Tassie

I went recently to Tasmania for a short one person holiday. The genesis of this experience was the cancellation of my planned European holiday in 2020. I still had a credit with the tour company Intrepid Travel for a six day tour of northern Italy. It feels too soon to go overseas but I wanted to use that credit sooner rather than later, so turned it into an Australian experience.

I’d been to Tassie before both as a tourist and a participant in a festival, but it had been a long time, and that southern isle seemed like a good place to visit during summer.

To be on time for my rendezvous with the tour group, I spend a night in one of those odd self-service hotels in which you are given a key code to get inside and barely see anyone. I spent some of the late afternoon exploring an array of aging courts and shopping arcades, delighting in the dense yet relatively low-rise city centre and the welcoming local culture. I found dinner in Franklin Square with some food vans and free live music.

The next morning, I met at a neighbourning hotel driveway with a tour guide and his group of tourists. We were fifteen in number and an interesting mix of demographics and groupings. Everyone was an adult but among us were parent-child and friend-friend combos as well as several sole travellers. Most were Australian but a few were international visitors. We proved to be chatty at times but were also content to be silent at other times. This suited me as just staring out the window at passing sceney was partly why I was there. Besides, our tour guide did much of the talking for us.

Our itinerary involved driving clockwise around the island to the west cost and then back to the east coast. We stopped in numerous small towns for lunch or bathroom rests. I admired the Tasmanian tendency to reuse aging architecture (rather than the trend of only preserving truly old 'heritage' and otherwise replacing old with new). One small town service station, still sporting an obsolete petrol pump out front, turned out to be a laundromat. I was also surprised that the valley of Queenstown, which I had once percieved as a harsh Martian wasteland, was now recovering from its toxic mining past with fast growing trees lining the hills.

The otherwise lush landscape of Tasmania was our key attraction, and we visited numerous rainforest waterfalls and ocean beaches, lucky to have some very sunny weather. The biggest walk of all was around Dove Lake in Cradle Mountain National Park. I’d been there once years ago, but somehow had only remembered the easy parts of it. There was a lot more up and down than I could recall and it was a long hot walk. I got some fantastic photos but was happy once it was over.

Our first two nights were spent at a motel in the west coast town of Stahan. I had my own room and it was a welcome contrast to hours together in a mini-bus. Mobile reception out west was shocking so I used a free public phone outside the local general store cum eatery and, strangely, this is one of my fondest moments. We saw a comedic play in an alfresco theatre called The Ship That Never Was (inspired by the historic event of some convicts commandeering a ship they had been forced to construct). I was one of a few hapless audience members drawn into the semi-improvized show.

We spent a Sunday night in Launceston in a hotel that was both water and wind mill themed. That was cute. I wandered the streets that evening looking for an eatery that was open and willing to accept more customers. Eventually found a nice pub and got a savoury salad to compensate for all the bakery products I'd been having. Back home, the hoons street-race in cars, but in 'Lonnie' it seems they prefer challenging each other in utes and even trucks.

Our final two nights were spent in the east coast town of Bicheno. From here we took in the Bay of Fires, lazed about the Freycinet Lodge, and visited NatureWorld fauna park. This last included witnessing some Tasmanian Devils fed Wallaby leg but, somehow, I was far more taken with the Cape Barren Geese wandering about.

On the drive back to Hobart we visited the township of Richmond, known for its historic stone bridge and other structures, which was lovely but, as I was saying, I enjoy merely mature old architecture too, and saw plenty of that. All-in-all, it was a good experience, one I suspect I needed more than I wanted, in getting away from Melbourne and having a bit of an experience.