Trains and boats

Today was a full day. First up was a trip on the West Coast Wilderness Railway. This is a narrow gauge line that was built in the late 1890s to take zinc and lead ore from Queenstown to Strahan so it can be loaded on ships and taken for processing.

It stopped running years ago and now takes tourists on full day and half day tours through the rainforest. We were booked on the half day tour that runs along the King River Valley to Dubbil Barrill and back again.

The little steam engine was built in Glasgow and sent out in crates so it was a nightmare to get it together and running but they did it. All up there were 5 engines running on the line and in its peak it was a very busy line.

We cruised up away from Strahan and into the temperate rainforest. It was drizzling lightly which actually suited the trip. The train climbed steadily and crossed a number of rivers and creeks after a while the rainforest became very thick. It is amazing they built this as it was after they had convicts so it was all paid labour.

We arrived at Dubbill Barrill which is essentially just a station hacked into the middle of the forest. They had a turntable and a second line so the engine was decoupled, turned around by hand, and driven up to the front of the train for the trip back.

All up the trip took about 4 hours so we were back in Strahan by 1pm in time for a quick lunch and to get ready for our next activity - a tour of Macquarie Harbour and cruise up the Gordon River.

We boarded a big Tassie built Incat catamaran and took off for the Gordon River which is at the southern end of the Harbour (Strahan is at the northern end). Macquarie Harbour is 5 times bigger than Sydney Harbour and only slightly smaller than Port Phillip Bay. The boat really moved, hitting 28 knots so we were there in about 30 mins or so, it would have taken hours to row in the early days.

The Gordon River is really beautiful. It was logged pretty heavily in the early 1900s but now there is little evidence of this. It is part of the Word Heritage area which makes up about 20% of Tasmania and you can understand why people say the Tassie Tiger is still alive as this rainforest is huge, very dense, and very rugged there would be things living in there that are unknown to man.

We cruised up to where the river flowed through a gorge and it was beautiful. This is of course where the protests happened in the 70s against damming the river.

After a while we turned around and headed back to Macquarie Harbour and headed up to Sarah Island. Like everywhere else Strahan was a convict settlement and Sarah Island is an island in Macquarie Harbour where they used to send the problem convicts. Now days there are a few ruined buildings and not much else.

Next stop were the fish farms. They farm trout and salmon in giant sock-shaped nets with about 20,000 fish in each and there are about 40 or 50 of these nets in the Harbour.

Lastly we went through Hells Gates which are at the entrance to Macquarie Harbour and so named because the convicts believed the west coast convict settlements were hell on earth. The channel is very narrow between the gates so we went out into the Southern Ocean turned around and came back in, lots of ships were wrecked in this area. Looking west the next stop would be Argentina (we are below South Africa) and the roaring 40s were really blowing.

Finally we headed back to Strahan and had dinner at the local Club.

Tomorrow we leave Strahan and head east towards Hobart.Read more