Tasmanias south

Lovely bit of dry stone wall… Huh?

Well, I’ve been sorting through photos and making blog posts for a little over 24 hours hours now and the photos I’m sorting through at the moment are leading up to Port Arthur, so there’s more absolutely magnificent scenery pictures with stunning huge cliffs. Or, there are pictures from Port Arthur where it was a bit like a human zoo, there were masses of people everywhere. So that’s a nice bit of dry stone wall from Port Arthur, shrug.And here are some OK cliffs and a lovely rugged section of coastline.

And here are some enormous stunning cliffs with huge forests on top. It’s hard to get a true perspective of their size.

And yet more cliffs…

I’m throwing all these cliff pictures in because I’m struggling with the concept of Port Arthur which was the next place I visited. You  know what they say, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. Still I guess some people must like it, there were so many people there.

This is walking into Port Arthur after paying your $37 entry fee. Push past these people and walk about 30 metres down the road towards the large grassed area.

Turn left and look along the road to the jetty and realize that there’s not only masses coming from the multi tiered car parks, but they are also coming in by boat.

And not just a few people, there are loads being ferried across from a cruise ship. I did hear later that someone was told to check first if there was a cruise ship in town before visiting Port Arthur.

Most of my photos ended up being fairly close ups of finer details rather than more open informative pictures.  Here are some nice shingles.

Now this is a cool wall. This is a tower wall with lovely eroded yellow blocks.

I left Port Arthur looking for a place to camp, here was a great walk at Fortescue bay following through Canoe bay into Bivouac bay and back with a National park camp site at Fortescue.

The weather was gloomy but the walk was good with the last summit into Bivouac being a good steep challenge. Back to the main area and have a shower (swim) before trying to get a camp spot there at the national park. I should have tried this before my walk as the grounds were packed. Still, a quick drive out of the park and you’re in state forest, there are little spur roads all along here, great spots to pull off and camp for the night.

 

This was far better than the camp site in the national park anyway, and free.

The little towns throughout Tasmania are filled with quirky people, this would have taken some work to put together.

Continuing along this bottom section of Tassie I made my way towards Lime bay reserve stopping in at the Coal mines Historic Site. This is a world heritage site and although a little like Port Aurthur in the fact that there are ruins to look at and lots of interesting history to learn about, it’s all spread throughout the bush. The ruins are colourful and interesting and the metal etched information panels are attached to many of the limestone blocks or railway sleepers laying around the area.

Same tiny little cells to look at and wonder how people could survive locked in such suck small spaces.

Same lovely colourful weathered blocks, in fact maybe even a little nicer here, more variety of colour and shape.

Same sort of artifacts laying around the grounds.

Except here you wander from site to site through the bush along coal strewn tracks.

And chances are, you my have the place to yourself.

Well worth a visit if your coming down Port Arthur way.

I then made my way to the campsite at Lime bay, what a great spot. I found a nice shady spot under some trees about 20 metres from the beach.

While having my afternoon bath in the shallow bay I noticed there were oysters and mussels scattered around on the ground so I filled my pockets with mussels and headed back to camp.

 

A bowl of fresh mussels and a glass of scotch as the sun sets. Towards the end of the bowl I discovered that I’d also eaten a few crabs as well, there were little crab legs in the bottom of my bowl.