Camp ground at Huonville beside Mountain Creek

These are the ‘convenience’ blocks at the camp ground . Not bad!

Here we are now after a few days of silence on the blog. Internet has been playing up on us, We must be in some sort of blackspot.

After Bothwell we travelled down to the Huon Valley below Hobart. Stayed in a Caravan Park in the town of Huonville as a base for exploration further south. This was an interesting Park. Not many people there. It was an eco-friendly sort of park. Turkeys, sheep, goats, chooks and geese wandered around amongst apple trees and van sites. The apple trees were watered from the parks effluent as well as the rain which absolutely bucketed down while we were here. Along with the wind which just howled around at times.  Stoic! But nonetheless we had bursts of sunshine and blue sky. We were camped by a lovely little creek which meandered through the place. Don’t know why there weren’t more people here to enjoy the ambience.

Major trip here was to travel down to Cockle Creek which is the ‘End of the Road’ in southern Tasmania. This is about 90km  south of Huonville, but there is about 30km of rough dirt at the end.  After the sculpture of the whale the next stop is Antarctica, we didn’t have the time.  Cockle Creek was the base for a large segment of the early whaling and sealing operations in this part of the world. There was quite a community in these parts whose livelihood relied on these activities. It was pretty cold and windy here and we had a brief storm of sago (little balls of ice) snow right here at the whale. Headed back to the car.

Southern Wright Whale sculpture at Cockle Creek….End of the Road!

On the way back to Huonville we called in at the Ida Bay Railway for a trip on this heritage train. It lasted a couple of hours and travelled over some old railway lines, 2 ft gauge, that used to haul  limestone from 1922 to 1975 initially with steam and after WW2 with petrol engines. These were army surplus and originally designed to be dropped off ships at the WW2 front in Japan to supply the advancing allied forces. 2 of these original reconditioned engines are in use on the railway today, but now with ISUZU motors. It was  a great little trip through the bush past the mining site down to the bay wehere the ships loaded the limestone. Trucks ultimately replaced the train in 1975.

Leanne ready to roll on the Ida Bay express!

Ida Bay railway engine.

That’s all for this blog, we will catch up further at our next stop at Port Arthur.