From the Snow to Sands
6th June, Strahan, Tasmania, Australia
The route from Queenstown to Strahan offers some of the wildest scenic views. The roads twist and turn up and down steep hills, offering glimpses of the wilderness beyond, sometimes shrouded in low-lying cloud. The vegetation has a unique feel to it - unkempt and colourful - and there is the most amazing abundance of lichens and mosses along the roadside (which hints at two things: a high rainfall and not many cars on the road - normally all you can expect to see at the road-side is a grey-ish/brown stain from car exhausts).
Moody landscape near Queenstown, on the way to Strahan.
After surviving the (at times) quite precarious road to Strahan (pronounced 'strawn') - Ethel really could benefit from power steering at times - we discovered that Strahan's residents don't rise early on an off-season Sunday. Actually, midday is your best bet if you want to grab a morning tea. The only thing that seemed to start early was the cruises down Gordon River, and as we had missed them there was not an awful lot to do here. So, we checked out the details for a possible boat journey tomorrow, then checked in to a caravan park. Manda was feeling a bit unwell - a cold that was no doubt brought on by the previous days' inclement weather - so we got the fan heater back in to action for a while.
Crayfish cages stacked up on a fishing boat moored in the harbour at Strahan.
Once Manda had warmed up a bit and generally felt a whole lot better, we headed out for a drive up to the Henty Dunes. These are around 14kms outside of Strahan, and are really quite an incredible sight - sand dunes that are some 30 metres high that stretch for miles along the coast, reaching far back inland. Standing on one of them, I could see the sea to my right in the distance, a thriving forest to my left and in front, the bare branches of trees that had lost the battle with the ever-moving dunes.
Henty Dunes: rising up against the forest and, in places, eating into it.
What a difference a day makes: yesterday we were checking out wombat prints
in the snow at Cradle Mountain, today we were making our own prints in 30-metre-high
sand dunes.
As we left the dunes, we saw a group of people arrive with a quad bike and a large sled in tow. It looked like great fun; there was no way on earth that we'd get Ethel up on that sand - this was the closest we were going to get to finding out what it's like to tear it up all over the dunes.