It was under threatening skies and with a chill wind that I left Hobart at 11am on Tuesday, 2 January, bound for Bruny Island after 5 days in Hobart that were always windy and often wet.
Route Maps: Hobart to Bruny Island ; Neck Beach to jetty Beach ; Bruny Island to Cygnet ; Cygnet to Hobart ; Hobart to Fortescue Bay ; Fortescue Bay to Orford ; Orford to Swansea
Tuesday 2 January, 2018. Hobart to Bruny Island |126 km|
The day before, New Year’s Day, I found out what a difference it makes when the bike is not loaded as I smartly powered up Mount Wellington at 15 kph in 8th gear most of the way in diabolical conditions – I strongly doubt I would’ve been able to make the 17 km uphill climb in such a strong headwind at all, with a full load on board.
It was an interesting and picturesque ride all the way down to the ferry at Kettering: once there, I was directed to the front of the 2-hour-long vehicle queue waiting to get on the ferry and was squeezed on after their full complement of 56 cars had embarked for the 10-minute hop across to the island.
Then it was a hilly and largely inland ride south before joining the D’Entrecasteax Channel coast at Great Bay, and then just a few more kilometers to the Neck, where I camped the night. Just before that, though, I pulled in to “Get Shucked” where fresh Bruny oysters were flying out the door and I enjoyed 6 of the best with a glass of Tasmanian Pinot Gris – cheapish at $2 each (the oysters, that is – the wine was $8 for a small glass), and they are absolutely the best oysters I’ve ever tasted (sorry, Coffin Bay; and sorry, Manta at Woolloomooloo), and then stopped off at Bruny Island cheese for 2 loaves of their home-made bread and a wheel of their “Saint” cheese, as well as a small jar of whisky marmalade. Yummiee too! Cycle tourists can sometimes act on their gourmand fantasies.
The Neck is a pay-by-envelope, $10 a night, basic campsite on the eastern (ocean) side and at the southern end of the very narrow neck of land that divides Bruny into its northern and southern parts. Fairy penguins come ashore each evening at dusk to roost in burrows along the neck, mainly at the north-eastern end. The campsite where we humans come to roost is set among scrub some 50m off the beach, and fills up at this time of year. Another touring cyclist, Tom from Norway, was there already and I camped next to him, but a large van arrived later and squeezed in between us, and on the other side, a young American backpacking couple returned to their tent to find a bunch of young blokes almost on top of them too. It rained on-and-off all afternoon and throughout the night, but all was fine and dry by morning.
I loitered next day with the intention of maybe staying on, but with a stiff southerly coming up, north-facing beach options further down the island beckoned and I decamped around midday for the short (45km) ride to the southern end of the island. The village of Alonnah has a takeaway food joint with a passable steak sandwich, and a pub, where I bought a bottle of that lovely Pinot Gris of the day before, to re-savour my oyster moment later on over my bread, cheese and marmalade plate.
The ride on south from Alonnah wasn’t all that easy – the dirt road is OK, with some sand and some corrugated patches to worry about but nothing serious – it’s the short steep sections that’ll get ya, on my loaded bike they did anyway, and I think any loaded touring cyclist without at least 2.2″-wide wheels might struggle.
That north-facing beach, on the D’Entrecasteaux channel coast is called Jetty Beach, and is another parks-run $10-envelope deal (It’s run on the honour system: they trust you to put the camping fee in an envelope which is then deposited into a letter box). Jetty Beach too is set in amongst scrub, but is on a wooded platform on a hillside about 15 m above a pristine sheltered bay, and it too fills up every evening. Even though I was in first, I ended up on the fringes of a group of 17 adults and about 20 kids, friendly-enough but, well…a lot of foot traffic back and forth barely a meter from my insignificant little tent was a bother.
A short (4’11” if she’s an inch) Swiss tourist called Anna – 60 maybe, travelling around alone in, and sleeping in, a hired half-cab (she “doesn’t touch the sides”, she said) – told me about how her own van exploded (ie the gas cooker did) in NZ, causing her and her friend considerable burns, but she was spared the worst of the pain by “Le Secret”. Apparently (she says), you call a number (it’s free), tell them your problem and voila: you’re cured! All the doctors in Switzerland believe in it and are routinely handing out the list of telephone numbers to all patients. Apparently. Well there ya go. I googled it later and I invite you to do the same – it’s part of “New Thought” philosophy, and was made into a movie.
Ho hum – not being judgemental, though I did suggest to Anna that as an experiment we blow her up again and see if it works a second time, and after a few more such experiments I just might be able to conjure up a glimmer of agreement that some psychosomatic pathway is at work here, but until then…nah. I think I drove her away – anyway she went off to commune with the 2 well-kitted-out (you know, with the ski poles but no snow?) French hikers by their fireside, who’s wood, by the way, I had generously organised. (Long story, but I “owned” the wood that was left at my site – that’s why I selected it in the first place – but when the large group began arriving, I said they could have it (the needs of the many versus those of the few and all that) and they took it, but later on another of their number pitched up in a ute and a couple of the guys then went off with a chainsaw and came back with a truckload of wood from outside the park, and said I could have mine back. Since Swiss Anna had parked her vehicle virtually on top of my fireplace I suggested to the two French hikers that they might appreciate it instead).
It was not without some trepidation (regarding my general weakness, and my sore right knee in particular) that I started the journey back out to the ferry terminal next day (Thursday, 4th January). This worry was somewhat justified by the fact that the continuous hills ran the batteries completely flat in 50-odd kilometers – but other than that there were no dramas at all. I charged up on the generator (as I’d done, discretely, at the previous two evenings’ campsites some distance off into the scrub) in the car park of Oyster Cove Inn which is close to the mainland terminal of the ferry (here, Tasmania is referred to as “the mainland”).
I was going to hug the coastline south and then camp, as per WikiCamps advice, at a place called 3 Huts Point, but as that location is highly exposed to southern winds, the app told me, and it was blowing a southerly, I made for the town of Cygnet instead, where I hoped to blend in unnoticed with the backpacking cherry picker crowd at the Cygnet caravan park, haha. Woodbridge, only 4km south of Oyster Cove Inn, has accessible power at the sports pavilion 500m up the C627 road to Cygnet – which would have been convenient had I known about it beforehand, but then again maybe I wouldn’t have gotten that far anyway. The ride over Woodbridge Hill is strenuous, and even with the full 250W of power-assist in TURBO mode, I barely managed 9kph in 2nd gear for long stretches of the 7km continuous 12-15° uphill grind on a narrow winding road, but was then rewarded with 15km of downhill through the picturesque Gardners Valley.
The Cygnet campground lived up to the WikiCamps comments – eccentric (bipolar, I reckon) caretaker, heaving throng of young backpackers (mainly European, and mostly French, with some Anglos and Latinos thrown in) on the fruit-picking trail, with limited and basic ablutions, a seriously-overworked camp kitchen/tribal hut, and everyone camped haphazardly refugee-style in mostly tents or under tarpaulins, some campervans, and no caravans except site ones, all strung out alongside a creek about one kilometer out of town. The backpackers all prefer picking cherries to any other crop (especially strawberries, which they hate, and even apples come in a long way back in second place). This is because cherries are a high-value crop (bringing up to $80 per kilo in Hong Kong) and there is consequently a lot of “shed-work” in sorting and boxing that pays per hour (i.e. is not piece-work). They all seemed to be having fun, too: even the non-working, hard-drinking, putatively drug-dealing ones.
I quickly fell in with Ian (“Ian Lachlan Macquarie”, as he proudly announced, an Aussi from Kununurra), a likable and sociable 41-y.o, who all the younger foreign backpackers seemed to know and look up to, having been trailing each other around the NSW and Victoria fruit-picking trail for 6 months already. An average worker can clear $300-500 per day in the shed, while a “gun” picker on piece-work can bring in $900, and they (Ryan from Manchester, and Martin from Paris) say that in their 88-day stint (mandatory for their working visa extension) they and their respective partners will bring in enough cash to fund their campervan travel around Australia for the next full year. Not too bad, eh?
He’s a bad snorer though, is our Ian, in his swag not 10 feet from my tent. I stayed on an extra day in Cygnet; not doing much, just resting and reading (Honore de Balzac’s “Father Giriot” at the moment), fish basket lunch at the pub, and watching a bit of cricket on the pub tele. A shame, really, since the weather was brilliant all day – low 20s, with hardly a cloud in the sky – and it would have made for ideal riding conditions; also, the fruit-pickers were in extreme party mode Friday after work (till 1am), even the Uruguayan contingent parked opposite me who’d been as quiet as church mice hitherto. But they’re young, eh, and work hard, so who’d begrudge them a bit of fun on a Friday night. No, it was snorer Ian at full stentorian volume for the rest of the night that did me in completely.
Drizzling rain Saturday morning, and the camp site is looking a trifle bedraggled, in sync with the way I, and I’m sure all the lay-in drunkards, are feeling. No point moving on in this weather really, but as it was grudgingly clearing up, and with Bill the caretaker at his charming best and not wanting to hang around for the inevitable swing, I did finally get packed up and move off at 11 – straight into the teeth of a stiff northerly all the way back to Hobart. Knackered when I got there after batting 50 kilometers-an-hour winds in 36° heat all the way, I checked into the 2-stars-if-you’re-lucky Tower Motel using Booking.com, after being rebuffed at 3 hostel and two motel walk-ins.
I stayed 2 nights in that motel in Hobart and took off again on Monday, 8th January, to check out the south-eastern tourist trail – Port Arthur, Maria Island, Freycinet Peninsula – that I bypassed on the way down south. The wind hadn’t abated much but it was cooler at least, in fact quite cold, and the wind, being from the North-west, was at least helpfully behind me for some of the way, but had died away completely by the time I got to Sorell. This was in stark contrast to the last time I passed through here (on the 28th December) and had to battle ferocious 40kph headwinds across the lagoon causeway.
The road (A9) gradually gets hillier and more interesting after Sorell, but the prolonged drought has certainly put-paid to any romantic notions of the lush greenery I was expecting.
Dunalley is a great little town and I stopped there to charge-up down by the foreshore for a couple of hours (even though the batteries were still holding 50% charge after 60km already), and enjoyed a really nice (and cheap) seafood basket at the Dunalley Fish Market.
And just as well I did charge-up too, because the road got dramatically hillier after Dunalley, and in fact I ran out of juice again just as I was coasting into Port Arthur, a mere 60km further on. A beautiful ride though!
The Big 4 Caravan Park at Port Arthur wanted $38 for a non-powered tent site in their “overflow paddock” – bloody hell, what a rip-off! – so I decided to give that a big miss.
I back-tracked 4km and then rode 12km out on the at-times-difficult dirt road into Fortescue Bay National Park. No ranger in attendance and hardly any empty spaces that weren’t displaying a “reserved” sign, but I put my $10 into the honesty box anyway, and squeezed on to a sort of no-man’s-land down the far end that seemed less populated (though it too gradually filled up throughout the rest of the afternoon). But what a beautiful place!
Bivouac Bay, the campground is called. Quite comfy, with brand new toilets (though unfortunately its impossible to avoid the slap of slamming dunny doors every time someone goes to use it – it annoyed me, and I was well away from the actual toilet).
A mix of family groups and hikers, not a caravan or RV in sight (everything has to be “walked-in” from the carpark), beautiful swimming beach and lovely bush tracks all around – so nice, I ended up staying an extra day. My camp neighbours, Tony and Wendy, hail from my mum’s home territory of Wellington/ Langhorne’s Creek in South Australia, and in fact run the Skydiving Centre there.
The next day, Wednesday 10th January, was a very hard day of riding. I stopped at Dunalley again on the way out to charge-up after 57km, and this time spoke with Tony and Kath who retired to Dunalley after a lifetime of international cycle touring and working in the mining industry.
Their neighbour, Tammie, was there too; she features in that iconic photo of the 2013 Dunalley bushfires, sheltering under the town jetty with her kids and neighbours Dunalley fire(©ABC)
Tony told me about an alternative route north to Orford that hugs the coast, but I must have got it all wrong, since I endured a 24km detour through a private farm and ended up at a locked gate.
The Wielangta and Rheban roads – just tracks really – have some rather steep sections and are in extremely poor condition, which is apparently due to the massive surge in traffic attending the Falls music Festival last weekend. I didn’t know single-use tents were a thing.
And so, after charging up yet again at the Bream Creek-Wielangta roads intersection and having a great chat with a local resident whilst doing so, I staggered into Orford on the last dregs of remaining battery charge and stayed the night at the friendly Raspins Beach caravan park, where an unpowered site next to the adequate camp kitchen cost $20. That was 127 km on 3 charge-ups: a total of 12 cells used, or equivalent to 55km per full charge. Not good Paul!
The ferry trip across to Maria Island (pronounced Ma-rye-yah, not Ma-ree-a, so everyone corrected me) is a complete rip-off at $79 return. OK, that does include park entry fee – however much that is – but compared with Bruny Island at $6 return…well, not justified. Maybe I’m just cantankerous because they damaged my bike. Every item of luggage costs extra (I declared 5 out of the 8 I had), and, on boarding, you have to deposit it all in a bin, which is then swung on board with a crane. Being in a queue, I was rushed in to off-loading the panniers, and they wouldn’t allow me time to re-secure the main bungee strap, which consequently wound itself around the rear hub as they wheeled the bike on board, to the extent that it forced the rear sprocket off the Rohloff hub splines. I had to spend my first two hours on Maria pulling the back wheel to pieces and reassembling it – fortunately, with no lasting damage that I can see, so far. And to be fair, the boat crew were a competent and jovial lot, so I’m not cranky at them either.
A couple of young American cycle tourists were also on the boat and helped me with the unloading/ reloading. I caught up with them again – Michael and Brett – at the other end of the island, where we camped at Encampment Cove. It’s only 15-odd km, but not easy – even they had to get off and push their bikes through a few km of sand, but that’s not an option for me with the load I’m carrying, and I was happy I could still power on through the worst sections even though I lost steering several times. At the cove, we were joined by Piotr, a genuine international cycle tourist from Poland, then Chad and Emily, a couple of Adelaide teachers touring mainly by car but trail biking at their various destinations, and already there was Lucy, a hiker from Murwillumbah on the NSW North Coast.
It was windy from the east, pushing seaweed up onto our rocky shore, and our exposed campsite wasn’t great to sit around in either, so I cycled with Chad and Emily over to a more sheltered cove on the western side of the island where we enjoyed a swim and saw so many wombats I thought at first they were a herd of some kind of short-legged fat sheep.
That night it rained heavily and the wind really blew in earnest, even splitting one of my aluminium tent poles, that I had to repair by filing off a 2cm-long section – hope it holds! I heard a Tasmanian Devil during the night – Lucy had seen a couple the night before – but I never did get to see a live one myself; alas, only roadkill so far.
I decamped around midday next day because the constant wind was driving me crazy and because the forecast was for more of it plus rain, and I was also worried about being bogged-in due to flooding of the causeway over to the cove (not such an issue for the others, as they could carry their bikes through), and so rode back up the island again to set up camp at Darlington, the more civilised end of the island close to the ferry landing. And rain it did too, off-and-on all day, so it was spent mostly under cover but the local wildlife – Cape Barren Geese, Native Hens, Pademelons and Wombats – close by the whole time.
I’d noticed that one of the two bolts attaching my rear pannier rack to the bike frame had vibrated off, and Bruce at the bike hire shop on Maria Island kindly did bring me out another one from Triabunna the following day, but I think we were given the wrong size by Andrew at EuroCycles – it didn’t fit anyway, so I have to remember to still attend to that, but other, more pressing, matters took over, so to speak.
Piotr came back over on the same 11.30 ferry as me, but the others all stayed on Maria. Once landed, I decided to wait and see what the weather was going to do – an ugly, ugly storm was brewing in the west – and so set my batteries to charging on the generator while tucking in to a steak sandwich from the Fish Van at the Triabunna wharf. Piotr, against my dire warnings, headed off into the coming storm – don’t know how far he got! Because, boy, was it a storm! Wind, rain, hail, lightening and thunder (and, from the lightening/ thunder intervals, the worst of it was a good 10 km to our north, where Piotr was heading). It was all over inside an hour but the 10 of us sheltering miserably inside the Fish Van still got lashed with horizontal hail there for a bit. I’d placed my chargers on the ground under a bench seat outside to keep the rain off them- not so cleverly, in retrospect – as unfortunately the bench was in a bit of a hollow and within a few minutes of the storm breaking, a large water flow had inundated the lot – batteries, chargers and generator – to a depth of about 8″ (200mm), whilst it was still all fired up and generating power. Oops, not good!
At this point, with this calamity going through my head, I met another pair of cycle tourists – Boris Botman, (like Batman, but with an “o” he said so I’d remember) a 23-y.o. student from Belgium, who I’d actually already briefly met getting off the ferry in Devonport 5 weeks ago, and his cycling companion, Mathieu, a 41-y.o. very funny Frenchman and veteran cycle tourist, with Sri Lanka, India, Korea, and most of the Americas and Europe already under his belt. I calmed down over a pint at the Spring Bay pub and made the decision to stay on in the free camping area behind the pub to allow my electrics to dry out before pushing my luck to see if they still worked, and went, in the rain, to set up the tent to get everything under cover. In the end the others decided to stay too, it being Mathieu’s birthday next day. Rob, a young English hiker we met in the pub, also joined us. Interesting, friendly folk one and all, and we had a bit of a session talking the joys and dramas of being on the road, sitting there on the damp ol’ ground.
I had enough charge to easily get to Swansea, which is a bigger town than Triabunna, and so thought I’d put off any unpleasant surprises, charger-wise, until I got there. I’d already tested the batteries and generator and they were fine.
But no such luck with the chargers. I happened across a helpful tourist who had good electrical knowledge, Tom from Hobart, and he methodically checked it all out and gave me the drum as to what to do next. It being a Sunday (14 January, 2018), there wasn’t much I could do, except check into the Swansea Motor Inn and strip down the two chargers to allow them to thoroughly dry out.
I took them to the local Servo the next day where an electrician checked with his multimeter and declared the fuses were, in fact, fused. So I went to Tom’s Plan B and shorted the fuses and gingerly tried to get power to the batteries without them but, no, still nothing. The resisters must be burnt out too (just repeating what Tom had said – I wouldn’t have a clue). So, on to Plan C: call Andrew at Eurocycles yet again and have him send me two replacement chargers Post Restante to the Swansea Post Office. And so here I sit in Swansea until I don’t know when…
-ends-
#41 Tasmania south-east: Bruni Island to Maria Island |601 km|
Tassie sounds nice. Did you know there is a D’encastreux national park on the south west coast of WA?
Believe it or not, I’ve just scored a job, start on Monday, with GR Engineering on Sheffield Resources mineral sands project up in the far north of WA! It will be design stuff, home based with a few trips to their office in Perth. After two years it will be a bit of a challenge working again, but they agreed to our two week ski trip to Japan at the end of the month, and I am only going to do a three month stint, so I should manage.
Wow! Sounds fun!
Nice pics. Let’s hope your (new) chargers come charging, eh?
We did spend one night in Swansea in the same joint (I think) and thought it was about the worst place we experienced. The restaurant food was particularly dated (70’s style) and uninteresting. Frankly, I don’t think we will visit Swansea again….