#42 Tasmania’s Central Highlands |497 km|

After getting both battery chargers fried, I had to hang around in Swansea for new ones to be sent to me and then took off to cross Tasmania from east to west.

Route Maps:  Swansea to Interlaken; Interlaken to Bothwell; Bothwell to Tarraleah; Tarraleah to Lake Burbury; Lake Burbury to Zeehan

I only had to wait 3 days in Swansea for the new chargers to arrive – ordered from Andrew at Eurocycles on Monday at 10am and delivered by Australia Post to Swansea post office at 10.37 Wednesday.  Thanks Andrew.  Not cheap though, at $225 each, so that was a painful lesson not to leave them out in a storm.

The ride out of Swansea started mildly enough in cold conditions, but rapidly got heavy-duty once I turned off the main road heading west onto a quiet, winding, hilly, paved road that steeply ascended the escarpment 400m to Lake Leake, and then on to Campbell Town, where I charged up in the rest area down by the ‘Red Bridge’.

Heading south on the A1 after Campbell Town, Ross is not to be missed – a picture-postcard-perfect heritage village – then it was along a wide dry valley on the busy main road to Tunbridge, where I turned off right (west) to cross the Eastern Tier onto the highlands proper.   This was a difficult climb on a very steep, narrow, winding, dirt road, and a real tester for me.  Hot – up to 34° that day – not a single other vehicle or homestead to be seen, so all on my own, and 7-10 kph in granny gear for over an hour.  Phew!

Interlaken, when I finally got there, exhausted, wasn’t much to crow about either: nothing there but a sparse campsite. I got a stake in the rear tyre as an arrival present (the picture is exactly as I found it – if you look closely, you can see where that stick went through the tyre.  At least it was easy to fix. No one else around, not a lot of spare water left (no access to the nearby lake) and meagre camp rations.

Next day, I thought I’d made relatively easy going of it on the dirt road to the main road junction at a place called “The Steppes”, which is an old pioneer homestead turned into a parks rest area, but maybe the heat (34° again) got the better of me.  All I know is after sitting down for 10 minutes or so, I felt suddenly nauseous, then experienced blurred vision and dizziness, followed by intense dry retching.  After 20 minutes of this, it was all I could do to crawl over to a tank stand and sit propped up against it in the shade.  And there I remained for the next 5 hours (from 10.30 to 3.30), but gradually feeling on the mend after 3 hours.  People I spoke to about my symptoms later were confident I had sun-stroke, but that’s a mystery to me since the overall conditions were actually benign compared to, say, riding into Adelaide from Port Wakefield a few weeks previously, except perhaps for the toughness of the ride itself.

I decided I’d better head back towards civilisation pronto, and Bothwell got my vote, being the closest town (but south, instead of my intended route north-west), so I gingerly got back on the bike and hoped I would be able to stay focused and balanced for the 35 km ride.

It was pretty much all downhill into Bothwell, fortunately, and I arrived there at 7pm without any further dramas, and found very nice accommodation at the Grange Guest House run by Elaine for $70.  That was after trying the grotty-looking pub where the asking price for a room was $140.  I did have dinner at the pub though – steak – and I can report that it was inedible (partly due to my delicate condition to be sure, even though I was ravenous, but also because it was raw and stringy and was accompanied by a mountain of off-putting frozen-fried “chips”, in inverted commas, manufactured from some rejigged potato-substance (probably).  The huge mountains of fried food put in front of a morbidly obese family of 4 next to me just before I got served didn’t help either.  $36. Ker chink!

The ride became definitely more interesting next day. It was on to Hamilton for a late breakfast and then beautiful wooded tall timber country all the way to Tarraleah.  Tarraleah itself was a bit of a disappointment, an ex-hydro town turned into a tourism hot spot, and hoping to capture the well-heeled grey nomad set, with a fancy restaurant and hoity-toity check-in ladies.  But I stayed anyway, for $33 in a tent site in their small caravan park that had no regular caravan park features, such as not even a camp kitchen, for example.  But the restaurant was indeed great!  And I did recover my full strength with an exquisite pork cutlet-in-jus dinner. Ta muchly!

And it only got better!  A steep downhill immediately out of Tarraleah meant another slow grind up.  Repeat.  Repeat.  And so on…

…all the way to Lake Burbury where, as suggested by WikiCamps, I pulled in, paid my $6 to the laissez-faire (it means “couldn’t give a shit”) caretaker and pitched my tent.

It was cold and misty next day but, raring to go, I got away very early by my standards (7am) and enjoyed more spectacular scenery on towards Queenstown.  They say there’s 100 hair-pin bends coming into Queenstown – that’s an exaggeration, but its pretty cool anyway.

Now, I for one found Queenstown to be a very friendly place, with an isolationist mentality and a certain…well… how do I put this – bulging eyes and protruding foreheads seemed to abound, shall we say?  Loved the deep pan curried scallop pie I got for brekkie.  Yumm-oh!

The rain wasn’t so drenching and so on I went towards Strahan.  OK ride, but didn’t go much on the destination – too touristy – and I ended up giving the idea of staying there a miss and pushed on to Zeehan.

And so, pointing back up north again, on I plodded, making a circuitous route of it to Zeehan.  Didn’t mind the unnecessary detour to Strahan, by the way.

Zeehan? Well, it’s a bit special to me, seeing as how I’m a mining person, but I wouldn’t expect most people to like it – let’s just say it’s got some character.  Almost a ghost town now, even though there’s still some mining activity in and around the town.  I stayed in a not-so-old old miner’s cottage (circa 1960s, I’m guessing), had a nice Asian meal and a beer as the only customer in the Cecil Hotel.  The mineral shop got my attention for a bit, and the “Heritage Museum/ Mineral Display” for a bit longer, but, really, hmm…not so great.

-ends-

#43  Tasmania Central Highlands.  Swansea to Zeehan |497 km|