Itinerary · for one

Tasmania · the edge of the world

A slow driving loop around the south and east of the Apple Isle · solo · eight nights. Hobart for Salamanca on a Saturday and the high cold air of kunanyi at sunset, with MONA across the river and the Sidney Nolan room in its basement. South to Port Arthur for the convict ruins and a quiet half-hour at the 1996 Memorial Garden, then Cape Hauy on the Three Capes day section and Tasman Arch in the wind. Up the East Coast to Freycinet — the Wineglass Bay Lookout climb on stone steps, the white-sand scramble down to the beach itself, sunset oysters at the Marine Farm and a glass of Devil’s Corner Pinot above The Hazards. North to the Bay of Fires where the granite glows orange with lichen and the swimming is cold and clear at Skeleton Bay. Then the long cross-island drive west to Cradle Mountain — Dove Lake at dawn, Marions Lookout if the weather lifts, wombats grazing at Ronny Creek at dusk, and a feeding session with the Tasmanian devils at Devils@Cradle before dinner at the Lodge. Out via Launceston on the morning of day nine.

1 traveler 5 bases 8 nights 10 min read

v1 · May 11, 2026

Feb 15 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at kunanyi. Then the road south.

Late February, the long Australian summer pulling its first cool breath. Out of Hong Kong on a Sunday night, Melbourne by dawn, Hobart by mid-morning — the Derwent estuary flat under a sky already smelling of leatherwood and dry eucalypt. Eight nights ahead on the Apple Isle in a small rental car, the C-roads gravel and the A-roads kind, driving on the left and slow on principle. Salamanca sandstone on the first afternoon, the orange Caloplaca lichen on the Bay of Fires granite by midweek, a wedge-tailed eagle somewhere over the East Coast highway, and the dolerite teeth of Cradle Mountain rising out of the bracken on the second last morning. The roaring forties in your face at Tasman Arch. A Tasmanian devil grunting in a sanctuary at dusk. A wallaby in the headlights on the C338 — go slow, brake gently, let it pass.

Begin the journey ↓

Feb 15 → Feb 23 · 8 nights · 5 bases · 470 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Feb 15–16 Days 1–2

Hobart under kunanyi

A working harbour town under a mountain that holds its weather, the world's strangest private museum across the river, and a Saturday market that fills the sandstone warehouses.

2 nights

Land Hobart HBA · 20 min by SkyBus or taxi to the city centre

Rental pick up the car at HBA on arrival — keep left, watch for wallabies after dusk on the C-roads, fill up before leaving town

Things to do

Salamanca Market on Saturday morning · stalls of leatherwood honey, Bruny Island cheese, fresh-baked scallop pies under the sandstone warehouses
MONA via the high-speed ferry from Brooke Street Pier · the basement Sidney Nolan room and David Walsh's former-card-counter sense of mischief
kunanyi / Mt Wellington summit drive at sunset · the city and the Derwent estuary 1270 m below — pack a fleece even in February, the wind cuts
Dinner at Templo or Aloft on the waterfront · Tasmanian salmon from Petuna or a Cape Grim eye fillet
Breakfast at Pigeon Hole in West Hobart or Born In Brunswick · long blacks and a slow start before the drive south

Hobart distances look short on the map but kunanyi is a 30-minute drive from town and weather changes fast on the summit. A Lark or Sullivan's Cove cellar door is worth an hour before dinner — both walking distance from Salamanca.

Bookings

hotel Hobart · 2 nights waterfront or Battery Point pending

flight HKG → MEL → HBA pending

Single-night layover possible in Melbourne if Qantas schedule shifts

rental Rental car · pick up HBA Feb 15, drop LST Feb 23 pending

Chapter 01 · the story

Hobart sits under a mountain that the locals call kunanyi and eats from sandstone warehouses on a Saturday and houses, across the Derwent, the strangest museum a former card-counter ever built. The city is small. The argument it is having with itself is not.

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The ferry to MONA leaves from Brooke Street Pier and crosses the Derwent in twenty-five minutes. The boat is named MR-1 and the seats on the top deck are vinyl sheep. David Walsh made his money counting cards on horse races and then on roulette wheels, and he built a museum into a sandstone cliff on a peninsula north of the city to house what he calls his collection of sex and death. The escalator down into the basement is unmarked. There is no gift shop in the conventional sense. The map is an iPod that tells you what every work is and, separately, what David thinks of it — sometimes the second answer is I hate this one.

Back across the water on a Saturday morning the sandstone warehouses on Salamanca Place fill with three hundred stalls of leatherwood honey, Bruny Island raw-milk cheese, and scallop pies still steaming under tea towels. The warehouses were built by convicts in the 1830s to hold whale oil. Now they hold a flat white and a queue for the cheese stall. The argument the city is having is between those two centuries, and it is not pretending to resolve it.

At sunset the road up kunanyi climbs 1,270 metres in twenty-two kilometres and the wind on the summit deck cuts through a fleece in February. From the top the Derwent estuary is a silver fork splitting south. The Tasman Peninsula is a dark shape on the horizon. Tomorrow’s drive runs that way.

Chapter 02 · Feb 17 Day 3

Port Arthur & the Tasman Peninsula

A day driving south down the A9 — UNESCO ruins of the convict colony, dolerite cliffs that drop straight into the southern ocean, and a quiet half-hour at the Memorial Garden before the road turns north.

1 night

Drive Hobart → Port Arthur 1.5 hr south on the A9 via Sorell and the Tasman Bridge

Out Port Arthur → Coles Bay 3 hr north up the East Coast via Triabunna on day 4

Things to do

Port Arthur Historic Site · the 1830–1877 penal settlement, the Separate Prison, and the Isle of the Dead boat tour across the bay
Tasman Arch + Devil's Kitchen + Blowhole loop at Eaglehawk Neck · roaring forties wind, schoolboy geology spelled out in dolerite
Cape Hauy day section of the Three Capes Track · 4 hr return on a benched track, the Totem Pole stack off the cliff at the turnaround
The 1996 Memorial Garden · a quiet space, not a tourist site — read the names slowly and move on without a photograph
Dinner at the Dunalley pub on the drive back, or fish and chips at the Tasman Peninsula's small caravan if it's open

Three Capes Track full overnight version books out six months in advance; the Cape Hauy day section does not need a permit. Stewarts Bay Lodge sits inside the historic site fence — handy for the late-afternoon ghost tour if you stay on for it.

Bookings

hotel Port Arthur · 1 night · Stewarts Bay Lodge or Port Arthur Motor Inn pending

activity Port Arthur Historic Site entry + Isle of the Dead boat tour pending

Two-day pass includes the harbour cruise and the optional after-dark ghost tour

Chapter 02 · the story

Port Arthur is two grief-sites laid on top of each other. The convict colony — a UNESCO World Heritage ruin of the British penal system. And the Memorial Garden, for the thirty-five people killed here on 28 April 1996. The site asks the same thing of you twice.

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The A9 leaves Hobart, crosses the Tasman Bridge, and runs south through Sorell and the dry yellow paddocks of the Tasman Peninsula. The road narrows. Eaglehawk Neck is the bottleneck — in the 1830s a line of chained dogs was strung across the isthmus to stop convicts escaping the peninsula, and the information board on the verge still calls them the dog line. The colony itself opens out at the end of the road: sandstone ruins around a green lawn that runs down to a sheltered bay, the Isle of the Dead a small wooded hump offshore where the unmarked convict graves are.

The Separate Prison is the building to walk through slowly. It was built in 1849 on the Pentonville model — silence as punishment, hoods worn outside the cell, numbers instead of names — and it broke men quickly enough that an asylum had to be built next door. The walls are still cold in February. The chapel has cubicles instead of pews so no prisoner could see another.

Above the lawn, past the cafe, a low broken-walled building sits in its own garden, signposted quietly. This is the Memorial Garden. On 28 April 1996 a gunman killed thirty-five people here and at the Broad Arrow Cafe, and the wounded part of the building was left as it stood and a reflecting pool laid in front of it. The names are on a plaque inside. There is no audio guide and no photography is asked of you. Spend ten minutes. Walk out the other side. The country changed its gun laws inside a fortnight after this. The garden is what is left to say so.

Chapter 03 · Feb 18–19 Days 4–5

Freycinet & Wineglass Bay

The white-and-blue curve everyone has seen on a postcard, climbed up to and then scrambled down to, with sea-eagles screaming overhead and pink granite on every horizon.

2 nights

Drive Port Arthur → Coles Bay 3 hr north via Sorell, Orford and Triabunna (fuel at Triabunna)

Local the C-roads inside the national park are sealed but narrow — BYO esky for picnics and oysters; the only café inside the park is small

Things to do

Wineglass Bay Lookout climb · 1 hr return on stone steps, the iconic blue-white curve framed by The Hazards
Wineglass Bay beach descent · 2 hr scramble down and back, sand crunching white underfoot at the curve
Cape Tourville lighthouse loop · 20 min boardwalk, sea-eagles working the cliff updraft and migrating whales in October–November
Sunset oysters at Freycinet Marine Farm · half-dozen shucked over the dock, a glass of Tamar Valley Riesling from the cellar
Lunch at Devil's Corner Cellar Door · the Hazards laid out across the bay, the Pinot Noir and a wood-fired pizza on the deck
Honeymoon Bay swim at dusk · pink granite boulders and clear water, a 5-min stroll from the lodge

Freycinet Lodge books out a year ahead in February; the alternative is a beach shack in Coles Bay village. Park entry is by paid pass — buy the holiday pass at the visitor centre, it covers Bay of Fires and Cradle Mountain on the same trip.

Bookings

hotel Coles Bay · 2 nights · Freycinet Lodge or a beach shack pending

activity Parks Tasmania holiday pass (covers all three parks) pending

activity Freycinet Marine Farm sunset oyster tasting pending

Chapter 03 · the story

Wineglass Bay is the postcard everyone has seen — a white curve of sand between two pink-granite headlands, the water a flat impossible blue. The walk up takes an hour. The walk down to stand in the picture takes another two. Both are worth doing in the same morning.

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The stone steps start at the Freycinet visitor centre and climb for forty minutes through the saddle between Mt Mayson and Mt Amos. The granite underfoot is pink — proper pink, not a tourist- brochure adjective — and the eucalyptus thins as the path rises until the lookout opens onto the curve below. The bay is crescent-shaped because the wind comes from one direction and the headlands shelter the other. Sea-eagles work the updraft on the cliff. The blue is the kind of blue that makes a photographer’s first reaction not joy but suspicion.

The descent to the beach is another hour on benched track. The sand at the water is fine and dry and squeaks underfoot. At the south end the rocks step out into the bay in plates and there is no one beyond the families who have made the same walk. The swim is cold even in February — this is southern-ocean water, not Sydney’s — and the salt dries on the skin in five minutes in the wind off The Hazards.

The pink-granite boulders that frame the bay are the same rock that runs the length of the peninsula and out into the strait. Honeymoon Bay is the small cove at the lodge end of the national park, twenty boulders deep at the waterline, and on a still evening the water clears to four metres. At Freycinet Marine Farm the oysters come up the steps in a plastic crate straight from the leases and are shucked at the dockside table. The Tamar Valley Riesling is two valleys west. The light goes pink on the Hazards at quarter past seven, then orange, then gone.

Chapter 04 · Feb 20 Day 6

Bay of Fires · orange on white

White sand, water so clear it forgets to be a colour, and the famous orange Caloplaca lichen burning across every granite boulder along forty kilometres of north-east coast.

1 night

Drive Coles Bay → Binalong Bay 2.5 hr north via Bicheno and St Helens

Local the C-roads beyond Binalong Bay turn to gravel — slow down, keep distance for the dust, and watch for echidnas crossing in the late afternoon

Things to do

Binalong Bay to The Gardens drive · pull-outs every 500 m for the orange-on-white granite stacks
Skeleton Bay swim · cold, clear, deserted on a weekday — towel and a thermos of tea afterwards
Sloop Reef rock pools at low tide · sea stars, an occasional abalone shell, the lichen photographing best in late-afternoon side-light
Dinner at Mavericks at Binalong Bay · the local catch — flathead, calamari, a James Boag's Premium on tap
Sunrise back at The Gardens · empty beach, the lichen glowing copper for the first ten minutes after the sun clears the horizon

Tassie distances are deceiving — average 70 km/h on rural roads, not the 110 limit. The Bay of Fires has no big-chain anything; book a Binalong Bay holiday house or the bush retreat well ahead. There is one small store at Binalong Bay — fuel and groceries in St Helens before turning north.

Bookings

hotel Binalong Bay · 1 night · Bay of Fires Bush Retreat or a holiday house pending

activity Bay of Fires Walk (optional 4-day guided) · for a future trip pending

Full guided walk is a separate booking — this trip is the self-drive day version

Chapter 04 · the story

The orange on the rocks is not paint and not iron. It is a lichen — Caloplaca — and it is alive. Forty kilometres of granite headland on the north-east coast carry it, burning against white sand and clear water, and the colour is what the place is named for, but only sort of.

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The English name is older than the lichen theory. Captain Tobias Furneaux sailed the Adventure up this coast in 1773 and named it for the Aboriginal fires he saw burning along the shore — the palawa people who had lived on this country for forty thousand years and would, within a single human lifetime of his sighting, be displaced and killed in numbers that Tasmania spent the next two centuries refusing to count. The orange-on-white coast he named is the same orange-on-white coast a tourist sees from a pull-out on the C843 today. The fires are not. The naming carries both things.

The road from Binalong Bay north to The Gardens is twelve kilometres of pull-outs every five hundred metres, each one a small headland of pink-granite boulders the size of houses, stacked at impossible angles by the southern-ocean swell. The lichen — Caloplaca, technically a couple of species running together — grows only on rock above the splash zone and only in clean air. It is bright orange because the carotenoid pigment that makes it that colour also protects the algal half of it from UV. It needs the salt spray and the wind and the cold clear water beneath. Each of these things is non-negotiable.

Skeleton Bay is the small cove halfway up that the locals know and the bus tours don’t. The sand is white the way printer paper is white. The water reads as a colour only in the shallows; in two metres it is glass. Late afternoon is the hour to come — the sun drops behind the dunes, the lichen turns copper for ten minutes, and the rocks at Sloop Reef hold a hundred small pools of sea stars and abalone shells and one curious gull.

Chapter 05 · Feb 21–22 Days 7–8

Cradle Mountain — Lake St Clair

The dolerite teeth of Cradle Mountain rising out of the bracken at the southern end of Dove Lake, wombats grazing the buttongrass at Ronny Creek, and a Tasmanian devil grunting through a feeding session before dinner.

2 nights

Drive Binalong Bay → Cradle Mountain 4.5 hr west via Launceston and Sheffield

Out Cradle Mountain → Launceston LST 2.5 hr east on the morning of day 9 · drop the rental at the airport, fly to Melbourne, then home

Things to do

Dove Lake Circuit · 6 km, 2–3 hr on the boardwalk, the iconic shot of Cradle's dolerite teeth above the southern shore
Marions Lookout climb · the wider panorama back down over Dove Lake and Crater Lake if the weather lifts
Wombats at dusk at Ronny Creek · half-dozen grazing the buttongrass on a still evening, give them ten metres of space
Devils@Cradle feeding session at 17:30 · Tasmanian devil grunts and bone-crunch, plus quolls in the same enclosure — sells out, book ahead
Dinner at the Highland Restaurant at Cradle Mountain Lodge · leatherwood-honey something, a glass of Tamar Pinot Noir, and a quiet walk back to the cabin under the southern stars

No big-chain hotels at Cradle Mountain — Cradle Mountain Lodge or Peppers are the options, both at the park gate. February is alpine but not snowy — pack layers and a beanie, the temperature drops 10°C the moment the sun goes behind the ridge. Park shuttle from the visitor centre to Dove Lake is mandatory in peak season; the car park fills by 09:00.

Bookings

hotel Cradle Mountain · 2 nights · Cradle Mountain Lodge or Peppers Cradle Mountain pending

activity Devils@Cradle sanctuary 17:30 keeper feeding session pending

Sells out 1–2 weeks ahead in February — book on confirmation of dates

flight LST → MEL → HKG on the morning of Feb 23 pending

Chapter 05 · the story

Cradle Mountain rises to 1,545 metres on the northern edge of the Tasmanian wilderness, and the Overland Track south from its foot runs sixty-five kilometres to Lake St Clair through button-grass and pencil-pine forests that have been here since the Pleistocene.

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The Dove Lake Circuit is six kilometres on a boardwalk that loops the lake at the mountain’s southern foot. The boardwalk exists because the soil here is peat — dark, wet, slow-growing, ten thousand years deep in places — and a thousand pairs of boots a day would tear it open in a season. The lake is small and tannin-dark. Cradle’s dolerite teeth rise straight out of the bracken on the far side, and the boathouse at the south end is a single cedar-shingled hut from 1940 that is photographed more often than most cathedrals.

The Overland Track leaves from Ronny Creek, half a kilometre back down the road. Sixty-five kilometres, six days, four public huts spaced a day’s walk apart, and at the southern end the ferry across Lake St Clair to Cynthia Bay. Walkers passing through in February shoulder packs that look heavier than they are because everything must be carried in and out and the weather changes inside an hour at 1,200 metres. The plateau is home to pencil pines and King Billy pines — endemic conifers, slow-growing, a thousand-year-old tree the size of a hedge. Some of the stands have been here longer than there have been cathedrals anywhere.

The wombats come out at Ronny Creek in the last hour of light. They graze the button-grass slowly, square-backed and patient, unbothered by walkers if walkers stay ten metres back. After dark, at Devils@Cradle, the keeper’s feeding session brings Tasmanian devils to the fence — the grunt and bone-crunch of animals at meat, eyes red in the headlamp light, the species itself in active recovery from a facial-tumour disease that nearly took it.

Feb 23 · Day 9 · the last one

Last morning at Cradle. Then the flight north.

Eight nights gone. After Dove Lake there is one slow drive east through the midlands to Launceston — the Tamar going silver below the Cataract Gorge, a final Pinot Noir at a cellar door on the way, leatherwood honey on toast at breakfast still on the tongue. LST by lunch, Melbourne by mid-afternoon, Hong Kong by midnight. The white sand at Wineglass already half-remembered, the sea-eagles still calling somewhere over the curve of the bay.

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