Back on the road in Tasmania

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, and I’ve decided to jump forward to the present time. I’ll post about all the earlier happenings as well, but for now I suspect it’s more interesting to know what I’m up to at the moment. So, without further ado, here’s a short post about Tasmania.

Tasmania

For the past 7 months we (Kelsey and myself) have mostly spent our time in Melbourne. There were some short trips at various times, but we haven’t been really traveling since we got to Australia.

Now that has changed, and on the 18th of March 2013 we set off for the beautiful island of Tasmania where we would stay until the 26th. During this time I drove the car we rented. The rental company generously called it a camper van, but with a low roof. Another description could be a pimped SUV. Either way, it was a good car to drive, allowed us to sleep in it and in general served us well.

The Great Oyster Bay

Our first big stop on this trip was the Great Oyster Bay, and the connected Freycinet National Park. The bay itself was beautiful, and when we arrived there on the 19th we had a quiet evening. The next day however we went for a walk to Wineglass Bay. This is a beautiful bay inside the national park. It was a very pleasant walk on a beautiful day. Aside from the environment though, the wildlife was well-represented by wallabies.

When we finally got to the beach, we had a bit of lunch there and were joined for this by one of these wallabies. Despite it’s wishes, we obviously weren’t allowed to feed it (or felt the need to do so) but it stayed around for a long time anyway and even allowed people to pet it.

The Bay of Fires

The next day we went north, up to the Bay of Fires. Unfortunately, it was raining so we couldn’t enjoy long walks along the shore. Nevertheless, it was fun to see the red rocks that (I assume) gives the place it’s name. After we left the bay we stopped for a bit at a quite beautiful waterfall named the St Columba Falls before we finally set up camp in the rain. I have to admit that while it’s part of the whole camping experience I’m not a great fan of the whole rain thing…

Narawntapu National Park

Luckily the weather cleared up a bit on the next day, so we could get underway with good weather again. Not that we did a lot of interesting things during the day as we visited Launceston and did quite a fair bit of driving. Of course, there were some short stops along the way as well, but nothing really interesting. That night we stayed in a Narawntapu National Park though, and that was fun. Aside from having a parking space literally two steps from the beach, we were pretty much sleeping in between the wildlife as there were wallabies and wombats everywhere around after sunset. Unfortunately we didn’t see any Tasmanian Devils, but it was really nice to see the others anyway.

Cradle Mountain

A couple of days later we ended up at Cradle Mountain, which is probably the most photographed place in Tasmania. Not that I’d actually heard about it before the plans for going to this state were solidified.

Anyway, despite it once again raining when we got to the walking tracks we walked around Dove Lake, which is the lake in front of the mountain. As the weather cleared up during the day we got some beautiful sights anyway.

The rest of Tasmania

There were many more beautiful sights in Tasmania than the view I’ve described above, but I prefer to go with the idea of a picture being worth a thousand words instead so you can have a look at the gallery below for this.

All in all though, it was a lot of fun to drive around Tasmania and see all the wonderful nature it has. The roads themselves are twisting all the time, and for many of these there is a recommended driving speed of 25 km/h, but they offer some amazing views. That, and an incredible amount of roadkill; I’ve seen a lot more dead wallabies than live ones.