Day 34: Low Head to Grants Lagoon

Looking towards the Tamar River and George Town.

On our way out of town we stopped at a lookout outside George Town. Read some more history and discovered it’s the third oldest town in Australia, after Sydney and Hobart.

We also found more mountain biking stuff today. Many small towns in Tasmania have made tracks and attract cyclists. The most noticeable we drove through today was the small town of Derby: there were many bike and bike trailers. It’s school holidays here, so I’m guessing they had holiday events going on.

We stopped for a comfort stop in Bridport, it's on the north coast and has been a vacation spot for over 100 years (remember: this is a long time in Australia's short history!). Then we had lunch in a Lions park in Scottsdale. Another free camping spot, but this was was very well patronised, probably because of the hot showers that were available for $3. 

St Columbia Falls

After lunch we drove on very windy roads for over an hour, as we headed east to the coast at St Helen’s. I rarely got over 50 km/h.

Dairy Farm where we stopped for afternoon tea

We stopped for a short walk to St Columbia Falls (so wet and cold!) in Pyengana and then for coffee/chai and scones at an old dairy farm. The dairy farm is fully automated: which, I discovered, means the cows can come at any time (minimum interval six hours) to be milked by the machines! 

There's so much history in this one little valley, some of the farms are run by the fourth or fifth generation. At the head of the walk was some of the stories of the ancestors of the current land owners. Including one mother who went looking for a lost cow in winter and got lost herself for over a week. They gave up on her, but she showed up anyway, with frozen toes that needed amputating! Her first words were: let me see my kids! There was another family that had six sons who licenced their farm house in 1880 so they could sell alcohol. It's now called Pub in the Paddock.

About 190 km, took over two hours, though,
due to very windy roads.

We found some really free, free camping north of St Helen’s at a place called Grants Lagoon. The local council (called "Break O'Day"!) has made a real effort to provide great camping options in this area and further north. There was almost no one there. 

Grants Lagoon

Free camping, I’m discovering, often costs money, but not as much as places that provide more facilities. Usually they don’t provide electricity or water or showers. Sometimes there’s a fee, sometimes a donation is requested. Occasionally you can pay for a shower and sometimes there’s toilets. But at this place there was no fee or request for a donation, so for the first time in our trip we stayed in a public place without paying anything! There was a drop toilet that we used during the day (but at night used our own). It was another very quiet night, with no need to use our eye masks!

Day 33: all day at Low Head

It was a Sunday and we’d hoped to walk to church this morning (2.8 km away), but I came down with a cold and we decided it was better to keep that to ourselves. Also, we had complementary WiFi at this place (pretty rare on our journey!), so online church was possible.

One of the lighthouses at Low Head

We went for a walk after lunch to a couple of nearby lighthouses. We discovered this region was discovered by Matthew Flinders and George Bass just 10 years after the first white settlers landed in New South Wales. It was settled in 1804 when they brought convicts and established George Town, just south of Low Head. One of the chief concerns was safe navigation, and, though the Tamar looks wide, it's apparently actually pretty tricky to navigate. So various navigation aids were introduced, including the two lighthouses we walked to. This area was also where the first submarine cable was laid between Tasmania and the mainland in 1859.

Getting the washing dry hasn't proved too hard,
we've had pretty good weather much of the time.
This view of the Tamar River was pretty good!

Bells Bay is Tasmania's main international port 
and is located just south of George Town.
On Sunday when we were chatting with our
sons, we saw this large ship sailing towards the ocean.

Day 32: Montagu to Low Head

Sunset at Low Head

We enjoyed the peace and relative isolation of Montagu, but it was nice to get to a caravan park where we could have a good shower this day. 

On the way to Low Heads, near the mouth of the mighty Tamar River, we stopped at Ulverstone. David visited the library to print out a form our real estate needed signed and I visited yet another doctor.

Another beach, this one called “Buttons Beach”

I was not experiencing anything like the pain I had over Easter and all the nausea was gone, but I wasn’t convinced that the infection had completely gone as I still had some lingering pain and could feel a little bit of swelling. The doctor agreed and so I got a third course of antibiotics with a phone appointment to followup on Thursday. The doctor owned a motor home that he often takes to the mainland during winter (his wife hates the cold) and that helped with understanding of how transient we are at present.

 

We ate lunch and walked along the beach there—it would be a lovely spot to holiday with kids in warmer weather! We then drove another hour and a half east to the Tamar Valley, across the Batman Bridge, and north to George Town where we shopped and then took up residence in Low Heads Tourist Park. 

Day 31: all day at Montagu

This was another quiet day. A bit of walking along the sea shore, rock hopping. But also a lot of quiet reading and game playing. We enjoyed watching the tide come in and go out. It was shallow for a long way out and low tide revealed many rocks, not sand. Walking at low tide was fun, but slow! We also enjoyed watching the birds cope with the tide coming in: moving where they were perched as their own particular "rock" became submerged. To our surprise there were many pelicans in the area also, always magnificent birds to spot!

The campground. Lots of lovely trees and space. 

So many rock pools. It would be a fun, but
slightly dangerous place to bring inquisitive kids.

Tide is out. In the distance is Robbins Is, the cattle farm.

The parallel lines on these rocks were repeated in many places, but hard to capture in a photo. Geologists have a lot to study in Tasmania!

There were thousands of these tiny crabs at low tide!

One of the eroded rocks, looked so cool. 

Pelicans

You can see we were parked very close to the shore’s edge. 

Another angle on where we were parked. It took ages to pick our way across this at low tide on foot, I was so surprised to see how little distance we’d actually covered. 

Day 30: Wynyard to Stanley to Montagu

The famous Stanley Nut

The downside of living in your vehicle is that you have to pack up entirely to drive anywhere. So we’re trying to do our shopping and other things that need wheels on our travel days. This day David discovered as he went to make breakfast that  one of our gas bottles was empty (mysteriously, at the same time the gas lighter also stopped working), so before we left town we bought another, and did grocery shopping. Shopping took longer than we'd expected. The shop was packed, we think, with people shopping on the day that their pension was paid (someone noted that Thursdays were always busy!). Also, every time we do groceries we're dealing with different shop layouts, which takes longer. Not to mention that we're looking to buy different things to what we usually buy: including smaller quantities for just the two of us, but also smaller sized packaging to fit into our tiny kitchen and fridge/freezer. But, it really is a bit of a novel adventure, and that's the best way to look at it, rather than be frustrated by these small things.

East from the Nut

Then we headed west, almost to the north-westernmost corner of the state, but just off our route was the famous Stanley Nut. So we stopped there for lunch and then climbed up the steep path and around the track on top. Then did a little bit of a historical walking in the town, finding a church that was completely imported from Britain! The first one in Australia, I think, the sign claimed. 

We moved on to our campsite and discovered a gem at the end of a dirt road. This is a popular campsite that only has toilets, but no showers, electricity, or water. It’s popular for fishing, and we saw quite a few boats in the campsite. It is more popular during the summer holidays and at Easter, so it was far from full with us travelling in this "shoulder" season. Apparently when things are buzzing, there can be over 70 kids running around (bike riding is popular too).

We were surprised by an offer for free pizza when we checked in with the site managers. Apparently it is their tradition in the quieter weeks, to provide pizza for anyone onsite who would like to join. We gathered around a fire in an old oil drum (fire pot or brazier?) with our chairs and drinks. This was a novel experience. We enjoyed chatting as the sun disappeared, meeting people from Western Australia and Victorians as well as Taswegians (Aussie for "Tasmanian"). We discovered that the island we could see from our parking spot is privately owned by farmers near the campsite and that they run cattle on it, cattle destined to be turned into Wagyu beef! It was really lovely to be included in this impromptu gathering, we felt included and somehow that we were "insiders" in this whole life-on-the-road thing.

Campsite at Montagu, right on the edge of the mainland.

It started to get quite cold, though, when the sun completely disappeared and we retreated to our little home-on-wheels. With no electricity, this campsite was completely dark, something we rarely see in Japan! Plenty of serenity indeed.

Day 29: all day at Wynyard

This was a quiet, day, although we walked nearly nine kilometers, we also caught up on washing and other things.

Right outside our "backdoor" was a footpath, so we followed it, both ways along the coast. Our walk after lunch took us to a place called Fossil Bluff. We didn't find any fossils, but did climb up the bluff and saw some great views along the coast.

On the way home in the afternoon I began to run out of energy, so we stopped in town for afternoon tea at a lovely little coffee shop. The town impressed us with its charming small town feel.

Out the back of the motorhome, you can see someone jogging
along the path and the sea behind them.

Sun setting.

Fossil bluff

We walked along the Inglis River for a bit.

View eastward from the Bluff

It was a little windy.

Day 28: Zeehan to Wynyard

We spent the morning and early afternoon at the West Coast Heritage Centre in Zeehan: there was way too much to see, but it was good to get a glimpse of the history of the west coast of Tasmania: (hint) much of it revolves around mining in very inaccessible terrain and also the lives of early pioneers in this part of the world (we saw some nasty looking medical equipment). People from other, older countries may not understand, but for Australians the 1800s was still pioneering times (for non natives) in much of this country.

Penny Farthing, that just looks improbable,
behind it is a rail car.

The centre boasts that it encompassed seven hectares! And indeed the museum sprawls across several buildings and into an area out the back of the buildings. Ranging from information about mining and minerals to machinery, pictorial history, various regional displays, as well as two buildings that are historical in their own right: the Police Station/Court House and the Gaiety Theatre Grand Hotel. The latter was stunning and you could just imagine how it was a centre for many social events in the past.

There was considerable space given to
minerals, many that I'd never heard of including the
Tasmanian state emblem: crocoite.

After we were worn out with an overwhelming amount of information, we drove north to Wynyard, to a caravan park right on the beach on the north coast. You start to get a grasp of how small this island is compared to the rest of Australia, which takes many days to get from the centre to the western then northern coasts! And after several days in the remote centre and west coast, northern Tasmania was like a breath of fresh air. Many more people, roads, and shops, though still not cities, just larger towns. The roads were less up and down and windy too!

With almost all our clothes very much needing to be washed, we were very happy to find an excellent laundry. It was a lovely quiet night right next to the ocean.  

Land transport was largely dependent on railway for many
years on the west coast of Tasmania. This is a working model of
a locomotive that was build in Germany in the1890s and arrived in
Zeehan in 1900.

I'm not sure if you're going to be able to read this fascinating
story of a man who used a skill he'd learned earlier in life
to contribute to the mining efforts in the region. He was a
mattress maker (and repairer). The following photo is of a machine
he recreated from memory of his apprenticeship days, a machine that
wove metal into shape for use in mattresses. The story is strikes
a cord for someone who isn't a "frontline" worker in Japan, but
supports those who are. Mattress-making might not seem like a
great skill in a mining town, but everyone needs to sleep and I'm sure
that his contribution was valued (at least by some).

Miniature bed with an example of the woven wire on it.

Gaiety Theatre, which apparently could fit over 1,000 people in it.
Houdini performed here!

Pipe organ...I forget the story of this, but it was in the theatre.

No roads, so this rail ambulance had to do. I'm sure that
many medical emergencies just couldn't be dealt with in time!

A wooden pipe!