Tasmania - Now That is South

After our tour of the Tasmanian east coast, we rolled into a town a little ways from Hobart called Richmond where we would establish our base of operations for the next three days. The town of Richmond is quite small and very historic (not England level historic, but still pretty darn old). Richmond has the oldest bridge in Australia and a lot of old and cool buildings. We were staying in the Richmond Barracks (built in the 1830s) which sounds pretty bereft of amenities, but in fact was an exceptionally nice place to stay. It was more like a home than a hotel as the owners had refurbished the insides into 3 units that felt like a small home. We stayed in the Lady Esther which was a separate two story unit with a second bedroom upstairs.

There weren’t many places to eat in Richmond so we ended up eating the first two nights at the Richmond Arms Hotel (built in 1860) after returning from our days exploits. In an interesting coincidence, Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla visited Richmond and stopped at the Richmond Arms Hotel while we were staying in Richmond. I’m not a “royals watcher”, but I must admit to being tempted to hang around Thursday to get some pictures. When you only have a week in Tasmania, you just can’t do everything so seeing the royals did not get added to my “list”. Besides, I had absolutely nothing appropriate to wear for such a momentous event (grin).

Our first day out of Richmond, we headed to Port Arthur and checked out the convict prison history there. We also saw some stunning coastal scenery and interesting road signs. My favorite scenery was the Tessellated Pavement because I just like saying “tessellated”. One of the signs we saw required driving 45 kph instead of 90 kph for a long, long way from dusk to dawn because, apparently, there were still wild Tasmanian devils in the area. We didn’t see any, but I did “capture” a turbo chook so I still got to cross another critter off my list.

The second day out of Richmond, we decided to head up Mount Wellington next to Hobart. By the time we got to the top, it was pretty chilly and enveloped in a cloud layer that made for tough pictures. The view was spectacular in spite of the clouds. Next we checked out downtown Hobart and after that we headed south as far as we could go. After we got to Southport the road turned to gravel so we decided we’d call it good. We looked real hard out the Southport inlet and just couldn’t see Antarctica – not that we thought we might, but it was fun to imagine anyway and I doubt I’ll ever get as far south as that again.

We got back to Richmond for our last night in the “barracks” and were sad to realize we had just one day left of our adventure in Tassie. We’d slotted our last day to be in Freycinet National Park on the lower east coast, but the predicted rain just might get in the way. Sure hope not.