Today was a day to start exploring Hobart and what better way to do that than wandering around town. We started by heading into the main shopping area stopping at a couple of bookshops and, in the second, found a 40th Anniversary edition of Possum Magic for Alex. It is a book we remember well from when we lived here, so will take a copy home for him. I also found a...
On our way down to Hobart we decided to take a diversion – a similar diversion to the one made by thousands of convicts from 1833 onwards – to Port Arthur. The differences between our journey and theirs were manifold – ours took us just an hour and a half along the A3 and then the A9 while theirs took them a day or so of sailing along the Derwent...
We are now heading south and we had been recommended en route to visit Maria Island, so we booked a morning ferry across to the island from Triabunna. The ferry takes just half an hour and lands at a jetty on the island. Maria Island – jetty From the jetty we walked initially past the silos (used to store cement in the 1920s) and headed along the path to the...
With another day staying at Freycinet, we decided to explore a little further afield. We started though with a browse around a couple of other sites in the National Park. We started with Honeymoon Bay – perhaps not entirely appropriate for us, but we could see the appeal. A beautiful small bay ….. Honeymoon Bay – Freycinet National Park The next...
One of the main reasons for coming to Freycinet was to see the National Park and, with the park visitor information centre just a couple of miles down the road, it was easy to get there promptly. As ever, the staff were incredibly helpful and honest. The Freycinet Peninsula is quite unusual in its naming as it is one of relatively few places named after a Frenchman...
A day in the car today …. We set off early from Strahan as the plan is to get right over to the east coast by this evening – a drive of about six and a half hours. However, to break it up, we decided on various stops. The first one was at Nelson Falls about 35km to the east of Queenstown. The walk at Nelson Falls was only about 20 minutes in total, but...
The Gordon (and Franklin) river(s) were subject to an intense and polarised environmental battle in the early 1980s. The nascent green movement which had coalesced in the battle against the dams which created Lake Pedder strengthened and organised to fight the proposed Gordon-below-Franklin Dam (more usually known as the Franklin Dam). This would have submerged much...
A nice lazy start today as we had nothing in particular planned. The forecast was for rain (much needed around here) later in the day, so we decided to head off walking down the Ocean Beach Trail. This is just to the west of the town and is around a 2km track down to the beach, but what a beach – once again superlatives fail me ….. Ocean Beach –...
Today was moving on day once again, so the usual routine kicked in. Pack everything away again (amazing how much we can spread ourselves out in a room after just two days), move it to the car and squeeze it all in. Then back to the room again to check once, twice and a third time just in case we have left anything – we hadn’t (we think!). From there we...
Cradle Mountain National Park was apparently used for the filming of the documentary When Dinosaurs Roamed America. This only misrepresents the park in two ways, but both are fairly fundamental – firstly it is Tasmania and not America and secondly there are no dinosaurs. However, it is easy to see why they wanted to use it – it is pristine untouched...