Here we are in Tasmania! Two weeks of Sun, Surf and... Wait, no that's not why were here. We're here for Cold, Calm and Cute Furry Things. Yay!
Day 1
Day 1 is technically Day 0, as we boarded the Spirit of Tasmania for an overnight journey with our car.
Boat fans do not be fooled by the cheap car rates, the Spirit is an expensive and rather dull way to travel. The boat departs Port Melbourne about two hours before sundown, so the first ten minutes waving the shore goodbye is pleasant, but more important is beating the enormous queue for bain marie dinner. After dark there is a cinema if you want, or mindnumbing pokies, for your convenience. We went to bed early as I have a headache, and we slept until the voices of morning alerted us to the fact that is was ten to six, time to get up, get your car, and get off.
Whoever said that this was to be the highlight of our trip has left me with great fears for this holiday.
Having woken up at such an unholy hour, the bright skies of Tasmania beckoned us to the road, as nothing was open in Devonport or the next four towns so early in the morning. A light breakfast in Ulverstone and back on the road. The coast road is pretty, although bloody windy. Particularly in areas where ancient lighthouses beckoned us for a 15 minute tour from 11am. Pity its only 9:30am. We did keep seeing this on farms though:
What kind of crop is Tasmania's most popular? Poppy Crops. Mmm, poppies.
By morning tea we were in Stanley, a small but pretty town on the side of a cliff, me driving after Tom declared himself too tired after our boat sleep. He was therefore responsible for negotiating with our house sitter and mortgage broker for the transfer of key documents not sent in time by the land developer. What a surprise.
For those of you with Google maps up, you’ll notice that we managed to get most of the way up the west coastline in a morning, so we decided to head for Smithton and then south to Strahan, our bed for the night. We had bought a map on the boat and had taken the same view of the coding as a UK map, which uses double green lines for both motorway and backstreet. We didn’t take too much notice of how the map categorised the roads. That, in hindsight, was a mistake.
About an hour south of Smithton, in the middle of nowhere, we were greeted with a sign and a road that I did not want to follow. The sign said that the throughway included a ferry trip via 120kms of dirt road. That’s One Hundred and Twenty Kilometres of Dirt Road. Why is this here ? Where are we? Why is this to only choice? Why didn’t the map tell us this? Oh. Wait. It did. Shut up map. So I drove 120kms on a dirt road, which was sometimes so steep 1st gear was required.
It was a scrub landscape, without any sign of civilisation, or wildlife, apart from a rather game bird and her two hatchlings who decided that my hugely noisy diesel on a dirt road was not enough of a deterrent to cross. Her last chick disagreed. I hold great hopes for its survival.
We managed to weave our way around the ferry trip and come up via Waratah (Note, no toilets for 250kms…) and finally stopped with a family running their three 7 week old puppies. A quick puppy cuddle and all was cured.
Strahan is a pretty seaside town with the usual tourist trappings of boats, planes and expensive steak. A supermarket would be nice though…
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