Tasmania – Center, North and West

Next on the agenda was to discover the center and famous Cradle Mountain.

We drove to the small town of Waratah to use a base to explore Cradle Mountain (and save the exorbitant fees that the caravan park at Cradle Mountain charges!).

Waratah

Waratah was a lovely little town. The caravan parking area was on a little lake that had a bunch of platypus in it. The lake then turns into a river and plummets in a waterfall into a valley below town.

Cradle Mountain

We spent a day at Cradle Mountain doing the Dove Lake walk and the Enchanted walk. The drive out to Cradle Mountain was very pretty through a nice valley:

Here are some photos of the Dove Lake walk:

The Enchanted Walk was similar, but shorter and followed a river:

Rosebery

After visiting Cradle Mountain, we were planning on heading north, but a huge storm was coming and was supposed to really hit the north of the island hard. So, we decided to drive a couple of hours further south and tuck ourselves behind a mountain in the mining town of Rosebery to wait out the storm. This turned out to be a good idea, because although we got rain, we didn’t get nearly as much as they did up north, where everything flooded!

The caravan park in Roseberry was at the site of an old quarry and was alongside a river that went crazy the day after the storm.

After the storm passed, we drove north and based ourselves in Smithton for a couple of nights. When we arrived in Smithton, we discovered that our ferry back to the mainland which was supposed to leave the next evening was cancelled because they had to close the port of Devonport for 5 days due to flooding and debris.

The Tarkine Drive

We spent a day doing the Tarkine Drive from Smithton over to Arthur River on the west coast and then back around again inland to Smithton.

There was a lot of new and old flood debris in the river and estuary at Arthur River.

The river was gushing as we went over the Kannunah bridge, and there was a lot of flooding just south of Smithton.

Stanley

Now that we had an extra 5 days before our re-booked ferry was leaving, we decided to stay a couple of nights at Stanley. I’m sure glad we did – we loved this town!!

Stanley has an ancient volcano core dominating the landscape which is called ‘The Nut’.

The town itself had some lovely old buildings and for some reason really reminded me of a coastal town in Maine.

We spent one morning walking around The Nut. We took the chairlift up to the top:

We then did the circular walk around the top. The views were wonderful.

We then walked the very steep descent (unfortunately the photos don’t do it justice for how steep it truly is – our knees were killing us by the end!)

In the evening, the sunsets were beautiful and the Fairy penguins came in from the sea for the night. Each night we saw roughly 8-10 penguins.

Penguin

Speaking of penguins, we visited a little town called ‘Penguin’ – home to the Big Penguin. Everything in town is penguin themed – from the trash bins to the poles. There was also a breast cancer awareness thing going on while we were there so the Big Penguin was all dressed up in pink.

Ulverstone

For our last couple of nights in Tasmania, we stayed in a caravan park in the city of Ulverstone. They gave us a really nice site right on a point with water all around. And, there were penguins living in the bushes all around our van that we could hear at night (and occasionally during the day).

The Ferry back to Melbourne

We had originally booked overnight ferries both directions. However, after our return ferry was cancelled, we were rebooked onto a day sail. We were a bit worried about this since the kids get seasick, but it turned out to be a flat sea. And, we were in a cabin at the front of the boat so we had a really big porthole that the kids could sit in and the view was great!