Australian Walks: Footing it in Tassie

Footing it in Tassie

A chance to venture overseas for the first time in ages!

By Phillip Donnell

Referred to locally as “Tassie”, Tasmania is Australia’s smallest state and the one that is most like our own country’s landscape. Tassie has impressive environmental credentials. It is nature’s verdant holiday house, a place of enormously diverse inland and coastal wilderness areas that range from the wildest of ocean dunes and satellite islets to near-impenetrable rainforest, rugged mountain ranges, soaring sea cliffs and serenely fragile alpine moorlands. Accordingly, It has become world-renowned for its spectacular scenery.

Tasmania is also a fascinating human habitat. The main cities of Hobart and Launceston engage in a cosmopolitan face-off across the length of the island, but smaller settlements are getting in on the act, continually adding to their urban inventories with a mixture of historic heritage sites, sit-back-and-relax cafes, artsy shops and markets, festive occasions ad restaurants that feature splendid local food and wines.

Flora and fauna are an added attraction. Many of the state’s plants are unlike those found in the rest of Australia and have ties with species that grew millions of years ago. 40 Walking New Zealand, issue no 281 - 2021 Perhaps the best known is the

Huon pine, heading a family which includes celery-top and pencil varieties. Myrtle beech dominates the wetter forests. Leatherwood, swamp gum, blue gum, buttongrass, cushion plant and horizontal scrub are common. Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons, platypuses, echidnas, possums, wombats, southern right whales and a host of unique birds accompany the fa mous Tasmanian Devils. Tasmania’s diversity and relatively compact size make it a great holiday destination. You can see and do a lot in a short space of time

One of the best ways to see most of what this state has to offer is on foot. Only on foot can you begin to appreciate the grand scale of the physical drama before you and its exquisitely-wrought detailing.

Such an opportunity is now available through Footsteps Walking Club of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their first overseas excursion since the pandemic abated is a Tasmania DayWalks Tour, 17 March-10 April 2022, for which registrations are now open.

This is a comprehensive 25-day tour which visits every part of the state in what is roughly an anticlockwise loop.

Above: Walkers on a boardwalk beside a rocky mountain.

bling waterfalls.

Tasmania certainly caters for experienced and determined adventurers, but mere mortals can choose from hundreds of less-demanding walks. This tour has chosen some of the absolute best. Fit walkers with limited experience can undertake all of the walks, as they follow marked tracks or well-used routes.

A few may test an uber-fit hiker’s fortitude and fondness for hills, but there are no epic bush-bashes, pack-carrying trudges, or off-track expeditions.

All the walks are routes to fitness that leave gym work-outs for dead. How could anyone prefer airconditioning to an alpine or coastal breeze? Or pumping techno music to the rattle of pandani curls as you brush past, or the squawk of yellowtailed black cockatoos, or water tumbling over a cascade?

Your heart will be stolen by Tasmania’s unique and outlandishly beautiful scenery. But beyond that, studies have shown that exercising outdoors raises levels of serotonin, melatonin and endorphins, which in turn reduces stress.

So if you need an excuse to go walking in Tasmania, you can always say you are improving your physical and mental health! Footsteps welcomes your enquiry.

Contact them on 021 172 3244, 07 544 9509 or footstepsanz@gmail.com.

Beginning in Hobart, it darts to the southernmost point in Australia before swinging east to the Tasman Peninsula (Port Arthur) and north up the east coast to St Helens.

Heading west, it crosses the central highlands via Launceston and Deloraine, then diverts to far-flung Stanley. The southwestern region is traversed via Derwent Bridge and Maydena.

The focus is the 19 wildlife-saturated national parks, which comprise one quarter of Tassie’s total area, with most of that awarded the status of World Heritage Area.

A few are described here to whet your appetite. Hartz Mountains shields fantastic alpine heath, rainforest and glacial lakes, and allows unforgettable views of the southwest wilderness. Tasman features the highest sea-cliffs in Oz. The striking coastal scenery of Freycinet is guarded by the enormous granite Hazards at its entrance.

Ben Lomond is arranged around a glacial plateau filled with wondrous alpine flora. The appealing bushland, rugged quartzite headlands, and exceptional bays of Rocky Cape are tailor-made for solitude.

Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair is a sublime area dotted with moorland, mountain peaks, and the deepest lake. Mount Field has flora ranging from towering swamp gums to huge tree ferns, alpine tundra and tum-

FOOTSTEPS

TASMANIA DAY-WALKS TOUR

17 March – 10 April 2022

We welcome your enquiry: footstepsanz@gmail.com or phone 021 172 3244