The West Coast

 Marilyn and I have been on the West Coast of Tasmania this week.  It’s an area we haven’t explored much and we certainly had our eyes opened by the spectacular scenery.  We had the first couple of nights at the northern town of Burnie staying, of course, at one of the few motels who would accept Archie.  Burnie is an industrial town which developed around a huge paper mill.  The mill is closed now and the main industry seems to be wood-chipping, with most of the chip being sold to Japan and China.   

The town is right on the water and the scenery is spectacular.  Cruise ships call in from time to time and the passengers are whisked off by coach to get a taste of Tasmania. 

We were particularly keen to visit the Tulip Farm which is on the top of Table Cape just outside the town.  What an extraordinary place. It’s very early in the season but already many of the fields were in bloom with every conceivable colour on display.  We also travelled up to Stanley which is one of our favourite places in the state. 

 We don’t get here often enough.  From the restaurant where we had lunch, we could see the expanse of Tatlows Beach which circles the bay for what looks like miles – and there was not one person on the sand! 

We then moved down to Queenstown with a stopover in Rosebery for coffee.  The young fellow behind the counter in the café was ready-dressed in his high-vis overalls for an afternoon shift in the mine but made a good fist of preparing ham and cheese toasted sandwiches to keep us going.  Rosebery and Queenstown are both old-fashioned mining towns: mostly tin at Rosebery and copper at Queenstown.  There’s nothing pretty about the towns and the weather they experience is often very grim.  You have to be pretty hardy to survive Tasmania’s west coast. 

We had good accommodation at Queenstown, at the Railway Hotel.  It was advertised as deluxe but I was expecting something from the fifties: all dark colours and musty-smelling.  The landlord, though, was renovating a string of cabins set aside from the main building and I think we were the first occupants of Cabin #2.  Deluxe was a fair description. 

One of the main attractions of this part of the world is the West Coast Railway – it uses the line which was built in the 1890s to transport ore from the mines to the coast at Strahan.  The train uses a rack and pinion system on the steep stretches and the renovated carriages are pulled by a tank engine built in Glasgow in 1898.  We couldn’t get seats on this trip but we’ll go again. 

We drove back to Longford today – I’m not used to a five hours’ stint behind the wheel any more but it was well worth it to experience how different Tasmania is when you get out of the bigger cities.