After 2 nights sleeping in a proper house we were probably getting a little bit too comfortable with our new-found high-quality living, and it was already getting harder to wake up at a decent time to do anything with our day. Liz worked remotely for her employer in Perth so even she could enjoy a long lie every day before the west-coast working hours caught up with her. Today, she was having some problems connecting to the company through her VPN, so giving me a chance to get some much-needed practice at my profession. Luckily, as I don’t know a huge amount about VPNs, the problem was fairly trivial for me to fix and soon I had another happy customer.
Deciding we should explore some of the coast to the south, Roy drove us down through Geevestown, where we stopped off at the information centre to find out about the Tahune Forest Air-walk, and got lured into a really tasty pie-shop, that I can’t remember the name of, but it’s on the same side of the street as, and very close to, the information centre. I’d already been to the tree-top walk at Walpole, which is basically an aerial walkway through some dense and ancient forest, which gives a great view of the trees, but isn’t something that I’d really bother to do again, so I wasn’t overly excited by the prospect of another walk. Anyway, it turned out to be better than the one at Walpole, partly as it was a much nicer day but also there were more views out of the forest over the Huon River, and there was a really fun part of the walk where the walkway was suspended out towards the river in a dead-end bridge-construction-in-progress fashion, giving a great view and endless possibilities for scaring people with a lot more sense than myself but recruiting people with about as little sense as myself to jump up and down on the edge of the swing-bridge in time and watch fear creep over the faces of the other people as the whole contraption – suspended 20m above the forest floor – bounced and rippled wildly with various creaks and groans to finish off the horror-ride experience.
I think Kevin and Roy were feeling more energetic than me so I tagged along as we did one of the ground-level forest walks, which had a scattering of shaking-bridges that we naturally put as much energy into shaking till we were almost thrown off them. The bridges were so well made that once given a good shaking, it was quite hard to not get to get hit in the face by the all the ripples running along the bridge when you stood still and waited for it to subside.
On the way back out of the park we checked in by a few of the lookouts, including the Big Tree, a name which pretty well sums up the site, save for a few ‘very’s before the name. Hartz Mountains National Park is also accessed from the Tahune Road and I was keen to get a landscape vista fix so we did the fairly winding drive up to Waratah Lookout and did a walk to some quite scenic falls a little further along the road.
Back in Huonville, we gladly accepted yet another night’s board, set going with yet more Baileys and card-games.