TripRoundUnder

Again, apologies for the delay between posts to our passionate fans.

After saying goodbye to Freycinet, we headed further down the Tasmanian East Coast with the goal of making it to Port Arthur.

Along the way, we stopped and had a look around at the Tesselated Pavement at Eaglehawk Neck. A stretch of coastline formed by ancient glaciers, showing straight lines that you normally never see in nature. Again, we also marvelled at the pristine blue beaches of the coastline and vowed to have a longer look on our way back up the coast.

From here, we drove to the infamous Port Arthur and the ruins of the old convict settlement. After running about a kilometre to make the last boat tour for the day, we took in some knowledge about the history of the site and it’s brutal beginnings. We learned about the child prison across the waterway and the Isle of the Dead, where dead convicts were buried in unmarked graves. This gave an eery feel to place and although there was a free campsite at the site of the boys prison, it was a no from Lauren and I.

From here, we had a tour of the main convict site and again we learnt more about the rough early convict history of the area. Something we noticed was that the grounds of the colony were so beautiful, totally in contrast with the harsh stories we were learning about.

I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone that visits, but the massacre that led to a lot of Australia’s sweeping gun law changes was definitely in the back of our minds during our time at the site. This wasn’t really helped by a curious Wikipedia search and although there was a caravan park right next door, we weren’t super keen to stay in the area. Looking back on it, this was a little silly, but we did find a lovely little campsite at White Sands, a short drive away.

It was here that we got a little worried about the troopy with some diesel smells/small leaks coming from the car. We visited a local mechanic and his “encouraging” words of, ‘It shouldn’t catch on fire’ and get it properly looked at closer to home made us feel a little bit better. We vowed to keep an eye on things and kept going.

From advice given by Lauren’s lovely mum Ally, we drove out to do the Cape Hauy walking track. This turned out to be a source of several different emotions… Firstly, we saw two snakes within the first 500m of a 10km walk and Steve was thinking that we had been set up by Ally.

However, we did not see any more snakes for the rest of the walk and the views were absolutely worth the early fright. Stretched out into the Tasman sea, we walked along cliff tops with huge columns reaching right down into the sea. Not sure Steve’s mum appreciated the FaceTime looking down a few hundred metres off a cliff top however. To make the view even better, we saw some seals sun-baking on rocks down below.

Our Tassie trip was coming to an end and it was time to make our way back up the peninsula. On the way, we checked out some more spectacular rock and cliff formations with the Tasman Arch and Devils Kitchen where the weather and seas had carved out some hard to comprehend views. This coast line continued to teach us about how powerful nature is and how it really can carve spectacular formations out of what was “normal” parts of land.

Now it was time to do the big drive up the Devonport for Lauren’s favourite theme park ride in the form of the ferry back to Melbourne. This time we had booked a day ferry in the hopes this may help with her belly. Our findings from this experiment showed that daylight vs nighttime did not have a differing impact and Lozzy still does not like long boat travels. Although more data will be needed to form a more decisive conclusion. In saying that, she did recover faster from this one, so there is hope!

Overall, we loved Tassie and we didn’t even get to properly see everything it has to offer, such as the West coast. Like I’ve said in other posts, it really has everything for nature lovers and we would 100% recommend it to everyone thinking of visiting! Time to head West!