Drive Hobart to Strahan via Mt Fields National Park and ”the wall”
We try to leave Michael and Ingrid’s immaculate and fascinatingly art-filled apartment as neat and tidy as it welcomed us, and we motor out of Hobart, over its long harbor bridge for the last time, and northwest along the Derwent River where thousands … yes, thousands … of black swans submerge their long bowed necks to feed. The river carves a valley into progressively larger and steeper hills. We’re moving from bright blue sunlight sky into impending gray.
After a time, we’re in serious farm country, the road a meandering two-lane gray asphalt ribbon with a soft sandy shoulder 12 inches wide and not enough space on either side of the double white stripes in the center to prevent a microsecond’s inattention or an errant itch from initiating imminent medivac in a chopper. We pass two large dead trees and a hundred white cockatoos rise from the ground in a white cloud and perch in the silver-gray branches. We hug the Derwent River, now a wide, silver stream with blackberry bushes along its banks. Cars are parked in odd places for people to pick the berries. We enter a region where poles for harvested hoppes stand naked over acres of fields.
We take even a narrower road into Mt. Field National Park where we walk through a forest of two kinds of Eucalyptus trees: Giant Ash (Regimens) and Stringybark (Obliqua). They tower 250 feet into the intermittently blue sky, absolutely dwarfing the gully fern trees and other forest brush. These trees are magnificent monsters, the trunks of the Giant Ash sloughing off russet strips of bark that are a foot wide and ten feet long.
We’re walking to see Russell Falls and, further up stone and wooden steps that last a kilometer, Horseshoe Falls. Both beautiful, their rushing water beating off the moss-covered, fern-laden forest beneath the towering trees. A spine fungus as white as the cockatoos and with tiny spikes like a piece of white coral grows from a dead stump; it’s Hericium coralloides. Never seen one before. Wow! Stephen and I see a few fish in the river above the falls. We think they may be Clarence Galaxias, a trout-esque and very endangered species in Tasmania. We will study this further and report.
We leave and continue to motor along the rushing Derwent River whose banks are now dappled with willow trees turning yellow in the early Fall. On the other side of the road, tall skinny poplar trees are also turning yellow.
We drive through mountains that have acres of pine planted to reclaim logged land and we pass “plantations” of pines that road signs say will be “harvested.” A few kilometers down the meandering forest road we might have been transported in time and place to the Somme in 1916. Both sides of the road are naked ground piled with ragged, torn and bleached limbs of trees lying in long rows or piles. The ground is dark and muddy. A kilometer deep and lasting maybe four to five, this swath of dead land has been “harvested.”
We stop at a hydroelectric power station built in 1938. A hungry herd of six or seven white geese and a few ducks follow David as he munches on barbecued potato chips for lunch. We leave them behind and drive to a place called “The Wall.” It’s a 12-foot high by 100-foot long wall of Huon pine panels carved in bas relief by Greg Duncan, a wood sculptor. Miners, mothers, wagons, horses, Tasmanian tigers, fish, insects … every fold of clothing, every vein and sinew in an arm are perfect and vivid.
We push on in lowering skies to Lake St. Claire, with Mt. Cradle in the distance, and take a short trek along its rocky shore. But we must push on because the day is drawing to a close, light is failing and rain is falling and we have a looonnnng way to go before we reach Strahan, our destination roughly at the center of the west coast. Stephen drives us in pouring rain through mountain roads so corkscrewed we think we’re back in New Zealand’s west coast … we average 20 kilometers an hour and we have no gas and we know the restaurants will close at 8 p.m. and we have no cell reception so we can’t call anyone for help. Just one of those moments.
At long last we get gas in Queenstown, an old mining town right out of the badlands in South Dakota: red dirt and depression ALL around. The gas station might be the only thing remaining open at 7:30. We push on. Strahan is supposed to be 40 minutes away but the rain is pelting, the road frighteningly narrow and unlit, the sides of its meanders are dense forest 30 feet high so we’re driving in a watery canyon at dead slow speed and we don’t get to Strahan until 8:15 when David spots a brightly lit building with two couples at tables and we stop and have one of the best meals on the trip at Bushman’s Restaurant. (“You can get anything you want, at Alice’s ….)
Ain’t life grand?
Our hotel left our room keys in an envelope taped to the entry door. It’s an old mansion, a treasure. Cynthia says the bed is the best yet on our trip.
Another full day of many “k” in Tasmania.
Two Tramps 