Cross Country

We rose at lark o’clock to make an early start. Today’s mission was to cross the island from east to west – fortunately not at its widest point – and reach our second destination, the village of Strahan on the west coast of Tasmania. We’d investigated some places to stop along the way.

 We managed to get away despite the Hobart rush hour traffic (yes, that’s a thing), and drove uphill to the central highlands, to our first stop at Russell Falls at Mount Field National Park. The falls are on a 20 minute loop track, so we wandered along that looking out for wildlife along the way. We could hear birds in the trees but nothing came very close to us – certainly not close enough to positively identify. After a break and a beverage, we drove off on a longer leg of the journey, which would take us to Derwent Bridge.

Russell Falls

 

A big tree

As we approached Derwent Bridge we spotted The Hungry Wombat café, and decided that looked as good a place as any to stop for lunch. Toasted sammies and chips! We’re living the high life! A minute away from the café is an art installation called The Wall In The Wilderness, which is a Thing To Do, so we went in and had a look. This is a carved wooden frieze work in progress by sculptor Greg Duncan. It’s housed in a long building, and is a depiction of his interpretation of the history of Australia. Parts of it are unfinished – he says, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes bit that he plans to come back to later…or not, depending on how the whim takes him, I guess. At the beginning there’s an entreaty from the artist to not take pictures, invoking copyright law, and saying to disrespect this is “UnAustralian”. Got bad news for you, mate. I’m not Australian, and harbour no ambition to become one, so your plea falls on deaf ears.

It was a good job we stopped at the café, as our onward journey revealed the size of the Derwent Bridge CBD…basically, that was it. Our next stop was at the Franklin River Nature Trail, another loop walk of around 20 minutes, and again we tried to spot some of the wildlife, but to no avail.

Our final call was at Nelson Falls. This location is home to the pink robin, apparently – a close relative of the New Zealand toutouwai, or North Island robin. Again, we could hear some twittering in the trees, but clearly they haven’t adopted the behaviour of their New Zealand cousins, who will come right up to and even hop onto your boots on occasion. So no birds, but the waterfall was cool.

After that, it was straight to Strahan. I say “straight”, but it was along twisty, winding roads. Fortunately we didn’t encounter any traffic on the road apart from at the beginning, when the car that pulled out in front of us had spotted a sign that said “55kmh”, but failed to register the “From Dusk Till Dawn” part of the sign, in an attempt to protect wildlife at night. Judging by the carnage we’d seen at the side of the roads for the last few days, this isn’t particularly effective. Anyway, we zoomed past them at the earliest opportunity.

Strahan is a small village, originally built for cargo and as a passenger port, then a fishing port. Nowadays it is a tourist place, for the West Coast Wilderness Railway and river tours. We’re staying at Franklin Manor, a house built in 1896 for the harbourmaster, now converted to a hotel. It doesn’t provide evening dining so we walked along the waterfront In the evening to View 42°, one of a handful of restaurants serving the other accommodation sites in town, and had a seafood buffet where we dined on oysters, smoked salmon and prawns to start, calamari and Portuguese fish, salads and noodles.