After solid and filling breakfast at our hotel, we spent a couple of leisurely hours strolling around downtown Hobart. Hobart was founded in 1804 (Australia’s second oldest city after Sydney) and has a wealth of colonial architecture.
The dockside warehouses of the wealthy merchants of yore at Salamanca Place have been tastefully transformed into galleries, restaurants and shops. This is where the Saturday Market is held (the source of all the traffic yesterday). However, since today is Sunday, and it’s early to boot, there were very few people around.
Several times we heard church bells pealing in the distance as we explored the narrow streets of Battery Point, a quaint and picturesque inner-city village above Salamanca Place reached via Kellys Steps, a steep staircase that connects the wharf to this residential area.
Battery Point was settled in the late 1820s when then Lieutenant-governor Arthur advertised “delectable building sites that will inevitably become the resort of the Beau Monde”. I don’t know if the “Beau Monde” ever lived there, but I loved the beautiful houses, many of them surprisingly compact (like the one below) even though there were larger mansions as well. What did ruin Battery Point a little for me were a few ugly apartment buildings from the 1960s or 70s that would have been right at home in Soviet-Era Stalingrad.
Bill and Katrina at Arthurs Circus in the heart of Battery Point
Sophie
Back at Sullivans Cove, Hobart’s harbor, we saw a neat drawbridge that allows the many leisure craft moored there to enter and exit the jetties. There were still quite a few sailboats from the Sydney-Hobart race that had just taken place—sleek and modern-looking.
After a quick refueling stop at a “petrol station”, we headed out of town in a westerly direction toward Mt Field National Park. I’d found photos of Russell Falls in a guide book and really wanted to see it myself. At the visitor center we bought a “holiday pass” for AU$60 that allows us to visit all 19 national parks in Tasmania over the next 90 days. That’s an astounding number of national parks for one island! As I said yesterday, 40% of Tasmania is protected in one form or another.
We’d seen Tasmanian tree ferns growing along the road already, but the trail to Russell Falls was unbelievable. We walked through a veritable forest of tree ferns! Many of them were much taller than I ever expected tree ferns to be, with a rather sizable trunk. It was like being transported back to the age of the dinosaurs.
While we didn’t see any dinosaurs, we did see a couple of pademelons (pronounced “PADDY-melon”), a smaller kangaroo-relative, and even a platypus which is very shy and rarely seen in the wild. Laura was the first to spot the platypus and had the honor of logging her sighting in a special register at the visitor center. Her entry was the first of the day!
Russell Falls did not disappoint either. In the U.S., a place like this would be mobbed with people, but there were only 20 or 25 people at the falls at any given time even though now is the prime travel season for Tasmania.
Russell Falls is a two-tiered cascade about 120 ft high. It’s a beautiful site made uniquely Tasmanian by the tree ferns that grow on either side of it. I could have spent hours there, enjoying the rushing water and the tree ferns gently swaying in the breeze.
Since we were on a schedule (we had to reach Strahan on the west coast), we pressed on. The next couple of hours were spent in the car, but the scenery was never less than impressive.
This is Meadowbank Lake near the intersection of C606 and A10 in the Central Plateau, as the highlands in the middle of Tasmania are called.
Highway A10 meandered languorously through open forests of eucalyptus, a sight Heather and I couldn’t get enough of. The weather alternated between moody clouds and outright downpours and was perfect for this kind of landscape.
Further west we crossed vast bogs that looked like the moors of Yorkshire (hello, Emily Bronte!). Except for a few small--very small--settlements, we saw no signs of human presence. I don’t think I’ve ever driven on a road that traverses such pristine beauty.
Close-up of two eucalyptus trunks
At 4 pm we reached the town of Derwent Bridge and decided to take a quick side tour to Lake St Clair, one of the crown jewels of Cradle Mountain—Lake St Clair National Park. It was drizzling steadily now, with temperatures in the mid-50s, and the kids weren’t thrilled by the weather. I, on the other hand, loved it!
At the edge of Lake St Clair, I ran into a nice lady who almost waxed poetic about the rain and the cool temperatures. She was from Queensland, a state known for its (sub)tropical climate and humidity, and was thrilled to experience such cool weather in the summer.
The Lake St Clair Visitor Center had a nice display of Tasmanian animals, and Laura was thrilled to find a stuffed echidna!
Australia has the quirkiest road signs. Their designs are very graphical and sometimes just a little over the top. I’ll do a separate blog entry after collecting a few more examples, but here’s one of our favorites.
Continuing on A10, the Lyell Highway, we saw glimpses of mountains all around. Their peaks were surrounded by swirling mists.
The open eucalyptus forests gradually gave way to a thicker type of forest with a dense undergrowth of ferns, making for an even more primordial landscape. The road meandered up and down mountains, skirted lakes of infinite solitude and beauty, and occasionally revealed vistas of deep valleys that looked like no human had ever crossed them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much natural beauty along one single highway!
All of this changed when we got to the outskirts of Queenstown about 25 miles from the west coast of Tasmania. In 1883, gold was discovered on Mount Lyell near Queenstown, and soon copper was being extracted as well. Within 20 years, the hills surrounding the town had been logged (the timber went into the smelters), sulphurous fumes had destroyed the vegetation, and heavy rains had eroded the topsoil. Water filtered through the tailings rich in sulphides to create a toxic brew of sulphuric acid and heavy metals. The damage to the environment was catastrophic. The smelters closed in the late 1960s but it is estimated that it will take another 400 years for nature to repair the worst damage.
Queenstown itself is utilitarian, with tin-roofed houses and a reputation for being redneck--a surprise to no one. Rough-and-tumble places like this aren't exactly uncommon in resource-rich Australia. However, after hours of driving through pristine natural environments, it was a rude shock to come upon such utter destruction of the very beauty we had just enjoyed.
The last leg of our journey, 25 miles to Strahan, was spent fighting off a vague sense of depression that Queenstown had left behind. We arrived in Strahan at 7 pm, tired and hungry after a long day on the road, and quickly checked into our cabins (“self-contained cottages”, as they call them here). After a simple but quite delicious dinner of local trevally (a white fish) and rainbow trout (which looked and tasted like salmon) at a seaside tavern, plus a couple of bottles of surprisingly nice Tasmanian pinot grigio (2008 9th Island), we put the kids to bed. The adults looked at the photos Heather and I had taken today (a couple of hundred, at least) but pretty soon the Ellises went off to their cabin and Heather and I fell into bed, soon dead to the world.
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