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...
Around 9am the Spirit of Tasmania squeezed its way down the Mersey River and into Devonport and fairly slickly we disembarked. From there the first stage went according to plan – the pre-loved car (pre-loved to the tune of 300,000km!) was waiting for us just a couple of minutes walk away and so we headed for the Devonport Information Centre. This stage was more...
14th March Parked up in the caravan park in Geelong, we decided this would be an ideal base to explore Melbourne for a day. So we headed to South Geelong station where a very helpful station guard helped us buy MyKi cards for unlimited travel for two days. At a total cost of just over $50 for both of us for unlimited travel for two days, we though this was a bargain...
From Otway we headed on to the east this morning to cover the last of the Ocean Road. We headed through Apollo Bay and then stopped for a short walk up to Carisbrook Falls. As with everywhere else, the volume of water was not very significant, but nevertheless a beautiful stop. Carisbrook Falls From there we drove on along a beautiful stretch of road, closely hugging...
With another day at the campsite on Cape Otway, we decided to do a tour of the Cape. The advice from the lady at the campsite was to start with Mait’s Rest. Immediately she said I made stereotypical assumptions about the way Australians would spell Mate’s Rest, but no …. this one is spelt Mait’s Rest. The reason for that is that the area is...