Day 19  - Florentine Valley     

Today we got up late which was nice, it’s great to stay in a cabin, it’s just nice to be able to get up and walk around and start your day.  Not rolling off a blow-up mattress putting on you shoes tripping over bags that are in your way, wrestling with the tent zip and getting tangled in the tent door while trying your hardest to not let in the bugs and mozzies.   

The cabin was very comfortable and had everything that you could want, check-out as usual was at 10:00 so we took our time.  We had our breakfast while watching Saturday morning cartoons and packed last nights washing away in our bags and started to pack the car ready to get on our way.

 John paid for the room while I did the last check and wrote a message in the visitors book.  We had another chat to the owner before we left, we chatted about the hippies up the road who were climbing up the big trees trying to save them.  John wanted to visit them just for a laugh.  The owner said that if we did we would need a very big peg for our nose because they smelled pretty bad.  Just another reason for me to not go see them. 

So we started the day by going along the Florentine track, it was a very easy drive something you could do in a 2WD vehicle as long as you took it easy in places.  The first thing we stopped to look at was Lady Binney Reserve which was a short forest walk which identified some local plant species, John was not to interested in leaving the car it almost took a crowbar to get him moving but reluctantly he came with me. 

The next thing we look at was Tim Shea look-out, it was a steep and easy climb to the top in the car, the views were well worth the trip, you felt as if you were on top of the world with 360 deg views, you could see lake Gordon and all the mountains in the area and the cars looked like little micro cars as the travelled the roads below us. 

 The Growling Swaller was the next thing we looked at, were the river plunged into a limestone cave.  We had never seen anything quite like it before, the water tumbled like a waterfall right into the mouth of the cave, deep and dark not the kind of place I would like to venture.  Apparently this cave system has Australia’s deepest cave the Niggly Cave at 375m deep.

 We continued our drive but did not stop to do the walk to the Gordon river because John again could not be bothered walking.  We drove up to the view of Wylds Craig which is a large mountain in the area.  The view was OK but it really was not worth the long drive out there.

So we started back to Maydena along the way we stoped to look at the Styx Valley and the BIG! trees, well make that two big trees.  The drive out there was 14k in total and had pot holes every where, it was like playing dodgems in the car as we ducked and weaved trying to avoid the pot holes.  All up they really were not worth the trip either, most of the information boards were missing, and the scenery was pretty much like we had already seen in our travels.  Granted the tress were BIG! the smaller was 86m and the larger was 87m high.  Some of the world’s tallest hard wood trees are found in the Styx Valley.

Again in Maydena we stoped to look at Junee Cave which is where some of the water entering the Growling Swaller comes out so the research says, though the water comes out crystal clear due to it being filtered through the limestone to get there.  Junee cave was not as pretty as the Growling Swaller but interesting none the less, a big cave mouth with a stream running out into lush cool rainforest.

 We decided to head south through Hobart we both had forgotten how busy main towns are and we actually encountered our first set of traffic lights since coming off the boat.  It was strange being caught up in traffic and we seemed to be going slower than everyone on the road and it made it worse because we had no clue of where we were going, just following the signs to Huonville.

 We stoped for fuel and had our first meal at a junk food outlet Hungry Jacks, which really was not that nice.  We continued past Hobart and we were in for a bit of a drive, not that it was too far but it was getting late because we hadn’t found a bush camp site and we were finding it difficult to find a caravan park in Franklin and Geeveston so we ended up in Dover in a caravan park for the night. 

4WD  national park tasmania