Thursday was a BIG driving day. Left Cradle Mountain after grabbing a coffee at the Cradle Mountain Lodge (the only place in the area with power) we drove all the way down to Strahan on the West Coast for lunch. Had a fish and chip lunch overlooking the harbour avoiding the seagulls who were intent on sharing our lunch and had a chat with a couple of guys on a Sydney - Hobart boat who were returning to Brisbane. Unfortunately, they'd been out of contact with the ...

As we'd expected we woke to more rain on Wednesday, but undeterred we drove the couple of hours up to Cradle Mountain (a UNESCO world heritage site) and did a 2 hour hike around Dove Lake. For a few seconds the cloud did clear to expose the top of Cradle Mountain, but overall it was pretty wet and windy (so much for Australia's summer!!!) We were trying hard to spot a platypus in the lake and streams or a wombat in the undergrowth but unfortunately it wasn't to b...

Launceston is Tasmania's 2nd largest city and it's small. We were told that the population of Tasmania (500,000) doubles during the summer months, but everywhere still feels extremely quiet. Many of the buildings in Launceston were really pretty, colonial houses with wrought iron balconies and big verandas. We spent the overcast but warm Tuesday morning walking around the very pretty Cataract Gorge and checking out the town. The afternoon was spent sampling the d...

We timed our departure from Freycinet perfectly as the minute we got to the car it started to rain. Unfortunately, it didn't really stop all day which put a bit of a dampener on our plans to camp at the Bay of Fires. In true British spirit (who ever let a bit of rain get in the way?) we made the most of it, calling into Bicheno for eggs and coffee and then Suvi and I shared a rocky road pancake at Mt Elephant Pancakes - delicious! Although the rain was pretty tor...

After our surprise at how busy Hobart was, we thought that we'd better have a back-up plan as everywhere else that we wanted to visit was likely to be equally as busy. We eventually managed to find a car to hire which we picked up on Sunday morning and then drove up to Freycinet National Park with a couple of stops along the way, including lunch sitting in a sand dune at 9 mile beach! Once into the park we hiked up to the Wineglass Bay lookout upon one of the w...