for the saddle in the middle, so kind of to the left of that tree that's sticking up)

View across Dove Lake towards the start of the walk. I didn't have any suncream on my legs (it hadn't looked like it was going to be sunny) so ended up with highly unattractive two-tone legs where the socks stopped and the tanning started.

View from the saddle looking south. No humans in sight.

Human ruins view across previously human-free panorama.

Did I really climb that?

Yes, I did. Cliff at the end of the hike up Cradle Mountain.

Sheffield, Tasmania. Famous for solitary clouds and murals (mostly the latter really, which all started when they wanted to encourage tourism to the town so began adding murals all over the place. Now there are dozens and an annual competition, and tourism is booming). The mural above is actually the view you could have for real (minus Victorians in period costume) if you just look a bit more to the right. Nice though.

And that was the end of Days 2 and 3 - pretty exhausting (and painful!) but pretty good fun too.


Volume 3 soon - but g'bye for now!

Cliff