Next day I woke early at Waldheim to pack and drive to the start of my big walk.
Raining.
As I am no hardcore bushwalker, I changed plans and sat in the van at the Ronny Creek carpark to wait to follow the first shuttle bus out. Following the bus is mandatory as the road is only one lane in parts.
A few intrepid souls did set off on the boardwalk start from there. It was wet and cold. Am I a wuss or what?
I have since been told by several people that I was very lucky to strike one sunny day at Cradle Mountain.
So I guess I’d better take back that whinge…
On the way to Burnie (where I wasn’t meant to go; lost again!), I drove past many, many kilometres of plantation forests, at all stages of growth. Including the clearfelled acres of what I could only hope had not been native forest.
Plantations are good for the timber industry, but as monocultures they do not make good habitat for wildlife.
Burnie used to be the heart of the wood chip industry, so known as the town ’where the forest meets the sea’… in piles of woodchips to go off in ships.
Next whinge:
I also passed many, many dead animals, roadkill. They were black and they were brown and some were just dark red smears; bodies by the side of the road, semi-squashed or whole bodies on the road (I veered to avoid these), and so many flattened flesh and fur splats that I wondered if locals deliberately drove over the bodies.
I know in Queensland that driving over cane toads on roads was almost a sport… and they were live toads.
There was often a roadkill every 50 metres or so. Staggeringly frequent.
And no, I didn’t stop and take photos of them.
Many of the bodies were small mammals; hard to say what they once were. I am told there is so much roadkill because there is so much wildlife. Not sure if this makes sense as an excuse.
There are black possums here, but I wondered how many of the black splats were the endangered and carnivorous Tassie Devils, who are fond of roadkill.
There was plenty of mixed farming on hills that ran beside the coast to cheer me up.
I’d decided to get to Stanley that night, to the famous Nut.
And there it is, an obvious standout in the low coastal land.
It turned out to be Touristville, but nevertheless charming and fascinating, historic… and sad…