Visiting Caves and Hiking to Waterfalls

Leaving Hobart, we travelled south where several sights awaited us, including the Hastings Caves. On the way, we drove through the Huon Valley, which is a major apple growing region. This gave us the chance to stop and try some Tasmanian cider. While we enjoyed it, we did not think it was as good as the Basque cider we enjoy at home. However, at our first stop we enjoyed Willie Smith's world famous apple pie with our cider (at around 11 am) and it was fabulous. Shana thinks it was the best apple pie she's ever eaten.

The tour of Hastings Caves was very interesting. We have visited several caves during recent trips, including in Italy and Vietnam, and they are always beautiful in kind of a stark way.

That night, we stayed in a cute B&B in a little town called Dover where our gregarious host, Gary, gave us lots of tips about things to see. We also took a dusk walk on the property and spotted a wallaby just hanging around under some trees (no picture because he moved away pretty quickly).

The next day we stopped at Mount Field National Park, Tasmania's oldens national park, and did a hike that took us to three different waterfalls -- Russell Falls, Horseshoe Falls and Lady Barron Falls:

We have found that Tasmania does a good job curating trails in national parks (sometimes too good -- the "hikes" are more like walks). In this case, we had a fairly strenuous hike through beautiful temperate eucalyptus rainforest. We especially enjoyed the Tall Trees path.

More to come from beautiful Tasmania soon.

Jeff and Shana