Devonport, Launceston to the Bay of Fires

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The first thing that I really noticed in Devonport, after getting off the ferry in a mad rush of 'what level is the car on', was the quarantine line. Not only did it stretch for a couple of hundred metres, but it started off as two lanes. This was fine with me, until it went into four lanes. Probably about 45 minutes later it merged back into two lanes. Then 15 minutes later we were jockying for position with all the other cars, trying to get through quarrantine, get our eskies sniffer dogged, and get out of there as fast as we could. This was the start of our Tasmanian adventure, we both told eachother, and it was going to be good. It was going to be good. It better be good. Thankfully, only a handful of cars nearly crashed into ours in their reckless and brazen efforts to push infront of us in the queue. In the end though, after I had gained an insight into potential causes of driver frustration, we had our esky sniffer dogged, and we got out of there as fast as we could.

We crossed the bay, flirting with the signs beckoning us to go to Hobart, pondering whether we should go to Launceston. In all our anxiousness, from car troubles to getting to the ferry on time to quarrantine, neither Beth nor I really knew where we wanted to go. Of course we had some vague plan in our head. We would do the Overland Track in the second half of our holiday, after we return from Melbourne where we'll fly to see Ani DiFranco. We'd hopefully squeeze in a hike up Frenchman's Cap in the few days before we flew out of Launceston. And that was about all we knew. We were full of ideas and yet totally clueless - we could go East, West, North, South or North-East, but we lacked any definite locations we wanted to go. After a bit of a sigh we decided to postpone this decision making until the next day, and happened upon a nice camping ground at Devonport Bluff.

Beth still fondly recalls the campsite rather fondly. It was the overflow area, effectively a big paddock of windswept grass which was fully exposed to the coastal wind. We decided on a spot next to some typical coast shrubbery, which gave us rather good protection. The sun went down as we cooked dinner, and we both decided that our time in Tasmania was going to be amazing.

The next morning we went to the Devonport tourist information centre, hoping that they would know more than we did about our holiday. We had a look at the large map on the wall and Beth realised that we had to go to the Bay of Fires. Only a couple of weeks prior I had been watching a 7.30 Report segment of a couple who had discovered the Bay of Fires, and they seemed to be entertained no thoughts of leaving. And so our hiking holiday became a road trip, as we jumped into the car to drive first to Launceston. We were only planning on having our picnic lunch in a peaceful park before continuing to Scottsdale and then St Helens, when we were led on a magical detour in the search of public toilets. We drove a little while, and then happened on the Launceston City Park . It took us about half an hour to find the toilets, as we were first distracted by the herbology department, a brick walled greenhouse in the middle of the park, and by monkeys. The plaque says that Launceston has a long history of displaying animals in its city park, but it still came as a welcome surprise to see them sitting around in whatever shade they could find.

The road to Scottsdale as a little scary. We took the A3 highway East, but quickly decided that the road wasn't suitable for 100km/hr traffic, with tight turns, narrow and potholed roads and no signage whatsoever for the blind corners. Road signage urging '100km/hr is a limit, not a challenge' seemed to make sense to me, but obviously it didn't quite click in the minds of the locals. We took it slow, and by late afternoon found ourselves in St Helens, from where we headed North to the Bay of Fires conservation area. We had a bit of a direlema when we realised we were 20 minutes from St Helens, with no drinking water in the car, and with none to be expected at the National Park run campsite on the bay. Beth stepped in and made it all work, talking some local residents into giving us some water. We found a campsite, and did the best we could with the ashy, sandy ground. We were relieved to have stopped after a long day on the road.

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