DAY 24
7th January 2021
We started the morning driving towards Mount Tassie (in Victoria). There was a walk there that I wanted to do but it was a horrible day for it – foggy and drizzly. So I decided it wasn’t worth it. We continued on to Tarra Bulga National Park, where we went for a walk on the easy walking trails there. We drove out along fern-lined roads. It was gorgeous! There’s a suspension bridge and lots of ferns and little clear creeks on the walk so it was pretty, though Josh did get some leeches on his legs!
We drove to the other side of the National Park and did another short walk, only 1.4km, which went past some pretty waterfalls and back to the carpark.
We left the park, pulling over at a picnic table and clearing at the side of the road to have lunch. It was such a beautiful area. We then headed south to Port Albert on the ocean. I had a look at the national parks website to see about camping at Wilson’s Promontory for the next few days but every single campsite was booked out! Crazy! So instead we changed plans and booked to go on the Spirit of Tasmania instead, sailing on the night of the 10th January and disembarking on the 11th. It was so expensive, booking only a few days before sailing, but we thought it was worth it. The old man at Heyfield had booked his ticket months earlier and it had cost him only $400 return, less than half what our ticket cost! Oh well, booked now.
We both looked on Wikicamps and decided to stay at a place called White Woman’s Waterhole.
We drove into the campsite and all the good camping was taken up by a whole heap of horsey people, with their horses and floats and electric fenced-off areas. So we tucked into somewhere at the back, next to this friendly guy who gave us some of the firewood he was cutting up.
DAY 25
8th January 2021
We headed to Sale this morning. On the way, we stopped off at a historic swing bridge, where the bridgemaster used to come from home at any time of the day or night to operate the bridge if there was a boat expected! He therefore thought cleverly about this and had a hut built by the river to make the commute a bit easier!
We went to Woolies in Sale to get supplies and headed back up north to Dargo and the high country. Now that we had a plan on going to Tasmania, we had a couple of days to kill and where better to do it than in the high country?
Dargo is a small but lovely little village with tidy houses and gardens. It’s also very well known in the 4WD community – whenever you mention the Vic High Country, people always ask if you’ve been to Dargo! There are a couple of pubs there and the Dargo hotel was so full, as people tend to meet there before going up the mountains, or drop in on the way back out.
We went to a campsite nearby to make lunch, where there was strangely mint growing wild on the side of the campsite! We then drove up the Dargo Plains road, where the car started having problems. The fan wasn’t working properly and the car started overheating! Luckily Josh had some spare electrical parts and managed to get it going on the side of the road. Going again, we head to the old township of Grant. This used to be a gold mining town and the only evidence that anything used to exist here was the remains of glass, porcelain and tin. Everyone had moved out when they realised that the gold mining wasn’t profitable.
In hindsight, this would have been a good spot to camp, as there was a fairly decent toilet and lots of space. But we made some bad decisions that day…
We started by going up to the top of a mountain to camp. It was absolutely gorgeous and it would have been such a nice spot if not for all the biting flies up there! March flies everywhere. I didn’t like it and neither did Josh.
So we went down to a campsite near a place called Smoko, which unfortunately was probably too close to the town of Bright to be nice. It was seriously crowded with only one toilet for about 200 people. Meaning there was a lot of human waste around the place. I’d rate it as one of the worst campsites we’ve been to in all of Australia.