16 and 17 Mar 2011
To Strahan and On to Cradle Mountain National Park
To tell by the tone of the produce manager’s voice, one would think that EVERYONE knows that the reason bananas are so outrageously priced in Australia right now is because they come from flood-ravaged Queensland. Everyone but us Yankees, I guess.
We were in the local IGA Supermarket in Strahan, on the isolated west coast of Tasmania, when we received this informative bit. A fairly dumpy store, I might add, in a town with a lovely restored historic district but frankly, besides those dozen buildings, not much else. All the guidebooks say you must visit Strahan and although we enjoyed the scenic drive from Lake St. Clair westward to just before Queenstown, we could have done without the rest. Before you even arrive at the redneck-flavoured district of Queenstown, you know something ugly is coming. The hillsides change from protected forests to naked scars stripped barren by eras gone by of copper mining. Beyond town, the road hairpins along through a bush-choked alley that never, and I mean not even once, affords you a view of the great wild west ocean lurking mere kilometers away. To say that this was a bit of a disappointment is an understatement – I was hoping to have photos of Gina frolicking in the surf that had just rolled in from Patagonia – but such is life on the road, winning some and losing others.
Speaking of losing, we have lost out again and again on getting a powered site at the local campgrounds. Unlike New Zealand, where there are more plugs than people, here in Tasmania the campgrounds have (so far) been much stingier with their outlets, providing just a handful of powered sites for the luckiest few. It’s not that we can’t sit here in the dark with our headlamps on – we can, and are – but like I mentioned a few days ago, it’s getting awfully cold here at night and that little heater of ours needs a big orange cord attached in order to run. We are getting so desperate that I’m pretty sure we may start fighting over who gets to do the cooking – this, from two non-cooks – in order to have that shot, however brief, at huddling in front of the propane burner while that one-pot-meal bubbles away.
