Launceston: the town with a gorge

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My first day in Tasmania, also known as "the apple isle", "the holiday isle", "the prostitute isle", probably other isles too. On my way to the airport I kept having the horrible feeling that there was more than one Launceston and I was booked on a flight to the one in Western Australia or Christmas Island or somewhere. I am staying for the night at Lloyd's Backpackers, attached to Lloyd's pub. Its $21 for a dorm bed but I'm the only one in it so its a bargain (real single rooms are $51). My plan was to head tomorrow to Devonport and from there to Narawntapu National Park to look for Tasmanian devils. However the lady in the information centre here says there is no way to get to the park without your own transport. So I'm going to Devonport anyway and see what happens. Maybe I'll be able to hitch a lift with someone, and if not maybe there's somewhere else I can get to. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime I went to the imaginatively-named City Park to see what Lonely Planet calls "the fabulous Japanese macaque enclosure". It seems a bit odd having a monkey cage in a little square of grass and trees in the middle of the town but there it is. It turns out that there has been a long tradition of housing animals at the site, including thylacines (which are also the city's emblem). Originally the macaque cage held rhesus macaques from India, from the late 1800s to 1979 when the last one died. Presumably they had been breeding, not being hundred-year-old monkeys! Anyway, the city council decided to keep the tradition going, redesigned the cage to a more modern design and imported ten Japanese macaques from the Japanese Monkey Centre. In 2002 the enclosure was refitted again to how it looks today. Its actually quite nice, but still kind of odd just sitting there with seemingly little relevance to anything else around it.

I wanted to go to the Tamar Wetland Reserve a little ways out of town where there's a 2km boardwalk through swampland, but the bus up there runs at irregular times and I couldn't really understand the schedule, so instead I went along the Cataract Gorge walk. Its quite a nice gorge, all craggy and gorge-like with the Tamar River "surging" through it in a sluggish kind of way, but all the tourists in town were doing the walk as well. I spotted a red-bellied pademelon in the scrub though (a pademelon is a type of small wallaby); also some European goldfinches which were a bit of a surprise.

Now just need to see what tomorrow will do for me.

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Comments

[Cas]

Park
I stayed in the hotel overlooking this park, and thought it was beautiful, it smelled of pine trees, and had a little train running round it, also a cihildrens park, were familys had there teas there on the Barbacues, and it was also a place to sit till the sun set, it is such a change from the rest of Aus, as it actually has green grass and trees, instead of dry bark, it also has a pond with ducks in, I also watched a couple Salsa dancing on the band stand, they had a speaker with music on, Yoga lessons are tought in the park as well as Ti Chi, it was just like walking in to a post card, I loved it.