Tuesday
After a short lie in we rustled up ourselves some beans on toast for breakfast. We'd reignited the spark at our hotel in Eaglehawk Neck and really fancied some. It went down a treat and set us up for the day. Just up the road from St.Helens is a place called the Bay of Fires. It has been voted Lonely Planet’s must see place in the world so we were expecting good things from it. It was about a half an hour drive from our accommodation and we got there fairly early. As we were now near the end of our time in Tasmania, we had noticed that we were getting out and about later and later. Having said that, it was long gone 10 when we reached Binalong Bay, which is a town at the southern end of the Bay of Fires. After an initial problem of trying to find a car park, we parked up and set off. There are spots along the bay that are littered with huge rocks covered in red lichen. This is the reason Charlotte and I guessed it was called the Bay of Fires but it didn't take us long to find out that was wrong. Not far up from where we parked there was a viewing platform. On this platform there was an info board that enlightened us. Apparently it got named by the original explorer that found it Captain Tobias Furneaux due to the fires the Aboriginal people had set up along the beach. We walked down from the platform and decided to give the waters a bit of a test. Some of the larger rocks had formed a small lagoon, which was protected from the large surf crashing against the outer rocks. Unsurprising, the water was pretty chilly but we wandered out to a rocky island and sat for half an hour enjoying the sights. Compared to Wineglass Bay, this was more our thing. We sat on our rock and watched the father of a family, that sounded like they came from Yorkshire, decide to take the plunge in the freezing cold water. He tried to keep a brave face on it but he couldn't hide the pain from his voice. When our peace was spoiled by 2 young children clambering all over our rock, we decided to head back to the car. There was a car park back along from us that provided access to a long, sandy beach, so we went for a walk on that. The sand was so fine, it squeaked as our bare feet rubbed against it as we walked, which provided us with far too much amusement. We walked along where the water was reaching and got caught off guard more than once by a rogue wave. We were watching a storm out in the sea and had no idea what direction it was heading in. By the time we had got to the opposite end of the beach, we were pretty sure we were going to get a soaking, so we picked up the pace on the return leg. We needn't have bothered. We sat in the car and watched it go further north and avoid us all together. The sit in the car did mean we could eat some lunch though. We sat there eating and pondering and came to the conclusion we had seen all Binalong Bay had had to offer us. We consulted our road map of Tassie and found a dead end road out to a place called The Gardens and thought we'd check that out for something to do. It would have been a quick drive but for a car that was going at a snails pace most of the way. We guessed on the drivers ethnicity well before the road mercifully straightened out and we could safely overtake. They were Asian, in case you hadn't guessed. I realise I don't speak highly of Asians and they are lovely but some of them are just nutters. A number of times we had had to be wary of Asian drivers on the road as they were very erratic, slow moving and rather indecisive. We also believe that a reason for this may be that they are renting cars with one named driver and then swapping drivers for some of the quieter stretches of road. This may be a load of rubbish though. Also, (sorry to bleat on) we have been warned by 2 completely different people on opposite sides of the state to watch out for Asians on the road. One told us there had been a very near miss when a group had stopped in the middle of the road and decided to photograph a dead wombat. The other told us one had been killed when lying in the middle of the road taking a photo of a dead Echidna. We did take these with a pinch a salt but then again, it wouldn't surprise us one iota if it were true. Anyway, we made it safely past the erratic driver and down the wonderful road to The Gardens. After continuing with our lunch for a short while we got out of the car to have a look around, unsurprised there was no sign of the car we had passed. Despite a large group of Asians, there was nobody around. We headed in the opposite direction, knowing that when we'd found a nice spot they'd come over and stand by us anyway. There was a viewing platform up on a very small hill that gave panoramic views of even more lichen covered rocks and Asians taking selfies (sorry, I'll stop now). We left the platform behind to do some more scrambling over rocks, which was a little bit awkward in worn out flip flops. We found a quiet spot and sat just short of where the waves were crashing against the rocks. Again, this was what we enjoyed. Witnessing the power of the sea. Our prediction was correct however, it didn't take long to hear the patter of Asian feet behind us, which was quickly drowned out by their shouting at each other from 2 feet away. We tolerated it for a few minutes but eventually gave up and walked back to the car. Tucked next to our car was the erratically driven one and I think we were both pleased to see it had arrived safely. That pretty much finished up our day in the Bay of Fires. We stopped off at St.Helens visitor information along the way and picked up a pin badge, stopped off at the supermarket for a few dinner things and then headed home. Charlotte had started working me like a slave to get caught up with blog writing. I'd started off writing day by day in Tasmania but somehow got out the habit. I was also struggling to catch up with the deficit that had been caused by Dengue Fever way back in Singapore. Under the whip though, I'd been catching up pretty well. That's how I spent my evening , while Charlotte done some tidying in the car. For the first time in a while, we had picked up some meat for dinner. Previous places we'd stayed didn't have adequate cooking facilities for it. One place we had stayed even charged us $1 for 15 minutes of hob time and we didn't fancy using all of that cooking up some chicken. Anyway, after so long without, the chicken and white sauce was delicious. It was just a shame the carrots had started to go a bit soft.
Wednesday
Getting up and motivated was quickly becoming a nuisance. We'd agree on a time to get up the night before and then press snooze on the alarm so many times it got silly. We were using up our time in the cabin though, as we could check out at 10. After tidying the car up once again, by the time everything had returned to it, it looked slightly worse for wear. We also knew we'd just have to get everything sorted once and for all in a final stop, wherever that would be. We were struggling to find a place to stay in Devonport for the final night, so weren't really sure what was happening. This was exacerbated by the fact we had an incredibly wacky plan for our final full day with the car but we deemed it necessary. Back in St.Helens though, we were eating our toast and just looking to make it to Tasmania’s second city of Launceston. Now, clearly when the British settled in Tasmania, they thought it looked slightly similar to home and decided to name almost every town after ones back in the UK. St.Helens, Launceston, Brighton, Derby, Richmond, Cornwall, to name a few. I don't have a problem with this but I do have a problem with how Australian pronounce Launceston. It's not quite as ridiculous as my parents disagreement on how to say Bosham but I still think it's weird. I wouldn't have even known about it had our tour guide for Uluru, Matt, not come from the town. I'm pretty sure we pronounce our town of Launceston, Cornwall as Lanws-ton. The locals here call theirs Lawn-ces-ton. We hadn't even started driving there yet and we were angry with it. It was a fairly long drive up from St.Helens, so we broke it up with a stop in the small town of Scottsdale. We popped into the visitor information just for the sake of it really. We told the lady behind the desk we were just passing through and she gave us a voucher for a free hot drink down at the local bakery. It would have been rude not too, so we headed down to pick them up. It would have also been rude to just go in for the free coffee, so we picked up a couple of sausage rolls to keep us going. We ate them back in the car and carried on through to Launceston. Despite being the second biggest city in Tassie, it wasn't huge. It has a population of 106,000, which i believe is pretty similar to Worthing’s. Hitting a complicated one way system again, we eventually found our hostel. We checked in and made our beds. While we were making them an English lady came in and we went through the pleasantries. When we said we came from near Brighton, she asked us “not Worthing?”. We were slightly taken aback as even British people tend not to know where it is. She was Mancunian but she has a cousin who lives in Worthing. We wanted to head out so we said our see you laters hit the streets. We didn't really know what to do in Launceston (having looked back, there are a few things we missed but hopefully we’ll come back) and decided to just wander the town and see what we might find. Not much unfortunately! We found the visitor info centre and popped in for a pin badge but there wasn't any to find. We asked the lady if there was any gift shops around town to have a look in. She told of us of one, which we decided to find a visit to Launceston library. We still needed to sort out some accommodation and plans for the next day and we'd found libraries the best place to access free wifi. Our hostel offered it but we refused to pay $1 for an hours worth of Internet. We spent a couple of hours here as I had not filled my blog quota for the previous day and Charlotte hunted down some accommodation. We eventually found somewhere in the small town of Penguin, that we had driven through on our first day in Tasmania. It was cheap and not too far from Devonport, so it seemed perfect. We left the library and hunted down the gift shop. We needn't have bothered. Not a Launceston badge in sight. I even asked her if we might find one elsewhere but she couldn't really help. It had annoyed us that the 2 biggest cities in Tassie were the 2 places we had failed to get a badge. We'd even got one from Strahan, with its hefty population of just over 600. We gave up for the day, seemingly now in wind down mode for the trip back to the mainland in a few days time. You guessed it! Blogs were written, dinners were cooked and beds were slept in. After all, we had a very busy day planned and we needed our rest.
James and Charlotte
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