Bye Bye Tassie

Bye bye Tassie. It was time to leave this beautiful mini version England but with 10 times less the people. Dave and I have been discussing with each other what our favourite highlights of this state are. With many hours gone by and talking with others we have made our top ten list:

1.      1    Bruny Island and the Pennicott wilderness tour

2     2    Bay of fires campsite

3     3    Mt Wellington with snow on a clear day with rainbows

4     4     Freycinet National park -Wineglass bay/Hazards Beach walk

5     5    Franklin Gordon National Park - Gordon River Cruise

6     6   Mt Field National Park – Russell Falls

7    7    Cradle Mountain on a beautiful clear day

8     8    South Bruny Campground like the Whitsundays

9     9   South East Cape – great white pointer sighting

10   10  Meeting all the awesome people including Tom and Amy/Tim and Nat

The night before the boat over to the mainland we caught up with Tom and Amy (they were catching the same boat over) and had a few drinks by the fire reminiscing about the great times and amazing adventures we found. The great thing about Tassie is the free camping and the awesome attitude of travellers knowing that there is always somebody there willing to help out and have a chat with a beer. We also thank Tassie for the lucky weather we had having only to deal with two nights of server wind and only 7 days of rain.

One day we will return to finish off those little adventures that we didn’t have time for this trip; a good excuse really.

There will be a slow down on the blog now as Dave and I head towards Robinvale for inevitable work to restock our bank accounts. I will update as much as I can but I seriously doubt people will want to know how much fruit picking we do each and every day.

To The Edge of the World... and Dave is still alive

It was off to The Edge of the World near Arthur River which is known for its wild westerly winds and rough seas. This town on the western coast of Tassie is renowned for its raging raw winds that come across 3000 miles of flat sea from Africa. I had imagined sheer cliff faces, waves as big as buildings, and constant thunder and lightning over the ocean but as we drove closer the better the day got. It was sunshine with a nice cool breeze; not quite as I imagined. However, there was one interesting point to The Edge of the World, from the lookout we could see huge rocks as big as houses but the weird thing was they had massive hundred year old tree logs sitting on top of them like UNO STACKO. What the? How on earth did those tiny waves lift something so big onto these huge rocks? It wasn’t just a few logs either; the entire coastal beach as far as the eye could see was full of these logs. There must be some crazy weather over here!

We cruised back to Stanley for the night at a free site by the beach. One great thing about that place was the little fairy Penguins. We climbed up into bed around dusk (8.45pm) and heard this chirping noise so we annoyingly got out of our very warm bed and investigated. Carrying my super appropriate red light we walked only 50m to find heaps of them walking up the beach to their nests. For FREE! We ended up seeing plenty of young chicks being fed plus taking some pretty sweet photos (trying to in pitch black without a flash) only an arm’s length away from them.  F@%K Phillip Island and their crazy commercialised fairy Penguin tour

Next morning we knew we had to do some serious walking. We camped at the base of this natural wonder called ‘The Nut’. It is literally a random piece of mountain, more shaped like a rectangle than a nut, at the end of a small peninsular. The photo will illustrate.

So, there were two options. Either take the rich and lazy approach ie: the $10 pp. return chairlift up, OR the poor and have to do it because I’m poor approach ie: walking up the insane vertical flat pavement up. Inevitably we decided on the poor man’s approach. It took us only 20minutes but with a far few stops in between...only to look at the view of course, not that I’m unfit or anything. Once at the top we had a puffed sense of achievement and admired the amazing views of the coastline and the pretty town of Stanley.

Then it all goes hay wire after that; the Deep Cycle battery is buggered. This thing has no cranking ability which basically means no power with stay stored. So we take it to a battery place and happy say it’ll only cost $11 to fix. YAY!!! Uber HAPPY now! They had to keep it over night so we treated ourselves to a caravan park (mainly because we needed power to keep the fridge cold) and OH what a caravan park it was. I don’t usually rant on about caravan parks but this one deserves the credit. For the low, low price of $25 we got a powered site (away from kids...sorry), free unlimited showers, a free bag of fire wood, an indoor heated swimming pool, a free tennis court, plus a the free unlimited use of a hot SPA. OMG, OMG I was in CP heaven. We took absolute advantage of everything and got our full $25 worth.