Tasmania - Ten Days of Magic
This is the first of some occasional blogs posted in 2026 .
1878 Poem by LMW
Home of my youth, how dear;
Rich and fertile is thy toil,
Thy skies are bright and clear.
If by summer’s morn I view thee,
Or by winter’s moonlit night
Thou art always beautiful,
Tasmania fair and bright.
Thy hills with verdure clad,
How beautiful they seem;
Thy rivulets are glad
Beneath the bright sun’s beam.
Let England boast her Thames,
Scotland her bonnie Dee;
Their waters are not half so sweet
As those which flow through thee.
Ric and I love to travel. We’ve done road trips, train rides, ocean cruises and river journeys. The most basic, 25 years ago, was a week-long river ride in China where the board bed was hard as a table and the in-room announcements couldn’t be turned off. The most luxurious was our recent cruise up the Canadian east coast in a small ship with only 300 adults and fantastic food and company. In between, we have used large buses, small vans, cross-continental trains, a hired EV and in NZ, of course, our own car. So when it came to celebrating my 75th birthday with a trip to nearby Tasmania, we looked at many options. In the end, it was my husband who made the call; he doesn’t mind driving in Australia where vehicles are on the left, and he found an appealing self-drive itinerary through Tasmania.com. I’ll share just a few snippets here; in time it might evolve into material suitable for a gap in our monthly speaker slot at Probus.
The website we used makes the introductory statement:
Tasmania is bigger than it looks on a map. We plan routes, accommodation, and daily pacing so your trip feels smooth and manageable from day one. We offer logical routing with realistic driving distances and no backtracking. Good-value inclusions are clearly explained, and local support is available during your trip.
And that is exactly what we got, in ten days that took us around Tasmania to six quite different destinations, a variety of accommodation styles, and a wealth of options of things to do. Daily driving times in our Subaru Crosstrek rental were mostly two or three hours and never longer than five. (1700 km total). We visited nineteenth-century convict relics, mining settlements, National Parks, cliff walks and lighthouses, a Tasmanian Devil sanctuary, Huon Pine camps and a still-operating sawmill, as well as many vineyards, and a raspberry farm. We enjoyed two 6-hour day cruises (both including estuarine river and the open sea) and two smaller ones, getting to tourist attractions.
As the marketing blurb says “You know where you are going, where you are staying and what to expect each day.” It’s all on the app!
Food and Fun
We self-catered breakfasts with the cereal bowls and bamboo cutlery we always carry with us. For lunches and dinners we dined out, eating lots of fish, fresh oysters, and scallops, and of course chips. The bento box lunches on both day cruises were wonderful. And I found Tasmanian wine a very fitting substitute for Marlborough Sav.
Part of the fun was deciding what to do each day, often on the spur of the moment. For example, the museum in the little hamlet of Campbelltown was closed, but Ric found a statue in the park honouring Eliza Forlonge, the woman who introduced German merino sheep to Australia in 1829.
People and Politics
Friends had told us we should visit MONA, the quirky Hobart art museum opened in 2011 and funded entirely by David Walsh, a local billionaire businessman and professional gambler. On our last day, we took the ferry up the river, opting for the ‘Posh Pit; tickets, with drinks and canapés. Next to us on the leather couch were an intriguing Australian couple dressed up to the nines with flowing scarves and freely-shared opinions. After the usual greetings and location-based questions, we were told all about our former prime minister “Jacinta”, in a decisive commentary that bore little resemblance to fact. We quickly identified our respective colours on the political spectrum, in a carefully-worded exploration we have learned to do when travelling in the USA. Having not seen very much reference to Tasmania’s First Nations during our travels, we inquired about how this dynamic plays out in their home in Queensland. The husband’s bitter commentary about lazy aboriginal people, ripping off the country despite their insignificant numbers, shocked and silenced me. These indigenous people have been in continued occupation in Tasmania for 40,000 years, have survived at least one Ice Age and have never been accorded fair recognition of their civil rights. But then, as the man recognised, I’m a leftie.
Surprises and Shocks
Ric was surprised to find that very few restaurants and pubs stocked zero percent beer. I was shocked at the poor internet service and streaming options, in hotels that don’t even seem to have discovered casting. The Spark NZ Roaming deal I has set up didn’t kick in till we got to the West Coast. The political views of the fellow tourists mentioned above did shock us but we also got talking with some more affable couples doing the same route as us. This companionship lost its appeal though, when our AirNZ flight home was cancelled due to engineering problems, requiring all of us to fly to Melbourne (on the mainland) for a night and return to NZ the next day.
I was glad not to see any snakes. On our visit to former Prison Colony Port Arthur (where there was absolutely no mention of the 1996 massacre), I was distressed by the number of dog droppings all around the park. By the next day, I realised these come not from lazy pet owners but from wild possums, which are protected in Australia. On the road, we saw hundreds of animal corpses (wombats, wallabies and padymelons) but no live marsupials, which mainly come out at night. We did however hear Tasmanian devils; it was breeding season and their screaming and biting seems to be how they find the most resilient genes. Tassie Devils and their cousin the Eastern Quoll are endangered species, and we appreciated the hard work being done by the conservation Centre in Cradle Mountain National Park.
Our best surprise I’ve kept till last. On the cruise to Wineglass Bay on the Freycinet Peninsula, the skipper told us that once out in the Tasman Sea, he would try and find some wildlife to show us. Perhaps seals or dolphins, or some interesting birdlife. He then expressed utter shock, as we suddenly steamed into a busy fishing spot where hundreds of shining white albatrosses were floating or diving on the waves, accompanied by a dozen playful dolphins plunging in and out of the ‘raft’ of birds. I’ve never seen this before, said the experienced Captain, and we just drifted there for half an hour, revelling in the beauty. The photo does not do it justice.
Thou hast not wealth, belov’d isle,
But holier joys are thine;
For thou art guarded, kept,
By Almighty power divine.