After resting in Tullah for several days with our friends, Rick and Barbara, we packed up and drove down to the port town of Strahan to look around and take a river boat cruise up the famous Gordon River. Strahan is a quaint little town and the cruise was great! We went on the Heritage Cruise lines boat, the Wilderness III.
It took us to Sarah Island which was one of the more notorious penal colonies and is located out in the Macquarie Harbour - sort of like an Australian Alcatraz. The Gordon River drains into Macquarie Harbour and then into the sea. The cruise up the river was magical!
The trip included a walk through the temperate rainforest and views of some of the few remaining Huon Pine. These trees were harvested almost to extinction in the early years of settlement as their wood was ideal for making ships and was light enough to float to the mills. They are very slow growing and all that’s left now are a few crooked and stunted examples that were unsuitable for logging. So many were cut that we’ve decided they’ve misspelled the name - it should be "Hew’n Pine"! The tour provided us with a great lunch and we met a delightful couple, Paul and Barbara, on the boat who invited us to do some bush walking with them in Victoria when we got back there.
That night we attended a fun play in Strahan called "The Ship That Never Was" about an escape from Sarah Island and spent the night in the local caravan park. Next morning, we headed off to the north with a stop in Tullah to photograph the lake in the morning light. We traveled the famed Western Explorer road which is a dirt road that cuts through some of the prettiest coastal country on the west side of Tasmania. We stopped at the Arthur River to stay the night and take yet another river cruise and a walk in the rainforest. Despite a rainy night, the cruise the next day was perfect and the lunch in the rainforest was memorable. The river was beautiful!
We also visited a place near the mouth of the Arthur River called "The Edge of the World". From this spot around the globe there is not another land mass until you get to South America, over 10,000 miles away!
This plaque marks the spot.
From the Arthur River, we continued north through Stanley where we climbed the costal headland there called "The Nut". It was a long, steep footpath to the top and the bush flies were terrible! The views were great, but it was quite touristy and questionable whether it was worth putting up with the flies. We continued on to Burnie on the north coast and, on the next day, met up with Heather LW in Devonport.
This began what was to be a food and beverage safari in which we were to "bag" and consume representative of all of the species of game on our list - beer, wine, cheese, honey, and berries (straw, black, rasp, blue, Russian)- every day! Over the next week, we stalked along through the agricultural heartland and eastern coast of Tazzie stopping in at every winery, cheese house, berry shop, brewery and honey stand along the way. We hunted through places with names like Deloraine, Mole Creek, Launceston, Scottsdale, St. Helens (no, there’s no volcano there!), Freycinet, and Swansea. In Mole Creek we stayed in this beautiful little cottage that was surround by a colorful garden overlooking the Great Western Tiers mountain range.
Along the way, we stopped to see the Cataract Gorge just outside of Launceston where we rode a chairlift to the top. Here’s Heather LW on the second chair lift ride of her young life!
At one of the wineries along the west side of the Tamar River, which was built by an exiled California couple we found this!
It’s a genuine, American Plains Indian style tipi!
Several times we were treated to the sight of these little guys waddling along or across the road.
It’s an echidna - a marsupial porcupine! Heather LW also took us to an unusual little pub out in the country called "The Pub in the Paddock", where they have a beer drinking pig, which I couldn’t resist!
A bit further off of the road, we ventured into the Evercreech (love that name!) Forest Reserve where there are some giant White Gums, like this one, named The White Knights.
The coastal areas included stands of temperate rain forest similar to what one might see in the Pacific Northwest, where moss covered logs like this one litter the forest floor.
On the Freycinet Peninsula we were treated to views of the ocean like this,
and hundreds of thousands of sand crabs like this little guy.
The hole in the sand that you can see in the background is made by these crabs and they cover the beach as far as the eye can see.
Despite all of these distractions, not to mention all the little museums, gift shops, bakeries, wood craft stores, wool shops, etc., we were not deflected from our primary task of making a sizable dent in the area’s supplies of edible and drinkable commodities. It was a tough job, but we were up to it! Heather even managed to find a butcher shop that had some kangaroo meat for sale, so I bought some good fillets and bar-b-qued them up - very tasty!!
Finally, we found ourselves in Hobart town on the southern end of the island. Heather had made arrangements to meet up with her brother Don and his wife Vicki (the Banks’ from Oxenford) who were vacationing at Vicki’s sister’s place in O’Possum Bay, just south of Hobart. Wendy and Jim have a historical farmhouse in O’Possum Bay that they’re restoring and graciously allowed us to camp in their front yard for a few days while they showed us around the area. We contributed the few prisoners that we’d taken along the way and we all shared several wonderful feasts in that old farmhouse.
We attended the Salamanca Markets in Hobart and toured it’s harbor and fish markets. We also made a trip out to Port Arthur, the largest of the early penal colonies. On the way back, we stopped by to see a rather unusual natural formation called the "Tessellated Pavement".
Believe it or not, this is a natural formation, not manmade! Hard to believe when you see the intersecting and parallel straight lines formed by the cracks between the rocks. This formation goes on for hundreds of yards up and down the coast here and apparently occurs elsewhere on the island!
Finally it was time to start back to the mainland. We went back north up through the center of the island which was where it was first settled. There were several historical towns along the way with very old buildings that had been constructed by convict labor from hand hewn stone blocks. Every little town had several of these building as well as very old and ornate church buildings. It was humbling to see the individual pick marks in the faces of hundreds of thousands of blocks weighing perhaps 100 # each that were used to construct the buildings, bridges, churches, and even curbs in these towns. The work and misery they represent is sobering and awesome!
We dropped Heather LW off in Launceston to catch her plane home and continued on to Devonport for our appointment with the Spirit of Tasmania. The trip back to Melbourne was as pleasant as the one out and we enjoyed being rocked to sleep by the gently rolling ship as Tasmania slipped into the haze behind us.