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Published: March 8th 2007
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Wineglass Bay
The stunning arc of Wineglass Bay curving gracefully into the distance. A drive north from the Tasman Peninsula, stopping briefly to pick up some tasty local smoked fish, takes us through an uncharacteristically dry part of Tasmania. Brown, not green. After nearly a week in the green south of the island the change is quite striking.
National park to national park. Peninsula to peninsula. Our destination is the Freycinet National Park, which occupies practically the whole of the Freycinet Peninsula, itself named after yet another French navigator, Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet - two names were just never enough, were they ? The peninsula offers several walking tracks, many of which take days to complete - instead we are here to walk a short loop, about fourteen kilometres long, which links two of the National Park's most famous features.
The track, which starts not far from the peninsula's principal settlement at Coles Bay, takes us first to The Hazards, a series of pink granite mountains rising out of Oyster Bay, the bay which separates the park from the mainland. Huge knuckles of granite jut outwards into the bay, periodically cutting right across the track, at which point care was needed to clamber over the smooth rock to rejoin the
Finest sand
Simply made for squeezing between toes ! Not a particularly artistic shot but I was quite proud of how I skilfully excluded a pair of rather corpulent and whale-like tourists by holding the camera an inch above the sand... path.
One of the many wonderful things about Tasmania is the relative absence there of man-made noise. Living in London, you get used to incessant racket. Endless platform announcements, muzak in shops, and the never-ending wail of police, ambulance, fire sirens. Here on the other side of the world things could scarcely be more different. Rounding the bulbous granite outcrops and heading into dense forest cover, it's as if there isn't another human being for hundreds of miles around. No racket - but not silence. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos take fright, and flight, as we pass their trees, emitting the long and unsettling wails that might have given them their scientific name,
Calyptorhynchus funereus. On more than one occasion we stop dead in our tracks, a wallaby mere feet away among the bushes, motionless and obviously wondering what on Earth we are doing traipsing through its back garden. Blink, blink, and it hops off to continue its breakfast. After a couple of kilometres, the track leads onto a long, windswept and deserted beach which stretches for miles ahead. Hazards Bay. Other walking tracks follow the beach for its entire length, but we turn east to cut across the peninsula's narrowest
Now it makes sense...
Perhaps Wineglass Bay is unique in that the beach is best appreciated from a kilometre away ! point. A kilometre or so later and we find ourselves on another beach, the most famous in Tasmania and - Bondi excepted - arguably one of the best known in Australasia. It doens't stop there - Wineglass Bay often makes an appearance in lists of the world best ten beaches. I'm not really one to take any notice of this kind of list - what makes a beach the "best" in the world ? Biggest waves ? Warmest sand ? Least shark attacks ? Most nudists - or least if you happen to be having your lunch on the beach as well ?
Best schmest. Wineglass Bay is stunning, a smooth arabesque of the palest, finest sand giving way to calm and inviting waters - topaz, sapphire. Anyone with a frontal lobe can guess as to how the bay got its name, but here at sea level it is not yet fully obvious. Perhaps what makes this bay so precious is that it is several hours' walk from the nearest road. This doesn't mean the beach is deserted - on the contrary. With the Freycinet Peninsula as long and spindly as it is and the last human settlement right
Wine into water
The beautiful waters of Wineglass Bay are more reminiscent of the Tropics - until you dip your feet in that is. up at the top, getting anywhere in the National Park takes a lot of walking - more than you could do in a day. Wineglass Bay, as the only place accessible in a day, gets quite a few visitors. And so it should.
Alex ventures towards the water and dips her toe in, at which point it suddenly seems a lot
less inviting. Not a day for swimming then ! After a little contemplation of the beach's stunning beauty, we head back to the track, which climbs northwards back towards Coles Bay. The return walk cuts straight across the Hazards, climbing up hundreds of roughly cut steps to a saddle point where a small area acts as both viewing point for the bay and a crikey-I-need-to-get-my-breath-back point. Even the huffing and puffing which follows the tough climb to the top cannot prevent a sharp intake of breath as we turn back to see where we've come from. Wineglass Bay - nothing could be more apt.
In addition to the bay, a special visitor provides some free entertainment - a particular tame Bennett's wallaby (or, somewhat more unflatteringly, a red-necked wallaby) hops amongst the granite boulders, sniffing rucksacks, looking
Is it an isthmus ?
This picture shows quite how tenuously the Freycinet National Park holds on the rest of Tasmania. for food and generally making a spectacle of itself. Something tells me this wallaby spends a lot of time on this viewing platform - the pot-belly is the real give-away...
We get back to the car at the entrance to the National Park and head into Coles Bay township for a very Tasmanian lunch - scallop pie. You name it, Taswegians will turn it into a pie - and they usually do it exceedingly well. After lunch we leave Freycinet behind us and progress north-east, inland again. On the way we make an emergency ice-cream stop in Evandale, a tiny little village on the road to Launceston, Tasmania's second largest city. Evandale has a rich heritage of colonial-era buildings - village stores, churches, antique shops, pubs. Quite delightful albeit somewhat manicured...Further along the highway we make a little side-trip to Launceston's Cataract Gorge, a popular recreation area barely ten minutes' walk from the centre of the city. With its outdoor pool, chairlift and attractive gardens complete with resident peacocks, the gorge is having a busy day. It's sunny and - the shock of it - hot. Tasmania doesn't really
do "hot" - so Launcestonians are out in force.
Feeeeeeeeeeeed meeeeee
The resident Bennett's wallaby at the Wineglass Bay viewpoint. Very podgy and very tame - he seemed to like having his ears tickled. Especially if a sandwich was involved... With a further quick emergency stop (no
not ice-cream again...beer this time) at a cute little pub in Carrick, we arrive in the small town of Deloraine. Far on the horizon under the setting Sun, the change in landscape is striking. Gone the sea, the cliffs, the coast. This is Tasmania's rugged, wild and mountainous centre. Another Tasmania entirely.
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