Meg has been crutching all around Tasmania for the past few days and the most common comment she gets is “Good on Ya”. Everyone seems to be just as impressed as me for her still embracing our road trip around Tasmania, despite the broken knee. We are enjoying seeing the sites as well as a lot of wildlife and it is hard to understand why it doesn’t get many tourists. We heard that only 3 percent of Australian tourists make a visit to Tasmania. The cities and town are not that noteworthy, (only 500,000 people live on the island), but the national parks and so many different types of animals should make more tourists add it on to their Australia trip.
Our next stop in Tassie was the oldest and biggest city – Hobart. We did a long birding walk in the botanical garden and then took a drive up to Mt. Wellington for some amazing views. The weather wasn’t perfect for great pics but we could still see quite a long ways from the summit. We then stopped at the biggest and oldest brewery in town- the Cascade Brewery. The highlight for our day was seeing some cool birds close up.
The next day we headed to the small mining town of Queenstown, but first we needed to see Lake St. Clair in yet another of Tasmania’s national park. We took a long walk to a creek with the hope of seeing a duck-billed platypus. We couldn’t find one but did get several more Good on Ya’s from other hikers. We did find a Echidna which is the other egg laying mammal in the world. I always thought that the platypus was the only egg laying mammal but here we learned about the Echidna which doesn’t even look like a cousin to the platypus. It looks like it is a cross between a hedgehog, porcupine and an anteater. We made it to the small town of Queenstown which reminds me of the small old mining town of Roslyn in Washington State. It was a bustling town at one time but it is now just a very small tourist town with some cool old architecture reminding us of it’s glory days.
The next day belonged to the biggest attraction in Tasmania- Cradle Mountain National Park. The weather was a bit rainy and cold, but we managed to do some walking. The first one brought us to the famous boat shed on Dove Lake. It reminded me of the boat shed on Lake Louise near Banff in Canada because so many pictures were taken on a beautiful lake with an old boat shed. Next, we toured a Tasmanian Devil Rescue Sanctuary. They had about 20 devils and some quolls that they were in rehabilitation. It is hard to call them cute when they also look a bit scary. One devil was gnawing on some roadkill with their very powerful jaws. While leaving the sanctuary, we saw our first wild kangaroos that were munching on some grass near our car. Yes!!! We were worried we wouldn’t see the roos. We then took another walk back in the park to see some wombats. They look cute but are really really boring. Kind of like seeing the marmots back in Washington State. They don’t do anything but placidly chomp grass.
We spent the night in Tullah. Another small former mining town with just 2 restaurants… Luckily enough our incredibly small cabin was within walking distance of the town pub. The next day we drove to Burnie on the North coast of Tasmania. This coast didn’t seem to be as scenic as the West coast but it does have 2 things we hadn’t seen yet- penguins and platypus’. The difficulty is that both of those animals come out right after sunset. We tried to go see the platypus first and took a nice short walk along a slow river but the only thing we saw was a pair of pademelons. Pademelons are smaller marsupials than the wallabies and kangaroos that we have already seen on the island and we excited to see them, so we weren’t super disappointed by our platypus shut out. We did have time to go see the Little Penguins (also known as Fairy Penguins) as they came to shore for the night and we were not shut out. Some volunteers show up every night to help people see the penguins as they come in to sleep in their burrows for the night. They provided red covers for everyone’s flashlights so we don’t scare them away. We were able to see at least 30 of the several hundred penguins that arrive in Burnie every night. This is our 3rd penguins sighting in the wild after the African penguins in South Africa and the Galapagos penguins.
Our 10 day Tasmanian road trip was definitely a success. We were able to see a lot of things despite being slowed down a bit by the crutches. There is a lot of hiking to do on this island and a lot more things to see. We intend to come back when we can get a little further into the National Parks. For now, we are headed back to the city. Next stop – Sydney!