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RE: A bit of a ride: after the race
Day 20: Hobart-Southport-Hobart
218 Kms
[url=https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zwzS5Q1Lo7Yk.k8hkm89ZaVyE]
I’m not sure how this map will load if you follow the link to it, but if you scroll out so you can see the whole of Australia, you’ll see red markers for the two pubs I refer to. If it opens showing both markers, you’ll have to scroll in to Tasmania to see the day’s ride.
One of dilemmas I always face when I go to Tasmania is how to fill my time. Because it was the first time for nearly 40 years that I’d been there on a bike, I wanted to ride some of Tasmania’s great roads as well as spend some time with family and friends.
The weekend on the boat had been excellent—a pleasant Friday night cruise down the Derwent River, a great sail in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel on Saturday far outweighed the slight disappointment of rain on Sunday. In any event, we still had a good sail for part of the way home. My brother has not long had the boat and it was the first time he had taken it away overnight. My son and I found it very comfortable; I think my brother was pleased with the way everything worked. I particularly liked opening the locker marked “First Aid” and discovering the wine cellar.
It was Monday morning and I had to be back in Devonport on Thursday evening to catch the ferry back to Melbourne. If I left Hobart on Wednesday I could take a couple of days and ride to Devonport via the west coast. The road from Hobart to Queenstown has a stretch known as the thousand bends as you wind down the final hill into Queenstown. Other stretches of the road—particularly west from Lake St Clair—are also fabulous for bikes. The only caveat is that it rains a great deal on the west coast and there’s bound to be snow on the road in winter. Theoretically it was spring so snow shouldn’t be a problem, but this is Tasmania where the advice goes something like “If you don’t like the weather come back in 10 minutes.”
Monday’s weather was not much chop—squalls of rain, cold, occasionally overcast—so I amused myself solving an IT problem. All the while I was talking to my son about riding to Huonville to meet him for lunch. I had two motives: one to spend some time with him; the other to ride to Australia’s southernmost hotel so I could post photos of Australia’s northern-most and southern-most pubs on this forum. I’d been lucky enough to travel to Thursday Island, site of the northern-most pub, for work some years ago. Sadly I did not ride there on a bike.
The weather cleared and I headed out. At Vince’s Saddle, the highpoint of the road to Huonville, I had to don the wet weathers but it didn’t rain too much, and it was fine when I got to Huonville.
Beside the Huon River
We ended up at the wrong café and had a pretty ordinary lunch, but it was good to catch up with my lad. You have to make the most of the time you can grab with your children when you don’t see them often.
After lunch, my son headed back to work and I turned my nose south.
For many years an argument raged about whether Australia’s southern-most pub was at Dover or Alonnah on Bruny Island. I think it was eventually resolved in favour of Dover, but fate took a hand when the Dover pub burned down and someone built a tavern at Southport, unequivocally further south.
It’s a great ride from Huonville to Southport. The road initially takes you alongside the scenic Huon River before turning inland to cut off the point on the way to Dover. It’s got some great twists and turns and the surface is good, although you have to watch out for gravel and bits of tree left by trucks. I guess I expected to see lots of log trucks, but didn’t. If you were out for the day you’d turn off at Geeveston and head out to the Tahune AirWalk, a fantastic elevated walk through the tops of the trees of an old Tasmanian forest.
It’s another 15 minutes or so from Dover to Southport. Again it’s a fun road for a bike and I enjoyed it. Here’s the CB at the southernmost point of my trip, looking southeast over Southport bay. The sea over the stern of the white boat is the Southern Ocean.
Just back up the road is the Southport Hotel and Caravan Park.
If the crow managed not to get a skin full in the Southport pub and flew some 3,685 kms ever so slightly west of north, it would arrive on Thursday Island off the tip of Cape York where it could have a well-earned drink at the Torres Hotel.
The remains of the Dover Hotel, once Australia’s southern-most pub.
My mission to add a photo of the southernmost hotel in the country to my collection complete, it was time to head back to Dover and have a cup of tea with old friends who live with a spectacular view of Port Esperance. Great sailors, they warned me that the weather the following day would turn seriously vile.
By the time I left them, the rain was pouring down. Much to their amusement, I put the entire wet weather kit on. We agreed that the most effective armour against the rain on a bike would probably be a set of ocean racing wet weathers. It was a wet and miserable ride most of the way back to Hobart, but it stopped raining for the final bit, so the outside of my gear at least had dried by the time I got to my son’s house for dinner.
I’m not diligent about checking things and keeping notes, and I forgot to look at the odometer while I was at Southport but, by reviewing the distances recorded in these posts, at the southernmost point I had travelled at least 4,283 kms. Given the odd unrecorded running around and a certain speedo inaccuracy, it would have appeared slightly more than that, but it was still a good distance to have ridden.
Days 21-22: Hobart
There’s no map as the furthest I rode was a few kms over the river to the city, but I wanted to post a couple of photos.
As Jeremy predicted, the weather turned appalling on Tuesday (Day 21). A front cracked in from the west. It was cold; it blew like stink; and snow fell on Mt Wellington which dominates the Hobart skyline. It was no weather for cold blooded riders like me. I hung around inside and finally abandoned my plan to ride home via the west coast. Remember, northern hemisphere readers, this is spring and the snow is supposed to be behind us for the year. But this is Tasmania and anything can happen. I have once seen Mt Wellington looking like that on Christmas Day.
A snow capped Mt Wellington on Tuesday 28 October
The next day I rode over the city to see my son and have a gossipy lunch with some very old friends and former work colleagues. In South Hobart stands the Cascade Brewery, still making a reasonable drop. The snow had receded a bit, but it was still cold!
I parked the bike in Salamanca Place while I went for lunch.
When Hobart was first settled, the stone warehouses in the background were actually on the wharf. A hundred metres or so of land in front of them has been reclaimed. That reclamation cements Hobart’s status as one of the deepest natural harbours in the world. Sadly, shifts in the global economy and changes in transport modalities mean it is not used so much any more.
This was the end of my outbound leg. All I have to do now is get home!
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