Our night at Friendly Beaches was fantastic - yes, Friendly Beaches is its real name! The campsite here is one of the best yet - National Park and free! The pademelons were friendly enough to come very close and not be at all perturbed by movement around them.

The Freycinet Peninsula is particularly famous for Wineglass Bay, its beautiful curving proportions gracing every postcard, calendar and tourist brochure in Tasmania. The walk to the viewing platform is a well-constructed path but is actually quite steep and arduous. Despite that the track is like Pitt Street. Chinese tourists made up about half the numbers walking and on the platform itself there were about 30 or 40 people at any one moment. The bay is indeed as pretty as its reputation suggests. The walk continues down an even steeper hill and continues on a circuit back to the starting point but takes another 4 hours. We decided against that option…

There are not many roads to explore in the National Park (and the 4WD ones are rated as 'hard')but there are a number of shorter walks. We did three more: to Cape Tourville with its stunning coastal views and lighthouse, to Sleepy Beach on the Tasman Sea side with its huge granite boulders and Honeymoon Bay on the calm western side with a superb rock platform and, for the hunter-gatherer, mussels growing. A row of stunning granite peaks called the Hazards forms a dramatic backdrop whichever way you look.

We camped for the night further north at Lagoon Beach. The beaches here have a chain of lagoons behind the sand which would make fine swimming if it was warmer. In fact it would probably be the safest swimming hereabouts with the raging surf and an abundance of rips offshore.

Incidentally the mussels were simply delicious put over the campfire and doused in some lemon juice.