Tarraleah and New Norfolk

Leaving Lake St Clair we passed through the geographic centre of Tasmania (kindly marked with a cairn).

We stopped for lunch in Tarraleah. This was once a vibrant hydro-building town, of which there were many in Tasmania. Tarraleah was built in the 1930s and abandoned once the hydro moved on, with most of its houses removed. It was eventually bought and the remaining houses restored. It is now a place to stay, with a hotel, cafe, caravan park and various types of accommodation, including the cottages. It looks absolutely gorgeous and I would love to stay in one of the 1930s art deco cottages.

New Norfolk was a pleasant surprise, mainly because it was warm and sunny - and not windy! We broke out our annex for the first time and sat outside thawing out.  New Norfolk was so named because, when the fledgling colony on Norfolk Island was failing in the early 1800s, the colonists were brought to Hobart and they settled up river at New Norfolk.

The park was right beside the River Derwent, which seemed very close to the road!  We walked along and had some lovely views of the river.

We visited The Salmon Ponds, which is actually a trout hatchery, built in the 1800s and set up as an English public garden. It has beautiful trees, and you can feed the display trout. The restaurant was very enjoyable too.

We also had a meal at the Bush Inn, which is a very old pub established in 1815, with many original features from the 1800s, including the christening font, as the inn did double duty as a place of worship!

Lake St Clair

Beautiful Lake St Clair National Park!

We stayed in the caravan park here for 3 nights. It was a fairly basic park, but it's inside a National Park, so it was pretty good. 

Don't be fooled by the apparent space, this is two sites!

On our first day we went on a cruise on the lake. It is absolutely massive, and surrounded by snow capped mountains. The water was calm, and oh so photogenic.

We also did the short walks in the park, and saw a platypus in Platypus Bay.  The trees and plants are very beautiful.

  

But the most exciting wildlife was right in the campground. In one night we had a wombat (with baby in pouch), brushtailed possums (including a baby on back) and,  most excitingly of all, a quoll! The quoll was very cheeky and even climbed up on Garry's leg like a cat while he was sitting in his chair - probably in search of Garry's dinner (steak) but naughty quoll was thwarted in that aim!

The second day we went out of the National Park to Derwent Bridge to see The Wall in the Wilderness, which is a building full of a fabulous set of carved panels and other very cool stand-alone carvings. It is massive and amazing and I can't show you because you are not allowed to take any photos.  So I guess it's something you have to go to Tasmania to see.

The weather started to deteriorate that day, getting very windy, and you can see the difference in the lake.

We certainly enjoyed our visit to Lake St Clair.

From Strahan to Lake St Clair

A whole blog entry for a drive that only takes a few hours?  Well yes, if there are a lot of lovely walks in national parks along the way.

We drove to Queenstown, which is an interesting old mining town, famed for destroying its environment.  Now, nature is returning and it is nowhere near as barren as I had heard.

After Queenstown, we had a big itinerary of walks, starting with the iron knob lookout over the open cut mine. 

Directly opposite this was the Horsetail Falls walk and lookout.  The walk went further uphill, beyond the best view of the falls, and we realised it was so you could see the sea near Strahan from up on the hill.

If you look closely at the horizon, you can just see the sea. 

Next stop, the gorgeous Nelson Falls, and a lovely walk through cool temperate rainforest beside the river. We were very glad we had bought a National Parks pass on the Spirit of Tasmania, so we had no issues stopping at all the lovely national park walks along the way.

On, on, on,  to the Donaghys hill walk.  This one was a stroll uphill through rainforest and button grass plains to a glorious 360° view of mountain peaks.

Looking down at Franklin River

The day was getting on, so we almost didn't stop at the last walk, but who could resist the lure of the Franklin River?  Later I learned that we should have also stopped to do the first kilometre or so of the Frenchman's Cap walk, as it has a swing bridge - but we didn't know, and the full walk was a bit much for a quick walk while traveling.

What a lovely series of walks, and we felt very lucky to have enough time to enjoy them all.

Strahan

We made it to Strahan, after driving through the scariest roadworks I've ever encountered - I was driving, towing our van, it was raining, the road was uphill/downhill/twisty-turny and the roadworks were about 4 inches deep in slippery mud. But apparently the previous stretch of repairs had been worse, with trucks jack-knifing in much-deeper mud. By the time we got through it, there was even mud on the top of the Avan - a fine white clay sort of mud that doesn't seem to wash off in all the rain.

Anyway, as you've probably guessed, it was raining a lot of the time we were in Strahan. It seems to rain a lot in Tassie. I don't think I'll ever complain about Canberra's weather again.  But we did some great things.

We went for a trip on the Heritage railway, which was built in very difficult terrain and weather conditions, and has some spectacular scenery. 

Our trip was supposed to go to two stations and turn on a turn-table, but not long before the second station we pulled up - there was a tree on the line.  The tree was more substantial than the driver's chainsaw could handle (tree 1.5m diameter, chainsaw, not even half that), so we had to reverse back to the first station.  Apart from a screaming toddler in our carriage, we had a great day, despite not making it to our destination.

The next day we took a fabulous cruise on Macquarie Harbour (5 times Sydney Harbour) out to Hell's Gates, back to Sarah Island for an excellent tour of the convict ruins, and on to a cruise up the Gordon River to Heritage Landing for a walk in the rain forest.  This was such a great day, and the tour guide has set the standard against which all future tour guides will be measured. 

Back in Strahan, we attended Australia's longest running play "The Ship that Never Was", about the last escape from Sarah Island. And there was our tour guide again, playing half the cast. Perhaps being a professional actor should be a mandatory job criteria for tour guides? The play is hilarious, but so is the underlying history. In brief, when Sarah Island (where the convicts built excellent ships) was closing and the convicts were going to be moved to Port Arthur, they built one last ship, for which the orders to NOT build apparently got lost. Then they stole the ship (politely leaving half their supplies for the officials they left behind) and lived in Chile for a year, before some of them were caught and sent back for trial and were supposed to be hung. But they got off! How? Well, there were no papers for the ship, so it didn't officially exist, so they only stole a 'bundle of materials'.

We took a drive out to Zeehan, and drove down to the west coast settlement of Trial Harbour, which didn't appear to even have mains power. Very remote and rugged.

We also drove to Ocean Beach, close to Strahan, which is actually at the other end of the same beach - I think it is Australia's longest beach, at about 90km, but don't quote me,  I might be wrong about that!

Everywhere we drive so far in Tasmania, there have been masses of little pink flowers by the roadside. They look kind of scrappy, but I finally got a chance to get a close up of these pretty little Ericas.