Land of the Green Gold

Trip Start Sep 16, 2008
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Trip End Apr 02, 2009


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Flag of Australia  , Tasmania,
Saturday, January 10, 2009

So I'm taking another tour with Adventure Tours Australia, the same guys I used around Kakadu, and Alice Springs.  We got picked up at about 630 in the morning again.  One of these days I'll find a tour that starts later.  Anyway, the first stop was Mt Field National Park, where we did a little hiking through some rainforest and saw a few waterfalls.  We followed this up with a stop at Lake St Clair, the deepest lake in Australia at 167 meters.  If I remember that correctly. 

After lunch we took what may be the most curvy road in the world.  It was pretty much non stop turns through some mountains and down to the west coast.  Maybe at this point I should mention that my 3 day tour is of the western part of Tassie.  Anyway, we all made it to Strahan without anyone getting sick, but it was a close call for a couple girls.  Strahan itself is a pretty little seaside town like you might see in New England Horseshoe Falls
Horseshoe Falls
 .  It used to be a major shipbuilding center back in the day, due to the presence of Huon Pine trees in the area.  They used to call the Huon Pine 'Green Gold', because it was worth more than its weight in gold and was the best shipbuilding material in the world.  But the trees only grow about a millimeter a year and can live to be 4000 years old, so when all the early settlers went out and chopped down all they could find, they nearly killed them all off.  Luckily, not all the trees were found, but I think all the big ones may have been.

The next morning, we took a bike ride around the town before packing up and heading towards Cradle Mountain.
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