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The Travelling Hambones

Nearly Not done roaming?

Revisiting

Tasmania (2)

Feb/ May, 2006

Around Launceston

Michael & Dorothy Hambidge—”On the Wallaby”

We’re back on the mainland now, due to catch up with our children and their children and then spend the Winter house-sitting, in Adelaide. Bad luck about Queensland this time. In fact, it looks as though our future travel will be without a caravan, but we won’t be sitting still for very long

Launceston is this month’s subject, and its surrounding scenery is the feature. At right, Paperbarks along the Tamar boardwalk that runs from the Old Port down to the Tailrace.

Below: Autumn color at the Legana Caravan Park.

Launceston was a blaze of colour as Winter made an early foray, mid-April.

Tamar Island forms the Eastern boundary of a large wetland, just half a dozen kms West from Launceston’s centre. We did the walk late one afternoon and hardly saw any of the zillions of birds of which the brochures boasted. But that’s typical of our bad timing.

The slightly surreal scene at right shows one of the wetlands’ tidal inlets at low tide, in the late afternoon—complete with its own deep-drain.

Below, a rocky canyon is a surprise view in the midst of rolling fieldss, just to the east of the city.

Below right, Mt Barrow, just across the river from “Lonnie” and dusted with snow. There are three size-stepped mountains in a North-South line over there—”Arthur”, “Barrow” and “Ben Lomond”, and locals remember the names by the line “Arthur wheels Barrow to Ben”. Ben Lomond, by the way, is Tassie’s Ski centre, and the drive up to the snowfields is spectacular