Tasmania to Tokyo – Cradle Mountain – Day 13 can be found here.
Another leisurely start to the day. We wake after eight, eat breakfast at our rental, and spend most of the morning working on reading / homework.
The writing will need to wait, as I need to figure out our plan at Cradle Mountain National Park for the next few days. Normally we would simply buy a park pass, but Cradle Mountain has the added twist of requiring visitors to use a shuttle bus to get to various trailheads. We also need a park pass for this afternoon’s canyoning trip with Cradle Mountain Canyons.
After poring over the Tasmanian Parks website, I decide to just head to the Visitor’s Centre instead. It’s quite close to Cradle Mountain Wilderness Village – walking distance if you were in need of exercise. There’s a massive parking lot, which is fortunate as there are a lot of vehicles parked there.
Thankfully, the staff member at the Visitor’s Centre is immensely helpful – we first consider just a 24 hour pass, but I then mention that we will need it for 2 days. So the pass is expanded to the full two months, and we also get 72 hours worth of shuttle bus passes. And we get a credit for the previous park pass that we purchased in Freycinet Park. The total additional cost works out to around AUD$75, which is fine by us.
We also hoped to get out for a short morning hike but that does not materialize. It’s already time to eat lunch and get changed for canyoning!
For those not familiar with canyoning, it essentially involves dressing yourself in a helmet and wetsuit and then swimming, walking, floating, jumping and absailing your way down a river canyon. Cradle Mountain Canyons is the most experienced and best rated provider in the area. (I’m not even sure there are any other operators, to be honest.)
We show up at 1:15 pm for our 1:30 pm tour, as requested. The Cradle Mountain Canyons office is right at the Cradle Mountain Visitor’s Centre, though I’m glad we had Google Maps so we can find the exactly location of their office. We’re in luck today – it’s just the four of us, so we get a private tour! They can take up to 12 people but prefer smaller groups as they are more manageable.
We quickly go through the process of selecting the right size of gear (and – in my case – finding a helmet that will accommodate a GoPro mount).
With our gear chosen, there’s one last chance for a bathroom break – and to secure any extra gear and valuables – before we board their bus and head off to the starting point on Snake Hill (so named for the winding roads, not because of any unusually high concentration of snakes). Cradle Mountain Canyons has their own bus, but it needs to follow the official Cradle Mountain shuttle buses up the park roads for safety reasons.
From here we have about a 15 to 20 minute walk through the park to get to the starting point. The dry bags and gear are heavy, so I’m glad to have left most of my extra stuff back at their office. Once at their platform, we change into our multi-layered 5 mm wetsuits. We have given a solemn oath not to wee in our wetsuits – I’m not kidding, they made us raise our hands and everything – so this is the absolute last chance to make use of the “facilitrees” before getting in the water.
Even properly sized, the wetsuits are still immensely tight – particularly on the children. Wetsuit companies apparently think that children have proportionately smaller hands and feet, which we know is often not quite the case – if you’ve ever seen a labrador puppy, for example.
But eventually we get ourselves into our suits, and we’re on our way!
It’s a great experience, though definitely physically demanding. The wetsuits limit our range of motion, and the rocks can be quite slick and slippery. But it gives us a unique perspective on Cradle Mountain, and lets us discover some of the minute forms of life here – including the newly-molted Tasmanian mayflies:
It takes us roughly 90 minutes to cover 300 metres in the canyon, including numerous jumps, slides, caves, floats, and other traverses. The guides do a fabulous job – we thoroughly enjoy the experience, and hope to come back again at some point to do some more challenging routes.
(The kids will need to be older, however. While the Lost World is open to those 8 and older, most of the other routes require the participants to be 13 or 16 years of age.)
Once we finish the canyon route, we return to the platform via the hiking boardwalk. There are no changing booths, so we essentially need to avert our eyes from one another and do our best to change beneath our towels.
We manage to get back into our dry gear, and then haul our wetsuits, helmets, life jackets, and dry bags back out to the trailhead. We’re struggling a bit by the end, but thankfully it’s not a terribly long hike, only 25 minutes or so.
Once there, we have another 15 minute wait for the Cradle Mountain Canyon bus to pick us up – they are very much at the mercy of the shuttle bus schedule, so it’s something of a process. There are some bees buzzing about, but we manage to find a shady spot to wait. The bus shows up soon enough, and then we drop our gear back at the office. The whole process takes between 3 to 4 hours, depending on how many people are in the group.
Back to our rental for dinner. Usually I don’t photograph the meals I cook, but I’ll make an exception this time for this lovely chicken curry with roast potatoes (salad not pictured):
We then head down to Cradle Mountain Lodge to wander along the Enchanted Walk in the hope of spotting some animals – wombats in particular. I somehow doubt they offer free parking to the public, so we head inside and buy a few drinks first. Seems fair to us – and they seem to have no shortage of parking – so we’ll seek forgiveness if necessary, rather than formally asking permission.
I bring my 105 mm f2.8 macro lens – in English, it has about a 4 times zoom, it can’t be adjusted, it takes in lots of light, and it can take photos of really small objects. Such as flowers:
With coffees and hot chocolates in hand, we set out on the Enchanted Walk – which really is quite lovely.
Some macro-moss
Along the way, we spot some pademelons. These are distinct from wallabies, and can be recognized by their shorter, thicker, sparsely-haired tails. (And the way in which they partly resemble quokkas.)
Over to the other side of the river, where I take a few more quick macro shots:
Gleichenia, also known as the coral fern
And then – a very distant wombat!
That’s about as good as it gets without a telephoto lens. Not bad, but let’s see if we can do better…
For you trivia folk out there – the collective noun for wombats is a wisdom of wombats and the babies joeys. They can run up to 40 km/h, and their closest living relative is a koala. Their poop is also cube-shaped.
And for those curious about the platypus – their collective noun is a paddle and their babies are called puggles.
We round out the rest of the Enchanted Walk, spotting a waterfall as we go:
It’s a bit under-powered at the moment, as Tasmania has not had any substantial rain for almost six weeks.
We try our luck with the King Billy Pines walking trail. There we spot a baby pademelon that looks like he’s ready to throw paws:
And some mushrooms:
The forests here really are beautiful:
But night is heading onward, so we decide to return to where we spotted the first wombat to see if we might spot a second.
Along the way, we get a good look at the Cradle Mountain Lodge accommodations:
Perhaps we’ll stay here next time.
And then we spot it – a wombat butt!
It takes some doing – and some lying down – but eventually I manage to get some close-in photos:
But we – like the wombat – are starting to get worn out.
Flushed with victory of seeing yet more adorable animals in the wild, it’s time to head back to our rental and off to bed. We’ll need our rest – the last big hike of our Tasmania trip awaits!