Water, Water, Everywhere!

As an Aquarian, I (Lotty) have a true affinity with water!  Many of our walks or views were centred around water in one form or another.  The enthralling waterfalls, of which there seem to be many here in Tassie. The rivers and streams flowing through impossible landscapes. The varied coastlines with such contrasts side by side.  And fascinatingly, the drips and flows found coming from mossy outcrops.

The waterfalls:

We found the first one at our first night camping, not far from Hobart. We were getting used to our mobile home - its handling on the road, and what it could offer as shelter. So we were taking it easy, and found a campsite with all mod cons!

The two-hour walk took us to this tall, narrow waterfall ....little did we know what other beauties we would soon encounter!  I think it is the attraction of downward falling water, visually and aurally, that make them so spectacular.  It is the constant sound ....I won't go as far to say 'music', but it is a powerful, natural 'sound'! Tony may come up with another word to describe the noise.                        

The next waterfall was at our third camping spot. This is the camping spot below.

A wild spot at the end of a little road which marked a walk to the Montezuma Falls.  This was an intriguing walk in the bed of an old railroad track - a 'there and back' walk of 8 kms.  The railway was part of the mining industry.

As a track it was fairly level, and to make it so, it was cut through various rocky parts.  The track followed a high level contour of a ravine that had a rushing waterway below.  So the walk was continually accompanied by the 'water backdrop'.  

What caught my eye best, was the collections of moss and their rivulets of water.  I tried capturing them, there were so many variations of texture, light, reflections .....all contributing to water flow.

Damp, with its own 'mini' waterfall.

 The water finds its own pathway to descend.

 The rock face here glimmers with water, which also influences the colour of the surface.

 The crude power of the the rock surface, combined with the reflections of the water.

 Combinations form a whole illustration of the surroundings.

 There is the rock foundation here, but will it be dominated by the moss over time?

                               The contrasts within the rock.  What story does this tell us?

It's ok, I haven't forgotten the purpose of that walk, the waterfall!  It was spectacular. I think the video describes it all, specially the impressive height.  Enjoy!!

However, what is the best way to capture the power of the water falling this long height: video or still photo?  I have both.  I have decided the photo does it, so just imagine the sound and strength.

Although the waterfall is completely captivating, there are always some jewels in the vicinity, here is one:

The third waterfall we found as we camped at the end of another road, a gravel road. Luckily the gravel roads have been well maintained and easy to drive on.  I say 'luckily' cos they were beyond the bounds of our insurance!!!  After we had admired some huge tall trees, which left us in awe as we cricked our necks looking skyward, thinking about the layers of habitats these giants offered.

Back to the waterfall .....wow, it just fell over the edge.  It is weird to stand beside this relatively gently flowing water, that disappears ...seemingly quiet, into a powerful cascade of rushing water and cacophony of noise!  We could follow it down to its bottom, and look up and admire its strength and glory.  The feature that made this fall different from the others was the rock formation that formed its backdrop - basalt columns.  This created a staggering contrast of the chaotic flow of water and the symmetry of the platforms of hexagons or their supporting vertical pillars.

I had fun playing with capturing this waterfall, so I shall take you through what I was seeing - step by step!

 

Umm, what's so special about this?!

Take a look upstream, the other side of the bridge, early morning. 

A magical reflection! Love it.

Now start wandering downstream....

Finding yourself on the lip of the world.

Now a series of three photos to show how changeable the flow of water can be.

As you may have notice I am not such a prolific writer as Tony, and I have been working on this too long.  I have lost the thread!!  Just check on the photos to see if there is something to get me started again.  No, I shall finish with the quiet moment as we contemplated the sea on the Western coast.  More water.....

 

The Carved Wall - A Bit Kitsch, But Still Good

As we were chugging along the road from Hobart to the west coast, we went past a place called Derwent River Bridge, and saw a sign for something called The Wall, which someone has mentioned to Lotty in the shower at the previous night's camp site as being a place we simply should not miss visiting if we happened to go past it.

So, being obedient souls, we turned in and found a parking place in front of a long blank wooden building, with an entrance at one end.

So in we went, to be received by a very verbose and friendly guy who told us everything we could possibly wish to know about what was about to be revealed unto us inside this rather beautiful wooden building.

What it was is an enormous carved wall of pine wood panels about 2 meters tall and about  100 meters (in 2 sections of 50 meters each)  long.  The whole thing was carved in relief and more or less told the story of that part of Tasmania, with excursions into making points about the wildlife that still lived there, or had become extinct owing to the activities of the white colonists.

Whilst generally such totally realistic wood carving is absolutely not my thing, this has been done with such consummate skill that I was overcome with awe at the guy's work.   The pictures here will give you an idea of the quality of his work.

The artist who is still busy carving this monstrous art work, is still a relatively young man, about 38 years old, and has been doing this for the last 10 years at every free moment he has from his work.

Almost as impressive as his carving is the building that he has caused to be created to house his work.   Totally made of wood, and finished with a totally unbelievable attention to detail it is one of the most beautiful and warm buildings I have ever seen.

So, should you ever find yourself in this part of Tassie, it is worth a visit and the $13 entry fee to see his work.

Here is a link to his website so you can find out more about this extraordinary work.

http://thewalltasmania.com.au/

Doctors Rocks - I Return To My Childhood

This post was written on the day it describes, but not posted until now as I was almost entirely in places with no WiFi as we drove around Tasmania.   I have left it as I wrote it on that day...................

This morning I had an experience that for me was unique.   

I am 74 years old, have lived in about 10 countries, went to some 14 schools, had a large collection of professions and lived in rather a lot of towns, villages and so forth, and in all of that I have so far never, ever, been back to a place I lived in, a place I have worked in, revisited an old profession or in any manner or way gone back to any earlier experiences.

It has always been my policy that once left, is always left, and so far that policy has worked well for me, even if it has made the business of regularly having to make new friends a bit exhausting.  Though the advent of Facebook has changed that last somewhat.

So what was this revolutionary experience I had this morning?  Simple enough.   We are currently driving around in Tasmania, a country where I lived for a few years back in the late ´40s of the last century, and one of the places I lived in was a farm about 15 km to the west of Burnie at a place called Doctors Rocks.

The actual Doctors Rocks is a small rocky headland just opposite the entrance to the track up to the farm and the house we used to live in.

The entrance to the farm track

This is the small headland in question, and this is the beach were at about the tender age of 7 I trod on a sting ray....

So, as we were driving past this place, I had no excuse not to stop and have a walk around and revisit for once part of my earlier life - a part that I have always remembered with affection.

It is a simple enough place, a farm at the end of a track (now sealed, but in my time, simply a dirt track) going off at right angles to the road.   Now it seems to consist of several wooden houses and a lot of modern barns set in a rather attractively wooded and up and down bit of countryside.

I am not sure if the houses that are there now were there when I lived there, as they are wooden houses, I suspect that they are not the same ones, but they seem to be in roughly the same positions relative to each other that they were in my time there.

What is possibly the house we lived in all those years ago - but if it isn't, then it is more or less identical.

The farm itself was about 2000 acres (some 800 hectares) and stretched in a relatively narrow strip back from the farm and up into the hills behind the farm.   

When we lived there, my father was working as a dentist in the nearby town of Burnie, and my mother, my 2 year old sister and my few months old brother happy passed our days in that house - well actually, I passed most of my days in a school in Burnie - more about which later in this account.

For a kid such as I, the life there was superb.   All the space in the world to run around in, small creeks to go fishing in (never caught anything apart from leeches of course), friendly farm labourers with whom to play ¨ẅho can piss higher” and rabbits to shoot every day before going to school.

On this rabbit killing bit, at that time rabbits were a major problem in Tassie, there were millions of them, as they had no natural enemies and simply bred like, well,  rabbits.

So the government had put a bounty on them, so if you turned up at a police station with their tails you were given money for each tail (I seem to remember it was a shilling per tail, but I am not sure of this).   Anyhow, what most of us kids who lived on farms did was before going to school we would go out with a .22 rifle and shoot a few rabbits, cut of their tails and sling the bodies into the chicken run and then head off to school with those tails to get our pocket money that way.

Typical Gin Trap

Whilst I was happy enough to kill rabbits, I hated the way the rabbit traps worked.  These were Gin traps that worked by a sort of spring loaded pair of heavy serrated metal jaws that closed when the rabbit (or once, my pet dog) walked on them, and grabbed the poor creature by some part of their body.   If they killed them at once I would be OK with them, but they often grabbed them by their legs, their faces, their ears or some other painful but not fatal part of their bodies… and there they were stuck until many hours later the farm labourer came around, broke their necks and took them away.

So I often went around with the guy setting these traps, so I knew where they were, and then later went around with a load of sticks and sprang as many if the traps as I could - horrible things!

And the getting to school part of the day was fun too.   What I had to do was walk down the dirt track to the road, cross it and there was a railway line (narrowish gauge) and a sort of construction for milk churns to be placed upon.   When the train duly came chugging along, I would hold out my hand the way you do for a bus, and the train would stop, I would clamber on board and off we would go to Burnie, where my school was.

Me standing on the track where I stopped the train each day....  strong wind as well!

In the afternoon, it was the reverse process.  Board the train at the station in Burnie, and when the train was almost at the place I wanted to get out, I would lean out of the carriage, wave my hand and the train would stop, I would leap down and off the train would go - to the next farm and so on…  Great fun.

At one point in the year the farm hands would burn off the grass in all the fields, which caused hundreds of scorpions and tarantula spiders to run out of the grass and onto the track, so all us farm kids would gather up a handful of these on our way down to the railway track, bung them into matchboxes and take them to school with us.

This we did as our teacher was terrified of these small (and relatively harmless) creatures, so we would agree on a signal, and at the signal we would release all of them at once - resulting in dozens of huge hairy spiders and scuttling scorpions rushing around the classroom in panic - and a teacher doing much the same.   Not kind but fun.

This school by the way I remember as follows - no idea if my memories are actually correct, but this is how I remember the state school at Upper Federal Street Burnie.

It consisted of two classrooms, and the students started in one of them, and as they progressed academically (!) they duly moved to the second classroom and stayed there until they reached the age to leave school.   There was a third room there, which was the Headmaster's office, which we only ever saw when our teachers sent us to him to be caned for some misdemeanour or other.

Not really at the cutting edge of educational thinking to put it mildly.

Anyhow, this place (Doctors Rocks, not the school) has always held a special place in my memories of my childhood, so now that I am finally back in Tasmania I felt I had to go and look at it once more.  To be honest I was concerned that it might be somewhat unnerving to be confronted with a section of my early life like this, a part that I have always looked back upon fondly.  Would the reality of the place be a serious let down?  Would it all be so much smaller and more boring than I remembered it to be?  And so on, many worries and concerns about seeing it again after some 66 years or so.

Farm seen from the road

Entrance to farm track

View from farm, this is the track I walked down and up every school day

Happily, whilst I did recognise the place totally, I found it interesting to see, and recall my life there, but in no way disturbing or unsettling.   Just curious to stand beside the now disused railway track at the spot I used to stand all those years ago, look at the bit of the beach where once, while paddling I stepped on a sting ray (it was as frightened as I was and hurtled off to sea, as I hurtled off to shore), contemplate the section that the farm labourers used to go to when they panned for gold (for beer money) and to look back up the track to where the houses nestled in their trees and remember how I learned to ride a bike up there (the daughter of another family who lived there taught me on her huge bicycle).  In passing I would mention that they lived on the other side of a small field from our house, and once when on my way to their house I managed to fall face first into a fresh cowpat…   Not to be recommended!

Standing in the rain beside that railway track all these memories and many others came flooding back in a manner that most people who do return to places they lived in earlier would find normal, but for me was a completely new experience - unsettling and a feeling of tristesse I think best describes it.   Odd and interesting.

Lotty wanted me to go and knock on the doors of the houses there, and introduce myself, but I found that I did not want to do this, that would have been going too far for me - my memories are enough, and have no need for other people's input or interpretation.

Roadkill - The Depressing Side Of Driving In Oz

One of the most distressing aspects of doing much driving in rural Australia - which includes Tasmania obviously- is the high rate of road kill here.  When driving outside cities or largish towns for every kilometer one drives, one will see probably two or three dead animals that have been hit by cars during the night.  

Every sort of wild creature that lives here is represented in this depressing parade of corpses - kangaroos, wombats, crows, ichidnas, wallabies and so on, literally every sort of wild animal will be seen sooner or later lying dead in the road or on the edge of the road.

As far as I can see, no one clears away their corpses, as one sees them in all states of decay.   From freshly killed to a bag of skin around a skeleton and all stages of putrefaction in between.

The crows are obviously very happy with this state of affairs, as it represents a continuous source of easy food for them to gobble up, and being crows they generally judge to a second how long they can stay eating as a car approaches, only leaping away at the last minute - or slowly stalking away in time for the car to pass harmlessly, before returning to their feast.

Even they miscalculate on occasion and end up as a sad bundle of disordered feathers lying next to their last meal - sad to see.

In the last few weeks we have camped in parts of Tassie that are famous for the high numbers of Tasmanian Devils that live there, and hunt every night, so we had hoped both to see and hear them while we were there - but nope, the only one we came across was a very dead one on the road..  Another victim of the car.

It is not for nothing that someone years ago produced a book called ¨Flattened Fauna of Australia¨, made up of photos of all the different types of animals and birds this amazing country has, but all as corpses on the road.

So, as I said, seeing this mass of dead creatures when driving is deeply saddening, but a very typical aspect of this country - always has been and probably always will be.

Tasmanian Country Towns - Odd Places

As we have been driving around Tassie, we have obviously occasionally passed through or spent nights in a variety of small country towns - as opposed to Hobart which whilst it has a slightly provincial feel to it, is not a small town.

All these towns had a number of things in common we have found, namely they are extremely friendly to strangers such as us, they are all remarkably sleepy and they tend to have very wide and underused streets. By the last point I mean that one can wander around in the middle of the road with almost no chance of getting hit by one or other of the various Utes (flat bed vans) that are the main form of transport in these areas.

 

Another thing they seem to have in common is pie shop/bakeries. Pies, mainly beef ones, but there are a plethora of other types, form a very important part of Aussie public eating, and in all the small country towns we have stopped in, there would always be at least one pie bakery in the middle of the high street offering a wide assortment of meat pies cooked in the place and coffee.

We tried a number of these pies, and by and large they are delicious I have to say, My favourite being what is called a Chunky Beef Pie. The name says it all, it is filled with a delicious mix of reasonably large chunks of well cooked beef in a rich gravy with a variety of vegetables as well.. A total meal in one pie. As you will see from the photo, they are about the right size for a filling meal for one adult.

Funnily enough, those country villages we came across that seem to consist of nothing more than a single short main street with a general store/garage/news agent/pub all in one shop radiated a much more energetic feeling of being alive than their slightly larger counterparts and looked like they might be fun to live near to.
 

Actually, all over Tassie we found that those houses and farms stuck well away from any towns or villages all seemed to have a sort of friendly and chaotic feel to them, as well as often a very iconoclastic attitude to how gardens and houses ¨should¨ be, which appealed to us a lot. Not being too fond of neat, we enjoyed seeing such things as these two past their sell by date vehicles simply turned into sort of totem poles and simply stuck on top of large tree stumps (and in passing, noticed that their letter box was also a small vehicle stuck on top of a post).

We saw many examples of this sort of thinking all over Tassie in the country, and liked it a lot, obviously the independent thinking that Australia was famous for is alive and well in the Tasmanian countryside if not in its towns.

Mount Fields National Park - Our First Walks In The Forest

So, we had managed to drive our wobbly camper van to the camp site of the Mount Fields National Park, which is relatively close to Hobart - about a couple of hours drive, and we settled ourselves in and connected our 220 volt cable so that we could use all the amazing gadgets in our camper and settled back to enjoy our first night away from our hotel in Hobart..

.

When we finally awoke at about 8 am the following morning, we decided to start our day with the joy of a hot shower, which is exactly what we did.   All good so far.

We then decided that it would be a good idea for us to have a go at one of the walks offered in the forests all around us, so off we set on what was said to be a 6 km walk encompassing three waterfalls and a load of trees.

The general forest was superb, semi-tropical in nature, full of tree ferns and similar soggy ground plants, and also the most incredible gum trees, apparently the tallest flowering trees in the world (as opposed ot the California Redwoods which are pine trees, and thus not flowering, they have cones instead).    But these superb trees in this forest, reaching heights of up to 99 meters (over 300 feet for you who don't yet use meters) were astounding to gaze up at, and impossible to photograph as they were simply too big.    If you can imagine a normal gum tree, but about 250 feet tall, everything in the normal proportions, well that is what these monsters looked like.    Perfectly normal trees, just absurdly big.

The forest was a delight to mooch along in, nothing too strenuous for a couple of ancients such as us, almost no other walkers, so it was easy to completely lose oneself in the calm and gentle atmosphere of the forest.  A total pleasure.

And as the finishing touch, we had the three waterfalls, all of which were simply superb, not huge, but going like the clappers and making that wonderful noise that waterfalls make.

Then that night another joy was given to us, herds of a small version of Kangaroo, known as a Pademelon (why on earth they have this name is beyond me), which are basically a fox terrier sized kangaroo, with black fur, suddenly appeared grazing all over the place, and being a part of Australia, of course quite a few Possums also wandered around the place.

Many of the Pademelons had babies, either peering out of their pouches or if a bit bigger, dashing about the place feeding themselves happily…   A great sight to behold all in all.

And that was our day in the National Park…  More to follow in due time.

The Great Day Dawns - Off At Last

After our pleasant and relaxed few days in Hobart, it was time to go back to the airport and go and pick up our camper wagon from Hertz.

On arriving at Hertz we were shown our new home on wheels, a most unlikely and ungainly looking wee beast it was too.

Basically it was a Toyota Hilux pick up truck with a small caravan fixed onto its load tray by means of thick chains and bottle screws - as you can see in the photo below.

After a long discussion with the friendly Hertz lady about insurance and own risk and all the normal things that car hire places always hide in the small print when shouting about their hire vehicles costing only $39 a day, we got down to cases.  Which if we wished to avoid an own risk of - in this case - $5000 for any damage caused to the vehicle while we were in charge of it would cost us an extra $500 on top of the basic hire price of $1088 for the three weeks we wanted the thing for.

Oh well, no real surprises here.

So we agreed, signed on the various dotted lines, and were introduced to our new home.

We were given a sort of somewhat rough and ready run down of the most important things we needed to know about it - well, most of them, but not all as we discovered as we rolled along the roads later. 

And so off we went, to experience the freedom of the road that such a camper might mean...   

And discovered within the first 100 meters that it was a scary and wobbly thing to drive.   When we hit the first bend in the road I realised that it was certainly not a Mini, and as the whole thing rolled alarmingly as I negotiated the bend it dawned on me that I might well have chewed off rather more than I could handle..  

However, I slowly became comfortable with it, and learned how to handle it without too much worry.