This week, I’m blatantly using my blog as an advertisement. My ebook, The Edge of the World: Next Stop Cape Horn, has been for sale on Amazon for two years and at last I have it available in print. 
In 2006, I set out in my little hatchback to begin the first of four road trips around the island of Tasmania, south of where I live in Melbourne, Australia.
Continue reading “The Edge of the World: Next Stop Cape Horn”
If you want to know what heaven is, indulge yourself with hot chocolate made in a chocolate factory: pure liquid chocolate. Anvers Chocolate Factory is situated in a beautiful Californian bungalow, surrounded by cottage gardens, on the outskirts of Latrobe, in the north of Tasmania. I sat next to a window. The room was cold but the light morning sun shone through, emulating warmth. A waitress approached and I ordered my liquid heaven.
Continue reading “Anvers Chocolate Factory Latrobe Tasmania”
One of the places on my Tassie bucket list was the Styx Valley, near the entrance to the Southwest National Park. The car rattled along the last of the gravel road into the car park of the Styx Valley Reserve. I parked beside an archway created by giant ferns, seducing me to peek through.
The Edge of the World. That’s what the sign said and, standing on the hill looking out to sea, that’s how it felt. Untamed and untameable: Arthur River, North-West Tasmania. If you sailed from where the river enters the sea and kept going, you would hit South America without touching land. This accounted for the vicious wind ripping through me and I was grateful for the knitted beanie a caring friend gave me on my announcement that I was exploring Tassie in the depths of winter.
In 2006, on my first trip to Tassie, I left Hobart and headed up the east coast towards Swansea and the Freycinet Peninsula. I was sick of just looking at photos of famous Wineglass Bay; I wanted to see it for myself.
‘The lookout for Wineglass Bay,’ I said to the girl behind the counter at the Visitor Centre. ‘Is it a hard walk?’ She shook her head. ‘So, it’s not difficult then?’ I prompted.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s okay.’
Forty-five minutes south of Ulverstone on the north coast is Leven Canyon, Tasmania’s deepest limestone gulch.
I followed a forest track to a large cantilevered platform, suspended and directed out over the canyon.
I left Hobart and headed up the east coast to Swansea and the Freycinet Peninsula. I was sick of just looking at photos of Wineglass Bay; I wanted see it for myself.
‘The lookout for Wineglass Bay,’ I said to the girl behind the counter at the Visitor Centre, ‘is it a hard walk?’ She shook her head. ‘So it’s not difficult, then?’
‘No, it’s okay.’
A must, when visiting Hobart, Tasmania’s capital city, is Salamanca Market, sprawled between historic warehouses and the waterfront, famous as the finishing line for the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, held every year on Boxing Day.
I’d been told I had to see the dead hills on the way out of Tasmania’s old mining town of Queenstown. All vegetation had been killed off years before by the felling of the trees to burn in the mine smelters and the sulfur fumes from the smelters themselves.
White Australia began as a penal settlement, a way for the English to clear out their overloaded gaols and to rid themselves of what they called the “criminal classes”. Many of the convicts were sent to Tasmania, around 76,000 between 1804 and 1853. We were taught at school about the colourful and fascinating history surrounding this time but I wanted to learn more. Continue reading “Gordon River Tasmania”
Planning to the Nth 