Black River, The Tarkine, Cradle Mountain and trash

Black River on Tassie’s north coast was one of my favourite camping places. We stayed there for about a week and had good weather for most of the time. The beach was pretty hard to get to from the camp site, but I did manage to find my way down there on the first morning walk with Jett. I was surprised to see the long jetty in the distance and the magnetite processing plant operating. I always think of Tassie as being the home of The Greens, and to some extent it is, however, for every force there is an equal and opposite force, and that is exemplified on the Apple Isle where there is a kind of anti-green sub-culture.

Although we saw some beautiful untouched and regrowth regions on Tassie, we also saw another side of things – particularly around the free camping sites. Tas Parks and Wildlife offer a lot of great free camping sites in fantastic places, sometimes with facilities and sometimes without. All of the sites, however, had no rubbish disposal available, and we found almost everywhere we went that people were dumping their holiday rubbish in the bush just beside their camp sites.

It seemed bizarre to us that this was happening, and the broken glass and other trash we found around camp sites reminded me of the bad-old-days when I was a kid, and drivers would throw their crap out of the window of the car, and basically leave a trail of rubbish wherever they went.

In the normal course of events Sarah and I would have cleaned up every site where we were camping, however we found that this wasn’t practical, mainly for the expense of getting rid of someone else’s rubbish – $8/ bag was a pretty standard price at most transfer stations (and that was after driving the rubbish to the dump and paying the exorbitant fuel costs for the car to get there etc). We could easily have cleaned up and dumped ten ute load’s of rubbish over the course of our travels around Tassie, but we’re on a tight budget, so it remains there.

We began to understand why there was so much rubbish being dumped in these pristine places.

Rubbish aside, we did enjoy the sights that we visited while camped at Black River. We visited the old town of Stanley, where we completed the historical town walk as well as catching the chair lift to the top of The Nut where we saw some great views of the Bass Straight Coast in both directions.

The nearest decent sized town was Smithton and I spent a bit of time between there and Burnie trying to find a solution to the broken canopy window. At one point I spent about an hour in an engineering workshop where the guys had cut out and were trying to bend a piece of aluminium to fit, and I thought we were cooking with gas…but alas, their bending machine wasn’t up to the task and they gave up and went back to some better paying work.

We drove The Tarkine loop one day and that was a really interesting variety of landscapes (see Heidi’s stories for details of where we went).

We then had a gas hose blowout and couldn’t find a replacement hose or even a stove that would fit in our kitchen. We had our emergency stove and our fire to fall back on, and in the end had to get through our last weeks on Tassie without the two burner stove. We seemed to survive and were able to order a replacement hose to meet us in Melbourne when we got there.

After spending a lot of effort with dealing with camping problems (without success) we headed off from Black River to Mole Creek. Mole Creek was our base camp for excursions up to Cradle Mountain. The camp ground at Mole Creek was superb. Our tent was a couple of metres from the creek, and one evening as I was minding my own business brushing my teeth, I looked down to the creek and saw a platypus about a metre away from me. I made a surprised noise (oh) which sent him under water, but I kept watching and was rewarded with another few sightings.

On one of our days there we went up to Cradle Mountain and walked the Dove Lake circuit, which took a couple of hours, and was a great way to see the mountain as well as the lake and environs – plenty of photos of this.

The weather was pretty good for the day we were up there, but it was still pretty cold. Sarah went back the next day (much wetter and colder) to do some of the more challenging walks which didn’t interest the kids. Having to look after the dog puts a bit of a handbrake on some excursions, but the caravan park owner had kept an eye on Jett when we all went to Dove Lake. We thought two days in a row on his own was probably a bit much though.

Mole Creek town boasted two pubs, one of which had its own brewery, a fancy menu, modern decor and was almost empty on a Friday night. The other pub was your usual town pub, moist floors, pool tables, deep fried menu and all of the Carlton United brewed beer your could poke a stick at (thankfully I was driving). It was heaving, and we went down there to have dinner after a flight at the other pub (the local brews weren’t too flash in my opinion).

After Mole Creek we returned to Devenport where we had a couple of nights in a cabin before our early morning departure on the boat back to big island. I guess I should be happy that Tony Abbot is no longer in charge and we were allowed to come onto the mainland by boat without a 10 year excursion to Christmas Island (where I assume every day is Xmas??).

Anyhoo – plenty to report from Melbourne, but that is for a future post, despite that it is now in the past.