Highs and lows

A Merry Christmas to all!

We are back in Smithton with Nigel and family, preparing for Christmas, so I probably won’t post another blog until after Boxing Day.

As we continued our progress westwards across the north of Tasmania, we really did experience the highs and lows of this island state. From a breathtaking view of the Alum Cliffs, rearing into the sky above a deep river gorge, we then plunged under the mountains themselves in the caves west of Deloraine.



One of the glorious bits of stalactite
sculpture in the caves.



One thing’s for sure. No overweight people could possibly manage to tour the Marakoopa and King Solomon’s Cave systems. We thoroughly enjoyed the tours but there were some rather squeezy bits to navigate along the way. Seeing the fabulous shapes formed by water dripping through limestone for literally millions of years, hearing the stories of how the caves were discovered, and listening to underground streams rushing by makes one feel totally insignificant as a contemporary human being.

Once we’d come out into the daylight, we continued wandering the mountain areas, spending the night at a place called Gowrie Park, a former Hydro Tasmania town, now a camping and caravan park. Opposite was a modern shed system for what everyone down here calls ‘the Hydro’ and it was painted in a fabulous mural fashion, showing the development of many mountain streams into sources of electricity. What made it even more impressive was that the whole thing was painted on corrugated iron.



This Sheffield mural from the 1980s is painted on brick, but
the weatherboards depicted are so real one can almost
touch them.



It was a taste of the next day’s highlight, a visit to the mural town of Sheffield. We’d thoroughly recommend taking the audio tour of the murals (available at the tourist centre) as the explanations and details are wonderful. It took us most of a rainy morning, with a stop for a coffee and scones at a delightful little café in one of the town’s old buildings. It was outside that café that we met two of Sheffield’s characters, Ludo and his alpaca named Pedro.

When he heard we were from northern NSW, he told us about visiting Lismore and The Channon, crossing Bass Strait most years to get away from the Tasmanian winters. He took Pedro to the special school in Lismore, delighting the children.



One of the letter boxes outside Wilmot.



On we drove to Railton, a town making a special attraction out of topiary, and later on, after yet more mountain driving, we came to Wilmot, which specializes in interesting letter boxes. It is also the site of a still-operating general store that was the first G J Coles store. It was one of Mr G J Coles’ sons who started a variety store in Melbourne, with nothing costing more than two shillings and sixpence, which later developed into the Coles-Myer retail empire.

After a night in a seafront caravan park in Devonport, being entertained by the sight of the Spirit of Tasmania emerging from the river entrance, and the local high school’s leavers’ dinner at the nearby surf club, AND a virtual Watership Down outside, with rabbits and pademelons everywhere, we collected a new mudguard we had ordered for the truck, and set off along the coast, still travelling west. First port of call was a berry farm where we picked a huge punnet of tayberries, a cross between blackberries and raspberries. Yum!



The little coastal town of Penguin featured a
 special Christmas coat for its permanent
 statue of  what else but a penguin.



It was disappointing to find that a camping spot at Sisters Beach had just been closed only days before, making it now for day use only, and we fell in love with beautiful, beautiful Boat Harbour Beach nearby (no camping and barely room for just a few houses) before settling in for the night behind the Rocky Cape tavern.

That meant we were close to the Rocky Cape National Park the next morning, which we explored before driving on to Smithton in plenty of time for the annual Christmas parade that evening, led by all the emergency vehicles from around the district, all tinselled up, drivers wearing Santa caps, and sirens blaring and bleeping.

All along this north-west coast is a rich agricultural area, so we’ve seen huge dairy farms, fields of opium poppies everywhere (Tasmania supplies 50% of the world’s medicinal needs for morphine and codeine), pyrethrum daisies, onions, potatoes, carrots, even some wheat, as well as beef cattle and sheep.

Here in Smithton is a huge new powdered milk factory, an abalone processing facility, an abattoir, a potato chip freezing factory and some timber works, so it’s quite an industrial place.

And here it is we’ll rest for a few days, enjoy Christmas, then get on the road again to explore the centre, the east coast, south and west coast of this lovely island.