TASMANIA

Hi all!!

I'm back!! - back from Tassie (Tasmania) :-)

And finally I found some time to post some information of the trip - sorry for not telling you earlier but uni keeps me busy at the moment ...

As you can see on the map - this was approximately our route (sorry it's not 100% correct - I didn't take much time for doing it precisely but it should just give you an impression of what we saw in our 5 Tassie-days; the crosses indicate our overnight-stops).

Here are some details of our route:

Everything started on Thursday two weeks ago when my alarm rang at 4:30 in the morning... The plane left at 6:05am (over Melbourne). All in all I guess it took us 4hours to arrive in Taz - and: what a surprise - the airport of Hobart (the capital city) is smaller than Klagenfurt-Airport, can you imagine this????? For those who have no idea about the size of Klafu-airport: it's REALLY small hahahahaha
But, we got our car immediately, a brand new (186km) red KIA - a "women's car" in my opinion, not much PS (which was worse with the automatic) but we reached every place we intended to, and that's the most important thing :-)
After visiting Hobart for a couple of hours and a Harbour cruise we left it to go to Cadbury chocolate factory. Unfortunately (or luckily??) it was already closed, but the houses around were just beautiful!!!
After this disappointing moment (we inteded to buy ALL the choc from the factory hahahahahaha...) we left Hobart and its surroundings to go to New Norfolk, our first overnight-stop. You can imagine how tired we were after getting up soooo early.
By the way - it was just Andi and me who did this journey as everybody else went to Cairns or had no time to joins us, but it was ok!

On the second day we headed to the west of Tassie to Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair National Park. I don't know if we just noticed it because we're tourists (maybe it's the same in Austria, we just don't realize it) but the landscape changed extremely often! We saw farms that looked like our Austrian ones, little villages, rain forest, hills, etc... is was great. And also the weather made it look different all the time - rain, snow, wind, sun, rain again, etc... it changed every 10mins.
Especially extreme was the weather when we reached Lake St Clair National Park and went to the rainforest for a 2,5hour-walk: it rained like crazy, it was freezing (around 0 degrees), it snowed and - it hailed (!!). I'm so glad that we had a look at the weather forecast before leaving Sydney and took several jumpers and trousers with us. I guess we changed clothes 3 times a day due to the fact that we got wet all the time. But even though this was quite challenging for our immune system, it was just GREAT and I loved the walk!!
After warming up in the car we went to some lookouts and did some little walks on our way next to the border of Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair NP and Franklin Gordon Wild Rivers NP. When it got dark we arrived in Queenstown, our second overnight-stop in Tassie.
You won't believe it, this island is really beautiful, the nature is just marvellous and the people are even friendlier than in Sydney (!!), BUT: This town (Queenstown) was the ugliest we saw on the whole island. The people were unfriendly (most of them), the buildings looked dirty and.... I don't know I'm running out of words when I'm thinking about this ugly town - I just hated it hahahahaha.
But of course we did the best out of the situation, ate some instant noodles in our room and fell asleep really soon as we left this place at 7am the next day!
As the northern part of Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair National Park was quite far we had to drive a few hours to arrive in Craddle Valley. It again snowed a lot (for Australia) and Craddle Mountain was completely white – remember: we’re here in Australia and winter is over!! Unfortunately almost every track was a little river or full of slippery snow so we couldn’t walk as much as we intended to, but even the small tracks were extremely beautiful and worth every meter we got wet J We went through an impressive rainforest and tried several lookouts for the best view to the mountain.
On our way to Lauceston we passed the King Solomons Caves. Initially we intended to do a tour and go into the cave, but we would have to wait for 45mins we simply not had. The problem was that the way to Launceston was quite long, the sun sets really early (at 6:30pm) and you shouldn’t drive when it’s dark due to heaps of wallabies hopping on the streets.
So we just had a quick look at the entrance of the cave and went on to reach the best wildlife park I’ve ever seen. It was quite small, but: we could touch, hug, carry and pet Wombats, Koalas, little Tasmanian Devils, Kangaroos etc… it was really nice and I bet that in no touristic wildlife park you’re able to get so close to those animals as in this park. I just loved it (and the cute Koala)!!
Initially the plan was to stay in Launceston for the next night but we had some daylight left after visiting this really nice city (small but full of soooo beautiful houses – I liked it much more than Hobart) we decided to go on driving to Scottsdale and stay there. BUT: We just couldn’t find the junction where to go – there were no signs!!! After half an hour driving around like idiots and getting angry because it got dark and it was quite a long way to Scottsdale, we found out that we were on the right way but didn’t realize it because there were no signs… So we filled the tank and kept on driving. The street was gorgeous – just the best for me: up the mountain, down, heaps of curves and a marvellous landscape. Then it got really dark, it started raining heavily and a lot of dead wallabies edged the street. Andi stopped talking (I guess he was a bit afraid of the curves I cut, the rain etc..) and we both stared into the dark for any living animals on the street. I just loved the way! Even though it rained heavily I really enjoyed driving this street with all its curves up and down the mountain – I felt like being at home driving on a carinthian mountain (just the street was a bit narrower) – it was soo much fun J
After this monster-trip I fell asleep immediately in the Motel in Scottsdale.
On day 4 we went to St. Helens, a lovely town on the east coast. At St. Helen’s point we visited several very beautiful beaches with sand dunes and lots of shells! And the best thing about it was (like during the rest of the trip) – no one as there, we always had the whole beach just for us!! Unfortunately it was not warm enough to take a bath – not even for my toes (they really start hurting after 30seconds due to the freezing south pacific ocean!)
After enjoying approximately 2 hours of beach-feeling hahahaha we went to Freycinet National Park in the south.
Maybe you heard about the famous “Wineglass Bay”. We did the hike up the hill to the lookout where we had an incredible view to this and another beautiful bay. As we realized that we will have enough daylight for going back we decided to walk down to the beach and again I have to say: IT WAS SOOOO BEAUTIFUL!!
Unfortunately we had to go back and drive to Swansea our last overnight-stop in a beautiful beach house!
The last day was quite stressy as we were far from the airport. We took the beautiful Tasman Highway to Sorell and then to Eaglehawk Neck via Arthur Highway. Eaglehawk Neck is a narrow land bridge which connects Forestier Peninsula with the Tasman Peninsula. There were a lot of attractions: The Tasman Blowhole (wasn’t blowing at all), Tessellated Pavement (a rock formation), Tasman Arch and Devils Kitchen (I wanted to cook Andi but there were too many people around hahahahaha).
After this great lookouts and mini-walks we went to Port Arthur were we joined a guided tour which gave us a brief overview about the huge area and how life has been in this convict prison. Then it again started to rain heavily and we ran from one house to the next – still we got really wet!! To be honest I expected it to be different.. I can’t explain how… but it was like a big park with lots of buildings and just a small museum, that’s it (oh yes, and the Isle of Dead which we couldn’t visit due to lack of time and the heavy rain).

As we had to be at the airport at 5pm at the latest we had to leave Port Arthur quite early (3:30pm). Happily nothing happened to the car, so everything was fine and we got onto the plain … the trip was over.

All in all we drove about 1,400k’s and I have to say that Tasmania is absolutely worth a trip! It’s sooo beautiful – but don’t expect it to be a party-island or something like that, you should go there to enjoy nature and the silence but nothing else J

I hope you found some time to read this monster-post and still have time left to have a look at the pics (click on “pictures” on the right)!

Hope to receive some news from all of you!
Take care – hope to see you soon!
All the best from DOWN UNDER
Stephanie