2000/02 Australia trip - Tasman Peninsula |
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MondayJanuary 24th
We were off before dawn, rushing along the motorway, only to join the rush hour into Sydney, walking pace along the Paramatta Road. We dropped the car off at the airport and checked in for the plane to Melbourne and Hobart. However, the plane was broken, so we didn’t go anywhere for a while.
We’d been given a bad phone number for the camper rental place in Hobart, so it was a while before we could tell them we’d be arriving after their closing time. In the end we got to Hobart about four hours late. It’s a tiny airport with roll-out stairs and a self-service cart for luggage and a quarantine tub for us to dump your fruit into.
The Britz guy came and collected us, and quickly got us set up with the camper. It was larger than we expected, a Ford Transit automatic diesel with built-in shower and toilet. It had been converted from left-hand drive, so the controls were the reverse of the Camry, windscreen wipers going again! He’d warned us that the camper didn’t have much get-up-and-go. He was right, but that wasn’t going to bother us much.
As it was late, we settled for a campground in Hobart, on the hill overlooking the harbour and their new casino. Hobart’s a nice city, but we’d hoped to be out in the country by this time. We made the best of it, walked along the sea shore, and found a quiet oriental restaurant with good cheap food and wine.
Tuesday January 25th
First stop in the morning was the supermarket to fill up with food, then we were quickly out of the city and headed east for the Tasman Peninsula. It was sunny but cool (or bloody freezing, as the Aussies put it). The peninsula was where they kept the convicts in the 1850s, beautiful and spectacular scenery but a grim history. We stopped at Eaglehawk Neck, a crescent beach of sand, beautiful now, but this is where the peninsula is only a quarter mile wide, and there used to be a line of fierce dogs to keep the convicts from escaping by land.
The employees at the local restaurant seemed to have gone to lunch, so we walked out and cooked soup at the Tesselated Pavement. That’s a fancy name for flat rock that has patterns that look like they’re man-made. From there we went exploring some of the crazy scenery, the Devil’s Arch, the Devil’s Kitchen, and the Blowhole, places where the sea has eroded the cliffs. All was peaceful, but these places would be terrifying in a big storm.
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Tasman Peninsula (14.24) |
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We drove through Doo Town, where all the houses have names like Doo Well, Will Doo, Doo Nothing. I guess that’s entertainment on the Tasman Peninsula!
We made it to the campground at White Beach in time for a walk on the beach. The campground seemed a bit crowded and noisy, kids all over the place, but it turned out that this was a holiday, Australia Day, so not so surprising. The beach was quiet, on a protected bay, a perfect crescent of sand, with a backdrop of forest and the sea like a millpond, still enough to get reflections. The sunset was gorgeous.
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White Beach (8.45) |
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