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"
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"