2004/03 Tasmania loop - Weldborough |
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We were heading up the east coast to Weldborough to do some sapphire 
mining. Going north the scenery became greener, and more like England. Certainly the place names were English. We passed some black swans and a more photogenic echidna.
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Echidna (4.10) |  |
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Weldborough is in the midst of the mountains, accessed by winding, narrow roads, and there’s little traffic to contend with. We were going to camp at the pub, which wasn’t hard to find as the pub is about all there is in Weldborough. It’s labeled “the worst pub”, but there is only one. It seems popular with motorcyclists, probably because it’s a great bike drive to get there, lots of opportunities to wear out the sides of your boots.
It was popular with Sandie as the campground had showers. We’d been camping free for a week, but many of those campgrounds didn’t even have water, let alone showers.
We paid to stay at the campground and went back up the road to the bridge over the Weld River, where there were supposed to be sapphires in the river bed. There were certainly plenty of blackberry bushes on the banks, so getting in and out was a chore. It was a pretty spot for standing in freezing cold water, but not very productive of sapphires. We didn’t have our sifting equipment with us, so the only tool was our shovel. We gave it a couple of hours of digging, and found only a couple of tiny stones that might have been gems.
We gave up after a couple of hours and drove back up into the mountains to the Myrtle Forest, and walked the rainforest trail. This forest had yet more massive trees, this time myrtles, a kind of beech tree.
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