2004/03 Tasmania loop - Bruny Island Neck |
|||
We drove over to Cloudy Bay for a windy lunch on the edge of the rocks. The beach was full of gulls and terns, and suddenly they all took off and dispersed. Then we noticed the sea eagle swooping in over the beach. Nobody wanted to do lunch with the eagle.
Rain set in as we drove over the hills on a greasy logging road to Adventure Bay, expecting this to be another isolated spot. To our surprise it turned out to be the biggest town we’d seen on the island, a popular spot with earlier tourists like captains Cook and Bligh. Bligh set off from there on his famous Bounty trip. What the old movies fail to mention is that after the mutiny Bligh navigated a tiny lifeboat over 3000 miles across the Pacific back to northern Australia and then Indonesia, and went on to become Governor General of New South Wales.
The national park began at the edge of town. We hiked out to Grassy Point, which was a 
whaling station back in the 1830s until the population of right whales crashed and the whaling ended.
We then felt ambitious enough to hike up to Fluted Cape. This is 900 feet of vertical cliff dropping straight into the sea. The trail was very steep, just a few 
feet from the edge, a really tough walk. At the top we were high enough to be able to look back over the island to Mount Wellington behind Hobart. These convoluted coastlines are geographically confusing! We could also see the Tasman peninsula in the distance, where we went kayaking on our last trip.
The trail down from the cape was much less challenging and we drove from there to the Neck for another free campsite. We were tucked away behind the sand dunes, but the surf was booming, sounding like cannonfire.
Wednesday March 24th
I ran the length of the beach in the early morning. The beach was heavily scalloped by the Pacific Ocean so it was a wavy run, trying to stay on the edge of the water where the sand is hard. It was a rising tide, so I was continually hopping away from the waves. One giant rogue wave came in and had me sprinting up the beach in deep sand to stay out of it. This would have been good video but there was no one else on the beach to record it.