Hard Labor in Tasmania
Trip Start
Dec 28, 2007
1
10
27
Trip End
Dec 01, 2008
Derwent Bridge,
Australia
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Friday night we bought some fuel, arranged our shuttle service and booked a trip on the ferry to shorten the length of our bushwalk to 65 km. The ferry across Lake St Clair shortens the bushwalk from 80 km to 65 km with a 20 minute boat ride. Due to some dodgy planning by Andrew, we only allotted ourselves 4 days to do this track, whereas 6 days is the norm. After final preparations for the track, we finished our last night in civilization with an excellent steak dinner and a couple of beers at the pub.
We woke up in Devonport and took the "tassielink" bus to the Cradle Mountain Visitor Center where we picked up our passes and then on to the Ronnie Creek car park
Dove Lake
. We put on our boots, secured our packs, and off we went.The first day was excruitiatingly difficult as we walked about 18k over very rugged mountainous terrain. The scenery was awesome though. We walked up past Dove Lake, around Cradle Mountain, through Waterfall Valley and ended at Windereme Hut. We set up camp, cooked some ready made Indian food and rested our weary bones. We had a great campsite with awesome mountain views. The best part of camping was the wildlife. We saw wallaby, wombat, quoll, possum and Andrew even saw a tasmanian devil (although Andrea thinks it was a possum). The later it got, the more wildlife came out. The noises of the forest were loud with animals and birds crying through the night. At one point we went for a nightwalk and came back to find two possums rumaging through our stuff. All night long the critters surrounded our tent as we slept well in anticipation of another tough day.
Day two brought more great weather. Great weather in Tasmania means no rain but not necessarily blue skies. In fact, the entire trip in Australia, we never had completely blue skies like you would see in other climates. The weather was somewhat hot, very humid, and rains could start on a moments notice. We got lucky on the overland though as we had no significant rain. We started hiking at about 10 am and hiked another 17k in about 6 hours. We had lots of breaks in the interim. The scenery was equally beautiful to the day before. Lots of mountain views, many stream crossings and lots of different types of landscape
oy vey!
. At about 4 pm, we arrived at our next camp, New Pelion hut. Every night had huts we could stay in, but since the weather was nice, we camped outside again. We set up our tent in a field near the hut, made some coffee and relaxed. Once again, as night fell, numerous critters and wildlife surfaced. The wildlife was definately the highlight of the trip. Many more wallaby, quoll and possums were running around our camp. When we were in our tent, it sounded like one critter tried to eat our tent stake and another ran into our tent running through camp. Lots of action. We finally got some sleep and rested ourselves for another long day. Day three was another long day. We hiked 19km from New Pelion to Windy Ridge. Like day one, we ended up doing two recommended days of hiking in one day. We arrived at camp at around 5pm sore and tired. We set up camp cooked dinner and off to bed.
The last day was an easy 9 km. We finished at noon, took a ferry across Lake St Clair, and hung out in the wilderness lodge waiting for our bus. We caught the 4 pm bus which dropped us in Hobart at 7 pm. We spent two days in Hobart cleaning and shipping home our camping gear and are now at the airport waiting to fly to Sydney, then Bangkok to meet Andrew's business partner Adam. Our flight is 5 hours late so we had lots of time to work on this site. PS -- Thanks for holding down the fort Adam. See you tomorrow!
