Tasmania 3 - In a Flowerpot at the Edge of the World

After leaving Hobart on Monday we headed southwest about 45 minutes to our next airbnb, a little cabin in a place on the coast named Flowerpot.



Tuesday we headed south about two hours to the end of the road. This entire drive, including the Monday portion to Flowerpot, is through absolutely beautiful countryside. The road mostly follows the coast, though occasionally cutting across peninsulas. The coast itself is extremely squiggly here and dramatically hilly, and across the water (with cute sailboats upon it) there's inevitably either more squiggles of the same coast or islands. The countryside is bucolic, cute small towns, orchards, artisinal this and that shops, interspersed with eucalypt woodland. Until we got to the very southern end of the road and then it was mostly impenetrably thick forest on either side.

Now this road doesn't go to the southernmost point of Tasmania, it would take days of hiking to get there. In fact if you look at a map of Tasmania about a quarter of the island in the southwest is entirely undeveloped, no roads or anything. I'd love to someday go on a multi day hike through there.



By and by we arrived at the end of the road at Cockle Creek. It seems like as far as you can go from anywhere now but apparently was once a whaling station with 2,000 people. There's a cute whale statue. Cute until you realize the disturbing fact that they used to slaughter whale calves like the one in the sculpture.



We went for a walk a few miles along the coast (an hour out, hour back), the beach sand was fine and white, the water clear and turquoise blue. The shore being lined with thick forest up to the edge it looked live a Caribbean paradise if you didn't know it was quite chilly and ignored that there were no palm trees. Across the water was dramatic silhouettes of mountains to the north and northwest, faint rows of islands to the northeast, and where we came around and could see out to sea to the southeast one could see huge distant breakers crashing on a reef -- i think it's thousands of miles across the Great Southern Ocean from here before there's any land.



Because he's a maniac dad had to go for a swim. If you look closely you can see him splashing along in the above picture. When he came out he declared it felt like 62f, just like back home in California!


You can see the difference between previous picture and this one, at clouds blew over it was constantly changing from sunny and brightly colored to cloud shadowed and cold. I was constantly taking my jacket on and off.

And then we drove back to our Flowerpot. It felt like we spent most of the day driving there and back but the views along the way recall cliche sayings about how it's all about those journey!

The more we travel the more we seem to come up with things to do "next time" -- there was a longer hike leaving from Cockle Creek I'd love to hit up "next time"

Bruny Island

Wednesday morning we drove about fifteen minutes to the Bruny Island Ferry, which departs every twenty minutes so we didn't have long to wait. Presently it arrived and disgorged an implausible number of vehicles. Around 11:30 we began our crossing of the channel, which only took about fifteen minutes.

First we drove to the northern tip of the island. The northern (and presumably southern) lobes are big enough that while in inland valleys you can't even tell you're on an island. Land use was mostly pasture or eucalypt woodland. There was a little township at the north end but we couldn't find the heritage trail indicated on the map. Proceeded south.

Next stop was a cheese and beer place. They had a very nice outdoor set up with a pleasant atmosphere and it seemed popular. We got a cheese platter and a milk stout (dark beer). The cheese platter had some cooked wallaby on it too.



From there we proceeded a short distance to Bruny Island Honey. Obviously it's not novel to me to see a honey/bee place but I was interested in their presentation and such. And it was really good! Much better presentation than we have at Edmonds Honey. If bossman ever shows interest in substantially redecorating these pictures will be good reference. Also they had some tasty honey-vanilla ice cream.

Next we were headed down the isthmus, which as you can see on the top map is very thin. It does however have a solid hillock right down its middle. About halfway down there was a boardwalk with steps to the top. There are penguin burrows all over the central sandy hillock but we didn't see any penguins, i think it's not the nesting season (and even when it is your primarily see them just after sunset)



At the southern end of the isthmus there was supposed to be a trailhead but we couldn't find it either.

Just at the top end of the southern lobe we went into a chocolateria, selling us chocolate should have been the easiest thing but their presentation was as bad as the honey place was good. Just a shed w self serve chocolates along one wall. I'd kind of expected fancy hot chocolates and all kinds of tempting goodies. We left there without getting anything.

Proceeding down the east side of the southern lobe we came to Adventure Bay. The bay is named after the HMS Adventure which was part of Captain Cook's famous expedition, and had become lost, wandering into the bay alone. Captain Bligh anchored here for reprovisioning in the HMS Bounty a few years later on his own famous journey.

And then we flew past a "Bligh Museum" it was little and came up suddenly. I really wanted to go in but there wasn't a convenient turn around :(



And then there was a tallship! We were able to pull over so i could get a good shot. I think this was the Lady Nelson which we'd seen at the wharf in Hobart.




Finally at the end of this road we found a trailhead. And saw our first live wallaby! By a wallaby cut out!

I would have liked to hike longer but by now we were feeling strained for time -- if we missed the ferry off the island we'd be stuck! So we just went half an hour out and came back. It was a nice well maintained trail ("grass point trail") through forest woodland just beside the coast. According to informational signs here too there were a bunch of whalers huts from whence they'd dart out and nab hapless passing whales.



From there we proceeded straight to the ferry. They don't check tickets getting back on the ferry since they only sell round trip and obviously you got one to get here. Ferry 17:45-18:00



Ate at a pub in the nearby town of Snug that looked like it couldn't decide if it was a nice tourist spot or a grungy local pub. The tables were nice and if you just faced the tables and windows from the bar maybe you'd think it was the former, but the bar itself looked like it belonged to a grungy backwater and though the food was good they didn't have any local Tassie beers or ciders on tap, just the same tastes-of-bootleather mass produced macro lagers you could probably find in the mines in the NT.



And then we returned to our cabin and lit a fire in the stove, the end (until next day update). In the meantime we just boarded the ferry back to the mainland (: