December 19 - December 22

We’ll be driving our rental car from Freycinet to Cradle Mountain. It’s about a 4 hour drive.

Things to see and do:

Cradle Mountain National Park
Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area
Tasmanian Devils

Hotel: Cradle Mountain Highlanders

Friday, December 19

We got a pretty early start (10AM) from Freycinet and headed towards Cradle Mountain. The trip would take us back through Launceston and then beyond to the mountains. We planned on stopping in "Lonnie" to try to find a data cable for our cameras - or at least a card reader. We must have been really tired the day we arrived because on the trip back to town, we pass all sorts of things that neither of us had any memory of.

We made it to the Launceston Central Business District (CBD) - a place we're becoming familiar with. This seems to be the primary shopping area and given today was the Friday before Christmas, it was packed. We tried Target and Tandy (Radio Shack) and had no luck with the cable. Tandy recommended a nearby camera shop, but again no luck with the cable. We settled for a card reader. (Card reader in Lonnie = $40. The ability to get pics from our cameras to our laptops so that you can see them = priceless.) We started looking for lunch. This took far, far longer than it should, but nothing was really striking our fancy. The places that looked good were full and not taking any more customers. We ended up with sandwiches and chips in a fairly nice courtyard. We stayed there after eating to copy our photos over and finish updating the Freycinet pages with photos. After a quick stop into an internet cafe to upload everything, we were back on the road.

On the way up to Cradle Mountain National Park, we passed through a town called Sheffield. Apparently the town was really struggling in the mid-90s and had heard of a town in Canada that had solved the same issue by creating a bunch of murals all over the town. Before we knew the story we'd stopped to take a picture of a couple of the murals and then by the time we got into the center of town, there were tons of them. We walked around a bit, checking them out. Even the Church is covered in a western themed mural! We bought 2 drinks - perhaps not enough to save the town. I will say that there was more happening in this town at 6PM than any other small town we've seen in Tasmania. Here are some of the murals:

Once we got up to Cradle Mountain, we discovered it was in fact quite chilly. We were aware that temperatures here could be all over the place - with snow possible in the middle of the summer. We have a small cabin which we finally managed to get warm through a space heater and a wood-burning stove. Luckily Doug knew how to build a fire, because all Travis knows how to do is push the temperature up and down button on his thermostat at home. Of course by the time we went to bed, it was perhaps a bit too warm in the cabin. Yes - we're city boys. We feel that we've almost reached civilization though. We have a TV with local channels and the restaurants are open until 9PM.

Saturday, December 20

Saturday was our busy day with bush walking. The Tasmania National Park system is quite accommodating as well as being fairly commercial. They offer several ranger lead tours (for a fee) plus they'll book other tours for you run by other companies. We chose a few self-guided bushwalks and booked two ranger lead tours. The first was a walk through the rainforest and the second was a "Wombat Wombling" for later in the evening.

We had the same ranger for all of the tours, and we believe ourselves to be quite lucky. Her name was Amanih. She's originally from Melbourne, but has been in Tasmania for 12 years. She's worked there at Cradle Mountain for the last two. They're doing some expansion work in Cradle Mountain and she thinks that as soon as it's completed, she'll have to move on (she's not quite fond of development).

Tasmania is home of one of the few cool temperate rainforests in the world. It's not hot and sticky, but somewhat cool and mildly humid.

On the way to the rainforest we ran into our first new animal. An echidna. It's somewhat akin to a porcupine, but a lot smaller and it has fewer quills. It's really quite cute and it has a long snout that it uses to dig for ants. A baby echidna is called a "puggle" (isn't that cute!), the same as a baby platypus.

The rainforest proved to be quite interesting. We learned all kinds of things like the top canopy is actually eucalyptus trees and how many years it takes things to grow (many things take hundreds of years). Amanih was quite excited to see some strawberry colored fungus growing on one tree. There are lots of things going on in the rainforest!

We learned so much that we have a correction (or two or three) to make on our Freycinet posting. What we originally thought was a not-so-live koala bear in the middle of the road was actually a wombat. They look somewhat similar. The wombat is quite cute and is a fairly calm animal. They're not scared of us at all (it doesn't seem like anything is in the park). If cornered, they can become mean and they have very strong jaws. They've been reported to be able to crush the legs of dogs. They make cubed poo (Amanih kept going on and on about this). She referred to it as looking like it was ejected by an refrigerator's ice cube maker (it really does look that way - unfortunately we didn't take a pic of it). They also don't perspire and they're often covered with leeches, tics, and fleas, none of which seem to bother it at all. They live in underground burrows, and have been clocked at being able to travel for short distances of 40 km/hr (translated to 25MPH for you non-metrics). Their young is also called a joey, just like a kangaroo. Amanih thinks the name is too plain has started a grass-roots plan to introduce the name "wuggle". It's now on the internet so it must be true!

And what we referred to in the last leg as a kangaroo was actually a wallaby. What's the difference between the two you ask? Well, the wallaby is just a smaller version of a kangaroo. It appears that once the feet get to 33 cm (again, 13 inches - you really need to learn the metric system, you know! ) in length, it is then called a kangaroo. There is also a smaller version of the wallaby called the paddy melon (we're not making this stuff up) that has characteristics of a medium-melon shaped body and uses all four legs more than just standing up on the rear two.

We had a fancy dinner at one of the nearby lodges. We're tired from all of the bushwalking and our brains hurt from learning all of this. Back to the cabin so Doug can build another fire and we can get some much needed rest. We had to hand-wash a few clothing items (this was planned - we actually brought detergent) until we can make it to a washer/dryer in Perth. They charge $9 for a load of clothes here!

Sunday, December 21

We're a little tired of bushwalking, and Doug's pre-trip sprained ankle is acting up, so we decided to take an afternoon trip to a nearby honey farm in Chudleigh. On the way, we had a very leisurely lunch (we've noticed that the cafes don't have much waitstaff and can easily be overwhelmed with a few sets of tourists) in Mole Creek. We think the Americans outnumbered the locals here. The honey farm proved to be pretty interesting. We learned more about bees than we did about wombats. Male bees are only used as drones, used for mating with the Queen, and they die promptly thereafter. The females make up all of the the worker bees. They also have a dance that they do to communicate where the blooming is in relation to the angle of the sun and the distance away from the hive. Very interesting indeed! The bee keepers have to transport the bees to various areas around when things are in bloom. They keep a small beehive on-site just for show that pollenate their garden. Because the bees get transported, they have the opportunity to make all kinds of different honey, depending on what is in bloom. Between the different types, the honey farm also does some blending of their own and they must have about 50 different varieties, all of which you can sample. We both liked the cinnamon honey quite a bit and decided that they could keep all of their cajun honey. We had some honey-sweetened ice cream and drove back to the National Park.

Just inside the park is Devils@Cradle It's a non-profit Tasmanian Devil conversation establishment. They have quite a few Tasmanian Devils and give some guided tours. We decided to do one that goes along with a feeding. Once again, we learned a lot! The Devil population is actually in decline. They're inflicted with a contagious jaw cancer that is passed from Devil to Devil, hence the need for conservation. The Devils are very solitary animals (they only live in family packs until the young Devils annoy the mother Devil too much and she finally stops mothering them) and are primarily scavengers. They tend to only come together for mating and feeding - which is how they pass along the contagious cancer. They would much rather take their dinner from another carnivore (perhaps a brother or a sister) rather than actually hunt for it themselves. They're very competitive creatures. They are threatened by humans and sightings of Devils in the wild by humans is rare. They have a scream and a hiss that is totally unforgettable. You should be able to hear some of their commotion in the video off to the side. It's bad enough that they were given a name which translates from latin to something like "flesh eating Satan creatures". We actually got to pet a Devil (with the guide holding it), but since they can be stressed by odd noises and threatening motions, no pics were taken.

Here are some video’s of devils feeding:

Devils@Cradle also have a larger relative of the devil called the spotted quoll. It appears that they often make the kills and then the devils chase them off and steal the food!

We had an easy dinner at one of the lodge taverns and then it was off to our last ranger-lead tour, "Marsupials in the Moonlight."

Once again, we had Amanih as a guide. She's great! We saw possum (they have different varieties, one of which is all black), wallabies, wombats, paddy melons, and we even had a possible quoll sighting (which seemed to excite most of the group).

We headed back to the cabin pretty late. We have to get up at 5AM so we can load up the car and drive the 2 hours back to Lonnie to catch our 9:00 am flight to Melbourne and then to Perth. Whoever made these travel arrangements certainly wasn't sensitive to a vacation schedule!!!

After six nights on vacation, we're starting to feel quite stress free. While reading this website may not leave you in the same state, perhaps this will help: