Wineglass Bay
Wineglass Bay is a lovely little spot just over the hill from Coles Bay, on Tassie’s lower East Coast. It’s a bit of a hike over a mountain and down the other side, and the guides reckon it’s about 2.5 hours return. TIP: With young kids, multiply estimated hiking times by at least 1.5. Here’s a few photos I took as we hiked up and back down. There aren’t many because, frankly, I was too busy keeping Rilien moving, and ignoring the 87 kilos it felt like I had in my backpack. (Water bottles, food, camera, lenses, etc).
Here’s our first real view of Wineglass Bay from the lookout at the top of the mountain hike trail. It’s a gorgeous view, and despite the joy of a good camera, the colours are still more vivid than I was able to capture in this shot.
The descent into Wineglass Bay from the lookout is at times very steep, rocky, sandy, and a bit of an ankle-twister, just waiting to happen. Oddly enough, we met plenty of people on the way back up the trail, but none of them seemed in much of a hurry! They were always very happy for us to pass them on the way down, and once we made the return journey we knew exactly why 😉
I didn’t take many shots down on Wineglass Bay beach itself, because by this point we had hiked for almost 2.5 hours just to get here, and were hot, bothered, and desperate for a swim in the chilly southern Tasmanian ocean waters. Forget your swimmers? Never mind – just go in your undies, like we did! (No photos of that for public viewing, however…)
At the carpark after grabbing a post-hike ice cream, there was this lovely view of the mountains we hiked over to get to the bay on the other side. Again, this doesn’t really do justice to how beautiful the scenery is.
Tahune Airwalk
About a week later, we stayed in a small town called Geeveston, south of Hobart. Not far from Geeveston is a beautiful old forest that is part original old-growth, and part re-grown plantations from logging in the mid and late 20th century. Within that rainforest-y forest is a spectacular airwalk, where you can walk along an elevated platform in the treetops. At some points, it’s over 50 metres above ground level! These are a few shots from the trek:
Some of these old trees just blew me away. We really felt how old these gorgeous timbers were, and had no shame in calling ourselves tree-huggers that day. They were majestic.
Indrani (above) was very relaxed about the walk. Belinda (below) was … shall we say, less relaxed about being 30 metres off the ground? Bel didn’t deal too well with the heights, and wanted to simply speed-walk from landing to landing along the raised platforms. Here she is, giving the universal symbol of cultural recognition and kinship:
Here we are at the end of a section called The Cantilever. It’s a suspended gantry-style thing which hangs out into space about 50 or so metres above the river below. This shot was taken by some tourists and doesn’t quite show much of the river (see the following shot below), but it does show the nervous laugh on Bel’s face as she quietly tries not to faint with terror. This cantilever also wobbles quite a bit from people walking up and down, so it’s really a bit of a test of the nerves for poor Bel!
Here’s a shot of the Cantilever from below:
Many of these shots show how beautiful the light was, and how rich, damp, and overgrown the roots and broken branches and trees were at the forest floor.
There are two suspension bridges that take you across the Huon and Picton Rivers on a separate walk around the forest, which were beautiful, if a touch narrow!
By this point, Bel had recovered a bit of her composure and was willing to laugh at herself – and me – without any “gestures” for the camera 😉
Cataract Gorge
A week or so later, we were in Launceston, and wanted to visit Cataract Gorge – a beautiful nature feature of the city of Launceston, which is only a few kilometres from the city centre. Before we even made it into the gorge, we met a lovely older couple who were travelling from Victoria for the Ulysses Club AGM (a social motorcycle club for over 40’s). Rilien is kind of obsessed with side-car motorcycles, and I’ve never actually seen one in real life before, so we started chatting to the couple, and they graciously offered for the kids to jump on for a photo!
Just down from the carpark is a chair-lift station. The chairlift across Cataract Gorge is apparently the worlds longest single-span chairlift. I felt great about getting on with everyone, up until shortly after I took this photo when I realised two things: a) how far up we were, and b) how flimsy and unsecured the single bar restraint was! With Rilien sitting next to me, I did my best to retain my own composure as we crossed the span. I had very very little interest in going back across again, so it was one-way tickets for us!
The Gorge is a gorgeous space (see what I did there?) and one that clearly a lot of folks from Launceston visit for day trips, picnics, nature time, and for a swim. We swam in both the chlorine pool and the gorge, and the water was … ahem…Â fresh! in both, but I think marginally warmer in the gorge. We loved visiting Cataract Gorge and can’t wait to head back to Launceston for another quiet day there.Â