To Strahan from Hobart

Thursday, March 05, 2015
Cambridge, Tasmania, Australia
We set off in our Avis maroon Pulsar this morning after consulting Matthew, the Avis man (who incidentally adhered to the Steve Irwin code of enthusiasm) about the minor scratches on the car. He proclaimed that it was "all good, it's a little beauty!!" and we were off. Hire cars here are ridiculously expensive and the original total that I was given ballooned out to almost as much as we had paid for a car for 4 weeks in the US, after they said that we had a $3000 excess on the car if we had an accident, even if it was not our fault.

Anyway we continued on through Hobart city and we were going to have a look around the waterfront but due to the confused GPS and the narrow and congested streets we decided to give that a miss and just head on down to Strahan .
The scenery along the way was ever changing and it went from open farmland, to forest, to rainforest and then cycled through again. We passed through the Derwent pine forest and on past the Franklin river and lots of lakes. The road got very winding going through the mountains and the weather continued to deteriorate into rain.
We stopped at a couple of places along the way. One was a lookout that looked into a valley and a hydro-electric power station. It was an amazing feat of engineering and had taken months of difficult labour to build.
Next we stopped at an attraction called the Wall, which was a series of huge Huon pine panels that were beautifully carved scenes that were mean't to depict the history of the area. The panels were about 10 feet high and had people and dogs and horses as well as wildlife endemic to Tasmania. Much to my annoyance they wouldn't allow cameras into the place as they wanted to sell postcards of the carvings and didn't want anyone taking their own photographs.

After we looked at the wall we continued on through the mountains and onto Queenstown, which is a huge mess of a mining town . We did pass an attractive waterfall that cascaded through the barren hills though.

We have now arrived in the little tourist town of Strahan which is situated on the Gordon river. We have a cottage overlooking the marina but it is raining again and freezing cold. It's colder here than our winter was and we have just been told that it is snowing up at Cradle Mountain, so that should be interesting.
There are lots of lovely yachts out in the estuary and a couple of seaplanes parked up near the visitors centre but I don't think they will be going anywhere as it is a bit rough out on the water.

We went out for dinner tonight to the pub restaurant owned by the accommodation where we are staying. The food was good and the place was packed. There seem to be a lot of tourists here as a lot of the hotels are full up. It is still raining but it has stopped blowing a gale thank goodness!
It would be nice if we could send some of this rain home.
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Comments

kjde
2015-03-06

Nice spot. I hope the GPS didn't cause too many problems.

2025-02-17

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