Western Tassie

Greetings, global audience! (Two continents.) We are back in Melbourne after three and a half weeks traveling around Tasmania. It was unlike any other place we have visited and we had an awesome time exploring. Tasmania is the second least populated state in Australia falling right above the Northern Territory, so most of the areas we visited were quite desolate and didn’t have much internet, hence the lack of blog posts. (Poor excuse, we know.) We did pack a lot in though, so we want to share the highlights.

After a night spent at the country club, our first stop was to a truffle farm. There we chatted with the shop owner about the process of growing truffles in Tasmania since they’re not native. We tried delicious truffle honey, oil, and balsamic vinegar. We ended up going with the balsamic and 10 grams of whole truffles for a fraction of the cost it would be in the States.

As we drove down the highway to our next stop, we noticed many signs for locally sourced foods like honey, chocolate, ice creameries, and vineyards. Turns out we were on the Tasmanian food trail, and we stopped at every one of them.

We did a short hike into a series of choose-your-own-adventure caves and then headed off to fish and find a camp near Cradle Mountain National Park. After catching state record sized clumps of algae, we set our sites on finding a suitable camp.  We settled on a nice moss covered area by an abandoned cattle corral, and made some fresh truffle pasta before retiring for the night. 

The next morning we woke and decided to summit Cradle Mountain. “Summiting” anything always sounds  grand, but we were sure this would be leisurely. Right…  Starting off, we chose to hike the Face Track which took us along a ridge overlooking Dove Lake. It was pretty much smooth sailing until we got to the rock scrambling section. We thought we were well prepared coming from Jackson where many hikes include scrambling. We were wrong. The scrambling here was much more intense due to the good amount of exposure and the duration. Overcoming some fear of heights, we made it to the top after an hour of tedious ninja maneuvers. After some lunch of tuna, granola bars, and matcha latte flavored Kit Kats (shoutout to Japan) we descended quickly, so as to not miss the last bus back to the parking lot. Legs feeling like jell-o, we hopped in the truck feeling satisfied we accomplished over 8 miles (8.01) with 2900ft of elevation gain in 5 hours. 

The next day we drove along the Northern coast driving through cute towns. In Smithton, we pulled up and ate breakfast at the designated tourist photo point. It was obviously the designated photo spot because they had gone to the trouble of erecting an enormous steel rectangle that framed… a tidal mudflat. Yes, just where we were hoping to take a photo. A couple approached us and offered to take our photo. We assumed they meant taking our photo with the (scenic?) mudflat. We agreed and handed her a phone, and what proceeded was perhaps the funniest interaction possible. 

The woman went to quite a bit of trouble to ensure that she got the perfect angle of us with, what else, but the giant metal frame. Ignoring the setting that the town was so proud of, she captured the perfect picture of us with the metal frame, as if the metal rectangle was the thing to take a photo of, and not the land beyond. Regardless, we appreciate her effort and did get a priceless photo with a metal rectangle.

Penguin was the next of the towns we stopped in because you can’t just drive through a town named Penguin and not stop. It turned out to be ill timed since it was Good Friday, which is a major holiday in Australia. Despite most of the shops and restaurants being closed, we still had a good time walking along the oceanfront, taking a picture with a giant penguin statue, and trying a few beers at the Penguin Brewery. 

The next town, Stanley, is home to The Nut. An old volcanic plug that looks like a flat top mountain, it is a unique and dramatic backdrop to the town. We stayed two nights at the car park there right next to the ocean. After fishing half the day and exploring the other half, we went to Hursey Seafoods for dinner. It’s a big restaurant for a small town that has its own fleet of red fishing boats and serves the seafood it catches, i.e. sea to table. With it being so fresh (and subsisting off of Aldi’s packaged pasta meals the previous nights), we had to try it all–oysters, calamari, abalone, and crayfish. It was so good we went back the second night, but since the inside was too busy, we had a take out dinner of calamari in the car park.  

We continued our journey along the west coast driving on the Sandy Cape Track where Ethan enthusiastically deflated our ute’s underwhelming street tires so it could perform well driving over sand dunes. Neither of us had driven on a beach before which made it all the more fun and exciting. The truck made it out in one piece, with the paint and underbody protection only slightly worse for wear. 

We finished the day by driving down seemingly abandoned logging roads, looking for the perfect spot for the night. Having found no such spot off the road, we decided to just park it on the road for the night. The tall trees, overgrown road, and utter lack of Homo sapiens gave the site an unshakable eerie feeling, foreshadowing our activity for the next day–visiting the ghost town of Balfour. 

Balfour was a mining town that died in the early to mid 1900s. It is down a 4x4 road a few miles off of the super highway (gravel road) of Western Tasmania, and all that remains  are abandoned vehicles, remnants of buildings, a cemetery, and bottomless mine shafts. In the center of the “town” is a shack. It was a hotel back in the day, and what remains of the cobbled building is held together by junk from the walls of a Cracker Barrel restaurant and memories. Needless to say, it is awesome. It's cluttered with old furniture, posters, pictures, and beer bottles all over the shelves and walls. A usable fireplace is along the wall and the front half of a Land Rover Defender is sticking inside the shack after someone presumably drove it through.

Creepy as we thought it was when we first arrived, it was actually a charming place. The hotel was clearly a local spot to hang out, and after speaking with some retired locals that came to visit for the 10th? 100th? time, we learned that the family who had been running the hotel abandoned it after their son tragically passed away. Their request to the community was to use and enjoy the hotel and property as their son did for many years. The locals clearly respected the area, and were proud of it. We admired it, too.