Tasmania Trip

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Exciting Plans for a Summer trip to Tasmania

My husband and I are headed to Tasmania for our second visit on 14th January. We will spend 12 nights in Tasmania and then fly to Melbourne for a whirlwind 3 night stay. Our last visit, in July 2007, was a very freewheeling affair, the cold having kept most visitors away from the state so we had little need to book accommodation ahead - as with our winter road trip through Victoria and NSW in 2000, we would pull up at caravan parks and find them sitting empty and silent, inhabited only by a couple of hardy permanents, who were always bemused and perplexed to discover that we had left the tropics and headed south in midwinter!

We love the cold and we seek solitude, so travelling out of season will always be our thing. We visited the 12 Apostles on that trip around lunchtime on a wild, windy grey day and had it entirely to ourselves - a dramatic contract to the photographs I have seen of the site in summer, with dozens of tour buses pulled up in the carpark and hundreds of people swarming the lookout.

Tassie in the Summer, as far as we can tell, is a very different experience to the winter in terms of the large number of visitors we will be sharing the state with, and as we have a limited amount of time, we have decided to plan our itinerary fully and book our accommodation ahead of time this time. We have scored some very good flights and prices. Flying to Tasmania from Cairns can easily be a full day affair. On our previous trip we left Cairns at 8am, and finally landed in Launceston around 5pm, following quite lengthy layovers in Sydney and Melbourne. This time we have a flight that departs Cairns at 6am. We will have time for a cup of coffee in Brisbane airport and will then arrive in Hobart at 1.40pm. Quite civilised. On the return we are flying Hobart to Melbourne/ Melbourne to Cairns. Return airfares for two cost us just under $950.

At the moment, our itinerary is : Hobart - Queen room at the Transit Backpackers (2 nights @ $70); New Norfolk - Bush Inn ($80); Devonport - Onsite van at Abel Tasman Caravan Park ($60); Smithton - Island View Spa Cottage ($180),Crayfish Creek - Onsite van at Crayfish Creek Caravan Park (2 nights @ $40); Launceston - Launceston Backpackers (2 nights @ $65); Bicheno - Unit at Bicheno East Coast Caravan Park ($105); Richmond - Budget cabin at Richmond Cabin and Tourist Park ($75); Hobart - Signalman's Cottage, Mt Nelson ($100). Melbourne: Greenhouse Backpackers @ $80.

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