Lake Pedder - day 3

This morning we actually saw the sun for a while, and I was able to take a few pictures featuring it. These were taken at Ted's Beach.

We got on the road and headed back east. There is something called the Creepy Crawly Walk marked on maps. We looked for it and failed to find it. A man (who Elf calls "the Twinkly Man") in Maydena later told us that a) it's awful and b) it's closed. We did go on another dirt road adventure to try to see the Big Tree Reserve in the Florentine Valley. Elf painstakingly crawled about 10km in on soft and slippy logging roads (it was raining by now) before giving up and retreating to the highway. We did see plenty of huge straight mountain ash trees, but the very very large ones have been preserved in a particular spot that was beyond us in this weather. It was worth it to see this amazing mixed bushland that's being logged. I can't tell if what we were looking at was old growth of regrowth, but if it was regrowth the variety was very impressive.

When we got into Maydena we loaded up at the Twinkly Man's with coffee and hot pastry-in-plastic. Then we went off for one last off-road adventure, to find Junee Cave. The drive there was not far but it was incredible. We drove over a little bridge and somehow back forty years into the 1930s. (That was a little joke because the rest of Maydena is stuck in about 1975. Well, anyway the Twinkly Man's TV was playing a footy match that I'm pretty sure was the 2007 Geelong/Collingwood semi-final. Explain that!)

So - here we are on the 1930 side of the river.



Just by here a man was fishing with his kids. A little ginger wiry guy, he was in the water with his rod. He had a little one in a stroller about a foot back from the riverbank, and three or maybe four others all under 8, prancing about, some with their own rods. His Commodore was about ten feet from the riverbank. It was wild. The road was about as wide as the car and Elf once again showed why she is the only one who should drive our car when the going gets tough.

The Junee River comes roaring out of the cave of the same name, after travelling underground for miles from the west. The water starts out stained brown with tannin from the bracken fern (like all western Tasmanian rivers) but it is filtered by the limestone of the cave system, and comes out clear or sometimes slightly blue-green. It was only a short walk from the road and really beautiful.

I insisted on a drive around Maydena before we got seriously on the road home. It's got some things in common with Queenstown - a very inventive vernacular style of building, with anything at all used as materials. And the rain obviously. Saw one house with vertical board lower storey and horizontal upper - nice.

We had lunch at Westerway. Its an interesting small town with the river, road and railway all running parallel through it. This is the west end of the hop-growing country of the Derwent Valley. Hop fields look a little as though they are set up for some strange complicated ballgame, with regular rows of high poles joined by ropes. Hop headquarters is a town called Bushy Park, and I finally got a photo of a building there that I love, the Masonic Hall.


And that was it. I would love to be able to throw in a good anecdote about the kids saying or doing something hilarious, but none spring to mind. They behaved pretty well but not without a fairly constant effort by Elf and I to threaten/bribe. School goes back tomorrow. In place of a genuine travelling story, I will give you this: while Elf read the bedtime story tonight Michael (who never listens) interrupted at one stage to say "my testicles have got smaller!"

Lake Pedder - day 2

In the morning after breakfast we went straight down to the Gordon Dam. FUN FACT: It holds back as much water as 25 Sydney Harbours. Lake Gordon abuts (word of the day) Lake Pedder and is connected by a sort of channel/spillway thing. Its a spectacular Hoover Dam style construction, unlike the others we saw later that day which were a bit dull to look at. The boys and I went down about 20 flights of metal stairs to walk along the top, while Elf watched and took photos from above.



It curves side-to-side and also top-to-bottom. It felt really amazing to stand on top of it. I can't deny that it's an incredible feat of engineering, but it's hard not to look down at the dry side of the wall and then imagine a similar ecosystem drowned under squillilitres of water on the other side. One or two species are thought to have gone extinct in the process. Worm species, but still, eh?

Climbing back up (in a relatively light shower) was pretty hard work. I was onto day 7 of a heavy head cold, and also I am very, very old. Our plan for the rest of the day was to drive around the lake to look at Scotts Peak Dam and Lake Edgar Dam. This involved heading back towards Hobart for about 45 minutes and then something like another 45 on a potholed dirt road. It's not true to say I went into every pothole, I certainly missed some. The dams? Average. Quite a view from this lookout but probably not a must see. As we left we "Goodbye Scotts Peak Dam - goodbye for ever".


From there the main excitement was to see if we could get back to the Chalet before they finished serving lunch as it was the only hot buffet available in the entire south-western quarter of Tasmania. We made it. The boys were understandably getting fractious with all the time in the car and no rain-free exercise, but they were generally pretty good. This range is called The Sentinels.


After lunch there want much else to do but try out the recreation centre (with heated pool). We splooped around in that for a while, then we filled half an hour in the empty games room. Elf and Marcus explored variations on badminton while Michael and I tried a new combination of cricket and indoor lawn bowls, that has no chance whatever of catching on. By this stage the rain had almost stopped and we walked to dinner unhurriedly. The wallabies were out and also the smaller ones which we have decided to call pademelons though they may be bettongs.

I can't talk about the rest of the evening as it involved a Richmond game on TV.

Lake Pedder - day 1

Elf heard that the Lake Pedder Chalet was closing its doors to visitors. It is owned by the Hydro-Electric Commission, and from now on its a staff-only deal. It's the only accommodation in that whole area, so it seemed like we would have to grab the chance now if we wanted to go there. So this weekend we did.

Elf and the boys picked me up from work at 3 on Friday afternoon, and we were west of Maydena by the time it got dark. It took us about three hours driving, as the road is winding and narrow and it was raining pretty solidly. There was much wildlife about, including a possum on the road who did not notice us until Elf slowed down to walking pace, rolled up to him and honked.

Lake Pedder gets 3 metres of rain a year. We have had buckets of rain over the last 3 weeks down in Hobart, so we were well acclimatised. Its the kind of place where fenceposts have grass growing out of the top of them. The Chalet is in the virtual ghost town of Strathgordon - the end of the road, from civilisation into the South West wilderness. Most of the population, along with their demountable houses, shops, school, church and supermarket, moved on to the next dam project once this one was built.

What we now call Lake Pedder is a man-made lake that was formed in 1974 when the Huon and Serpentine rivers were dammed. A huge area was flooded, including a beautiful small lake with an amazing white beach. This was the original Lake Pedder - what is there now bears no resemblance, and really should have been given some other name I think. I have just checked Wikipedia and some people are keen to call it the "Huon-Serpentine impoundment" - but I can tell you I have never heard anyone call it that. The dam controversy is fascinating but I will actually stick to describing our trip.

We arrived just in time for dinner. Our unit was newish, very nicely set up with everything you could want, (including tumbledryer in the laundry) but with one thing we did not want - a horrid smell of damp. I got used to it (Elf didn't) but each time I came in from outside it got me again. When Elf asked if we could move into one of the other vacant units the manager admitted that they all smell just as bad, due to some stuff-up when they were built. There was a queen size in the bedroom, and a couple of single mattresses to plonk on the living room floor.

We strolled (in light rain) down to the Chalet itself for dinner. Its basically a mess hall with a civilised recreation room off one end and a lounge bar up the other end. Through the wall is the blokes bar - you would imagine things got pretty lively in there in the old days. The side of the building facing the lake is practically all glass, and the view is pretty amazing.


There is a menu, but most people seemed to have the buffet and we did too. The food was pretty good, considering how far we were from anything.

Back at the unit (quick stroll through medium drizzle) the boys watched the first quarter of the footy on TV with us then we put them in the big bed. We watched the the rest of it and read then zonked out. Wallabies hopped about outside.