The western areas of Tasmania are quite stunning, much of the west in inaccessible and those areas which do have roads are magnificent. At this stage I’d become a bit of a walking machine and I was trekking longer and higher wherever possible. The further I was pushing it the further I wanted to keep pushing it.
Yeah sorry, another car picture. I pulled into a caravan park which seemed very full and I was about to turn around and leave till I saw another troopy parked by the water so figured I’d stay for a night. They had bought there’s many years ago as an x-camper and changed almost nothing on the vehicle, it was the old straight 6 with no turbo, only 2 years older than mine. I’d arrived back in Tassie at about 5 in the morning, it was dark and foggy and I’d had very little sleep laying down on a couch in the ferry.
I’d been thinking about converting my landcruiser 200 series into something more useful for quite a while, ever since I was back in Fowlers bay I’d been keeping an eye out online and researching a few different options. Originally my thoughts were to go for a tray back ute with a slide on camper, but there were a few drawback to that, mainly that there was no real living space during bad weather in a slide on. So, the troopy conversion won out for my wants and needs in the end.
There’s a lot to see around the Hobart area, when I first drove through the city I was just happy to get out the other side but now that I’ve spent some time here it’s growing on me, perhaps a little like a fungus. I wouldn’t want to live here, but as a major centre near by that you may need to visit, there’s everything you could need and more. Also for a capital city, it hasn’t lost it’s small scale artisan aspect, bottle shops sell local ciders and beers, IGA sells local small goods and cheeses.
Why is it that posts are coming through thick and fast down here in Tassie where I’ve had no power and very limited internet connection and facilities? I guess it’s because I feel more like I’m on an adventure here, a holiday of sorts. I have a mission and I’m doing it rather than just living in my caravan wherever I happen to be and I want to record it and keep track. This is my office of sorts where I’ve made all the Tassie posts from, I’ve spent many hours sitting on those hard metal stools wading though all the photos and trying to remember what I did a week or two ago.
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.
I was moving fairly quickly across the top of Tasmania, the good thing about this state is that everything is so close together, it doesn’t take long to move around although the roads are generally very small and windy. I’m so glad that I didn’t bring the caravan over here. From the Weld river it was only a short drive of about 30km up to Gladstone where there was a fossicking area for smokey quartz.
Ahh Tasmania, lush and green with rain forests filled with ferns and mosses, there are some fantastic walks through varied scenery ranging from sparse open dry forests, through to mountain heaths and deep lush areas, as well as rugged coastal cliffs and beautiful beaches. It really is a land of extremes down here with the only constant being that it remains cool most of the time. Though even the weather has it’s extremes, when it’s cloudy it’s cold, but then within seconds the cloud can clear and the sun is scorching hot. This means that you seem to be constantly putting on and taking off layers of clothes.
I finally bit the bullet and booked my ticket to Tassie. The delay for getting a passage was almost as surprising as the price, the soonest I could get a fare across was 7 weeks from booking and the return ticket for my car and van was going to cost $2000. So a little bit of a rethink, I decided that I’d go with just the car leaving the van back here on the mainland, a one way ticket for the car was only $250. Yeah one way, I may be taking a gamble as the bookings need to be so far ahead generally, but I really have no idea how long I’ll need to “do” Tassie and if I get stuck there for a little longer who cares.
Back in Victoria and I’ve been rather slack in not posting on the blog for well over a month. I spent about a month in the vicinity of Tingha fossicking for many different shiny rocks and I had planned to write a very long blog post explaining my fossicking experiences around the area. I have written a lot of the post, but it’s taking a long time and I haven’t organized much in the way of any photo’s for the post either, so we’re skipping it for the moment, to be finished at a later date.