After a couple of weeks in Tassie, we’ve come to believe that there are just two types of weather down here – furious wind with or without rain, hail and snow or magnificently calm sunny days.  When we arrived in Devonport, after a voyage enlivened only by watching the Barbie movie in the on-board cinema, the wind was howling.  To our delight, the Mersey Bluff van park people waited up until we’d arrived – we were pretty close to first off the Spirit, so it was still light and we were followed in by a handful of others, all personally guided to our sites, so it could have been accomplished in the dark if needed👍👍.  Perched just below the lighthouse, we rocked around during the night and even higher winds were forecast.

The next day was Referendum day so we had to vote, of course.  On the way to our out-of-state booth we stopped at the “famous” Devonport market.  Entirely satisfactory, with good coffee, unexpected but excellent gallettes and pastel-coloured chooks.  A winning combo, we thought.  Certainly more successful than YES.

A country drive took us to the Ashgrove cheese operation where they’ve cleverly run a glass wall down one side of the factory and put their retail outlet on the other side so customers can see in.  Unfathomably, they were not able to do a sensible tasting of their Signature cheeses – only 3 hunks of their supermarket range, along with nuts and fruit and salad and biscuits and all sorts.  Later on, we encountered a similar issue on Bruny Island – three substantial chunks of cheese rather than a whole lot of slivers to experience their wide variety – very disappointing and consequently no economy boosting happened at either venue.

After 24 hours of wild, windy weather, we set our sights on Stanley, the west coast and the Tarkine – if it was going to be windy, we may as well see it at its most dramatic.  It was logistically convenient, therefore, to camp at Boat Harbour Beach and what a treat it was.  A glorious outlook across the beach, a cracking café, a beautiful peninsular hike and no van on the back to drag around the steep, narrow, winding roads.  And the wind abated for a day or so. 

Stanley was lovely, old, quaint and closed.  The exception was the excellent wine bar, complete with wildly kitsch decoration and an open fire.  A couple of glasses of Pinot (Pooley and Bream Creek) and a cheerful hour spent in the warmth made for a great afternoon.  And we avoided a hike up The Nut – the big rock that towers over the town.  Happy days!

Keen to see how rugged the north west really was, we waited until there was a strong wind warning and took a couple of longer drives to Arthur River and down as far as Corinna.  Continually thanking Peter Noble for fixing our brakes, we found ourselves at “the edge of the world” being blown off our feet and imagining the chances of survival if your ship came to trouble in these waters – zero!  Couta Rocks turned out to be a shack settlement with a substantial sized but seldom used boat slip and a “Deliverance” vibe – we could almost hear the banjos.  Sadly, despite the much touted Forage Trail, no-one was selling fresh fish or prawns or crays anywhere.

Corinna has a hotel and a car ferry to cross the Pieman River but also a boat tour up river to see the country where Huon Pine really came from.  When we arrived, the tour was on in just 40 minutes time and there were 2 seats left, so we grabbed them, seduced by a picture of the beautiful Arcadia II steaming along the river.  Down at the dock, we were marched straight past her and on to a big dinghy.  The big boat tour was tomorrow, only the little one today, hence the 2 seats.  Ho-hum.  But the tour wasn’t ho-hum at all, with great scenery, a flight of stairs through the “cool temperate rainforest” to Lovers Falls, a platypus sighting and lots of information about the heyday of “the pine”.  We now know that Huon Pine has miraculous protective properties that ward off marine borers and other pests and allow it to last “forever”, which is lucky because it takes 500 years to grow a decent sized tree.  After the war, when surplus machinery was cheap, bulldozers and tracked vehicles helped the piners to take 20 million cubic feet of pine in a decade.  The previous 100 years had taken only half that.  In today’s money, that decade’s logging was worth an unbelievable A$60 billion.  Of course, it’s all protected now and only fallen timber can be collected by a small number of authorised people.  It also turns out that the beautiful Huon birds-eye grain only occurs in a small amount of the timber – a pity!

What was also a pity was that ATGANI’s wheels were looking decidedly un-aligned and the tyres were wearing badly, so our long-awaited appointment at Get Hitched in Launceston came none too soon.  As well as straightening and tightening things (all a mystery to me), they replaced one of the trailer brakes, taking some glee in telling me that we’d been using only 3 brakes on our 4 wheeled van!  They used a well-known technical term to describe the tyres, so the next day, it was 6 new Tazzy Tyres.  The uneven wearing habits of chunky mud tyres combined with poor alignment had seen to the old ones.  But now, our rig simply felt much better on the road and our economy-boosting habits had returned.

Launceston has a nice feel downtown and around the riverfront.  The art gallery was interesting, the City Park was pretty, the existence of Japanese-donated macaques in that park was weird and we had a great dinner at Stillwater.  The other draw card for Launceston is Cataract Gorge where there’s a magnificent reserve area with a bit of wilderness thrown in, only moments from the heart of town.  We took a decent hike up the gorge, crossed the wobbly suspension bridge, admired the rhododendrons and the peacocks, enjoyed the chairlift and generally had a fine time.   

Tamar Valley wineries also beckoned and we visited a solid cross section.  Joseph Chromy was a bit corporate but their vintage fizz was good, the views from Marions were outstanding but the wine was not much to our taste, we loved the set up at Westella and thought their wine (Pinot only) was terrific and even fair value, and Cabbage Tree Hill had been set up only a decade or so ago by a couple who’d left the mining and resources sector in WA, to come to Tasmania and start a winery with no prior knowledge or experience – crazy brave!  The consumer-led recovery continued.

A well publicised collection of 60 Short Walks covers all of Tasmania but our first one was to be around Dove Lake at Cradle Mountain.  We set up camp on a glorious, chilly afternoon at the Cradle Mountain Fishery, looking out over a dam that proved to be stocked with enormous trout, available on a catch-and-release basis or to simply have fish food thrown at them. Just last week, someone had landed a 20lb fish (allegedly)!

Next morning, we awoke to heavy fog which was eventually followed by, you guessed it, high winds, this time including snow.  The van’s heater got a workout and our walk around the lake was curtailed – we felt a bit wussy when passed by a hockey-sticks type woman, all bundled up and equipped with a walking pole, obviously heading out to complete the two hour lap in 90 minutes in order to catch the last bus out.  We were impressed…but still not tempted.  You can’t really drive into the Park and are obliged to catch the shuttle bus which is free, albeit that you’ve already been hit up for park entry.  However, in just a week or so, the shuttle is going to cost an extra $15 – naturally, there is uproar.  We eventually made it back to our car and turned on the heater.

We’d had plans to move southwards from here, towards Hobart, but hadn’t counted on the Hobart show and consequent lack of camp sites.  Nor had we expected Tracy to blow in to Sydney with a desire to pop up to Brisbane to see Mardi.  However, we did have new brakes on the car, new brakes and new tyres on ATGANI and the road to and from Strahan looked exciting, so we headed west once again.  Advice about Strahan had been contradictory but, as luck would have it, we had a great time.  The weather was cool but spectacular and we took an extended Macquarie Harbour boat trip.  We first headed out to Hell’s Gate, the narrow entrance to the harbour and actually went through the gate and around to Cape Sorell and its lighthouse.  We were told that it’s only calm enough to do this about twice a year, so we felt pretty lucky to see this rugged coastline from off shore.

There’s also plenty of fish farming (trout and salmon) in the harbour and we heard the usual stories about how carefully managed it all was to prevent environmental degradation, exactly as for Cone Bay barramundi up north, also now owned by Tassal.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, there seem to be just as many stories railing against the farms.

Further down the massive harbour which empties the Gordon River, we walked around Sarah Island, the convict settlement early on in Marcus Clark’s “For the Term of His Natural Life”.  Unbelievably brutal and in use for only eleven years, its biggest surprise was that about half way through its life, it suddenly became the convict “destination of choice”, as they became moderately well-treated shipwrights under the entrepreneurial eyes of master builder David Hoy, utilising the abundant local Huon Pine.  It didn’t last (Port Arthur was established) but it did form the basis for the play, “The Ship That Never Was” which we saw that night.  A great story handled in hilarious and ingenious fashion by a two woman cast with assistance (both willing and unwilling) from dozens of audience members.  It’s been running for almost 30 years and is a must see if you find yourself in Strahan👍👍.

The Lyell Highway wriggles rather than runs from Strahan, through Queenstown, Derwent Bridge and on to Hobart.  I think the climb out of Queenstown and the descent into Tarraleah might be the steepest roads of our entire trip.  Certainly, all those new brakes were needed and they had a well-earned smoko at the bottom.  We stopped to see The Wall, an impressively large Huon Pine bas-relief sculpture and eventually made our way to Barilla CP at Cambridge, outside of Hobart and close to the airport. 

A half a day later and we were landing in Brisbane, meeting Tracy and dragging Mardi out of her maximum-security-twilight-home (credit BH) to High Tea at Lennons in the city.  Glasses of champagne later, a quick overnight hotel stop and we were back in Hobart by the end of the day. Well worth it! 

Our next target was Bruny Island which involved a no-booking-required trip (always concerning) on the vehicular ferry from Kettering.  What could possibly go wrong?