Day 34  Leven Canyon and Devonport 

 In the morning the rain had mostly stopped, we got up and were looking forward to getting on the boat and heading home later on.  We can’t wait to see everyone again and sleep in a nice bed.  We packed up pretty quickly because it was still drizzling a little and we didn’t want everything getting too wet, not the best way to finish a camping trip!   

We headed off for Leven Canyon which was just a matter of following signs at each road junction.  We got there and went for a short walk to the edge, but were a little disappointed because the cloud was covering much of it.  We stood there for a while and watched as the mists blow in and out.  It was a huge gorge below, which I guess is why the all the signs call it a canyon.  The river Leven was flowing quite angrily at the bottom, the level was probably up due to all the rain overnight.  Even with the cloud it was quite spectacular.  It’s funny that most people I talked to hadn’t even heard of it.  We decided that it would be good to go back to the car and wait around a bit for the cloud to dissipate before coming back.

.

 The parking area itself was also really nice, there was a grassy camping ground and picnic area set in the trees, with little fire places and tables spread around.  We should have camped here, because there was an undercover eating area and everything.  The toilets were a bit strange, they were flushing ones, but there was one normal toilet and the other one was like some kind of bush toilet without a seat, just a porcelain hole in the ground, I have never seen one like it.

When we went back to the Canyon the cloud had cleared and we had a full view of the river winding around past the mountains and cliffs way off into the distance, it is one of those places that is so large to look at that you can’t possibly fit it all in the camera. 

We didn’t really have any other plans so we headed off towards Devonport.  We got there and decided to have lunch at Macca’s.  We went over to the beach afterwards and had a look at the rocks and the waves crashing over them.  I was getting bored, so we decided to go and find some of the Valhalla Tasmanian made icecream we had eaten once before, so we could take a tub home.  We went into the major supermarkets in Devonport, but they didn’t have any, and after driving around for a bit we found an IGA which did have some, but not many flavours, so I got one tub of pineapple flavour.  With lots of time to spare we decided to drive back to Ulverstone to see if they had an IGA with Valhalla icecream, but their IGA was closed down, probably put out of business by the Coles and Woolworths in town.

So we went off to the local river that flows past the town to watch the jet skier’s jetting around for a while. There were some guys on jet ski’s pulling kids along behind them on inflatable rafts which looked like fun.

 After we got bored with that we went back to the ferry terminal at Devonport expecting to be quite early.  But when we arrived people were already lined up, so we joined the queue.  Not long after we were through customs and watching Shrek 2 on the laptop waiting to board the boat.  Half way through the movie Jo looked up and noticed the line in front had just disappeared and we hadn’t even noticed, whoops, so we drove on up to the boat hoping we hadn’t annoyed too many people behind us!

 The boat is much the same story as last time.  We had the veggie lasagne for dinner again, which didn’t quite seem as good this time.  It is a lot busier too, the business class seat section is almost full, unlike last time when we were able to choose almost any seat.  Soon we were watching Tasmania disappear off into the distance in the sunset, a bit sad that our holiday was ending, but still looking forward to home.