Day 50: Oatlands to Greens Beach

We continued our journey north this day, heading all the way to the north coast (Tasmania is so small, especially when you drive the straight, fast road up the middle).

We got to Launceston by mid morning. This is the second largest city of the state, with a population of about 91,000 (Or is it 71,000? I found two different figures!). Another of the "one of the oldest cities in Australia", it was settled in 1806 and was second in Australia to be declared a city after Hobart in 1889. (Correction: this is not true. Maybe second in Tasmania, but not Australia.)

We headed for the famous Cataract Gorge and spent an hour or so exploring. I'd been there as a kid and thought it was much further from town than it was, but it's practically inner city!

One of the first things that struck me was, in the middle of the gorge, the blue rectangular swimming pool surrounded by a bright green, mowed lawn. That seemed quite odd after the national parks we've been to where the priority was on preserving the natural state of things as well as possible, this looked very unnatural. Hence I don't have a photo of it!

But as we walked around and read the signs we realised that this area was an example of what people (largely from the UK) thought was beautiful in the latter part of the1800s and how they did recreation—that involved tea parties on the lawn, band rotundas, walkways, shelters, and lookouts. Still, it was a beautiful, peaceful place to wander around, though we hadn't allowed time to do the longer walks.

After lunch we drove north up the western side of the Tamar River (earlier in the month we'd driven across Batman Bridge about halfway up the river and stayed over on the east side of the river, near the mouth at Low Head). The Tamar is a very wide, shallow river for most of its journey, so there are almost no bridges over it! We drove almost to the "end of the road" for our last night on the island, at a caravan park across the road from Bass Straight.

But on our way there we stopped at Beauty Point to see Platypus House. Ironically I don't have any photos of the five platypuses there, just the echidnas that they also house! It's a rescue facility, and they haven't had any success with breeding platypuses, though the echidnas have produced a baby in the last year. We had a 45 minute personal tour (no one else showed up for the last tour of the day), so got to ask lots of questions. In the echidna room we got to get up close and personal with them (they could touch us, but we were asked not to touch them). The baby kept investigating our shoes! 

Echidnas and platypuses are the only monotremes in the world: that is, mammals who lay eggs. There is not much else they have in common, but it was cool to see them so close. Platypuses are very difficult to spot in the wild, though David thinks he might have seen one playing in a stream earlier in the month.

Yes, it was our last night on the island and wasn't a particularly remarkable evening. We still had more to do the next day, but the time is nearly here for me to reflect on the Tasmanian leg of our two month journey (along with a map we compiled of the journey)!