Day 16 – Queenstown to Maydena    

 We awoke early again, even though Jo needed a bit of coaxing out of bed, but that was easily done by letting the air out of the mattress.  We were soon up and on the road.  Our first touristy stop was Donaghy’s Lookout.  It was a short walk to a mountain peak, which had views all around, including a good view of Frenchmans cap, a funny shaped mountain top, and the Franklin valley.  The Frenchmans cap is a stone capped mountain, made of quartz, but needs a pretty good imagination to see why it was called Frenchmans cap.

A few kilometres down the road again was the Franklin river nature walk.  It was a short easy walk through rainforest and up a short section of the Franklin River.  It was pretty and worth the stop, but nothing we hadn’t seen already.

 We stopped for a snack at a road house along the way and kept going on to Ouse (pronounced Ooze) for lunch.  The lonely planet book said they had famous pies there, but we couldn’t find any and ended up with a hamburger with the lot which was pretty good anyway. 

There were some unusual towns along the way that only existed because of the hydro power stations being built in the area years ago.  The towns were very regimented looking, like an army barracks, built for a purpose, with straight roads named first street, second street, third street etc.  One entire town had been purchased from the hydro company by a family from the mainland and they have been doing it up ever since, making the houses look neat, and adding accommodation and places to eat overlooking the hydro electricity pipelines.  It was an interesting sort of place.

There were farms along the way, which we had not seen for a while because of all the ocean and forests we had been visiting.  The farms look quite brown which is evidence of the drought they say they are having over here.  I still think Tassie has heaps more water than Victoria where every dam seems to be empty.

Russell falls did not have a lot of water going over, and after taking some nice pictures at Horse shoe falls we drove off looking for a camping spot where the Ranger had suggested, a few kilometres down the road and off by the river.  We wanted to be near a river so I could set up the shower, it has been a few days since the last one.

 We drove on until we found a nice spot which was at the start of a walking track to the Marriott waterfalls.  We hadn’t heard of the waterfalls before, but the road looked isolated enough to camp beside, next to the intersection of two streams.

 Rather than set up camp straight away we decided to do the walk to the falls.  We didn’t really know how far away they were, but it was still only about 4:30 so decided to give it a go.  We walked along side the stream we were camping at for a while, then the track veered off over a bare hill and back into a rainforest area.  The track looked like it had been slowly engulfed by the forest with fallen trees and scrub taking over in areas, and the overhead trees and ferns making it a bit dark.  It was a very pretty, natural walk where you would not expect to find anyone.  After about 50 minutes, we arrived, not knowing what to expect we were pleasantly rewarded with a 30 meter high waterfall, covered with moss and none of the touristy barriers and boardwalks to keep us away like at Russell falls.  It was a beautiful spot that kind of looked like it was from a different time period when everything happened more slowly and nothing was worth rushing for.  The surrounding fallen logs and rocks were all moss covered and the water sprayed down from the top making it misty and nice.  We took some photos and sat back and enjoyed it for a while before heading back. 

 Back at the campsite I set up the shower, using water directly from the near by steam.    We both agreed it was the most satisfying shower we’d had in ages, we both felt clean and fresh afterwards, and quite happy to cook up some sausages and go to bed.  There is some wildlife around here too, as I write this in the tent, there are bouncy bashing noises just outside the tent of little wallabies wondering around looking for food.  When I go out to try and see them they disappear too quickly to be seen.  They’re very sneaky little things.

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