Wednesday 15th March: We had a lovely day with Heather and Robbie playing golf at Bicheno. It was quite a nice flat 9 hole course that we played twice to make the 18. Heather & I took on Robbie & Chris and won! So we were happy. In all there was some good and some very bad golf....guess this is "par for the course".
We finished about 3:30 and went into Bicheno for some lunch, found a nice pizza place and spent an hour or so there talking. I was surprised that Heather & Robbie stayed so long as they still had a 3 hour drive to get home. Heather had also collected some brochures from the Tin Museum where we had met previously, as my back was so bad when we were there I didn't get the brochures and I had wanted them to show Paul. She put them in a folder for him which is really very nice of her to do. Anyway it was a nice day and we'll probably catch up again as we head down to Port Huon on Saturday.
Thursday 14th March 2013 was a golf rest day, we started off driving to Friendly Beach and exploring there, then a drive around the Hazards View (a mountain range), a brief stop for some lunch and then back into Freyincet National Park to do the Wineglass Bay/Hazards Beach circuit. Well at first our intention was to walk to Hazards Beach and come back, but I really wanted to keep going and do the full circuit so we just continued. The circuit took along the Isthmus Track and across the isthmus to Hazards Beach with a flat walk along the beach. Then we followed a track around the base of Mt Mayson then up the Wineglass Bay track to the lookout and down to the carpark.....11kms in all over rocks and a very steep incline to the lookout. Well worth the walk though and fortunately the temperature had cooled down a bit. Chris was not that impressed with the walk as we had left it until after 2pm to start and he was concerned that we were not going to make it across the beach and up the mountain before dark, however we were fine and both fit enough to do it.
Not sure it was that much of a rest day. I am very pleased with my back considering I could barely walk last Thursday. Actually the day before Robbie said how different I looked as I wasn't in pain.
We played golf on Friday at Swanwick, quite a nice 9 hole course not far from where we were staying. We enjoyed the game and once again there were some good holes and some really bad holes. Overall I had 99 and Chris had 106, but really on such a short and easy course (no bunkers) we should have done better. The weather was really good and we were the only ones out there apart fromt he green staff for most of the game.
After golf we had something to eat and then drove down to a little beach area in the National Park and had a very refreshing cold swim and sat on the beach for a little while. Actually it started to get a bit cold so we drove home and started packing up the car for the drive on Saturday.
We left Coles Bay on Saturday 16th at 8am, heading to Port Arthur, we stopped on the way for breakfast and then again at a couple of scenic places: Tessellated Pavement, Tasman Arch and then through the burnt out country side of Dunalley - what a disaster that is. Houses burnt to the ground and so many trees burnt but amazingly the regrowth has started already.
Anyway all this stopping of made us quite late arriving at Port Arthur and really we didn't leave enough time to see it all and to top it off it was raining and very cold. I changed into my track pants and grabbed my wet weather jacket, Chris talked about putting on his wet weather gear but didn't and walked around in shorts and a jacket and froze and got wet. We had enough time for a short walking tour with a guide (had to stand under some shelter to listen to him and he had a cold and kept losing his voice), then we had a brief walk on our own, then down to the wharf for a short cruise, we had tickets to get off to do a 40 minute tour of Isle of the Dead (the cemetry) however by the time we got there it was raining and the wind was blowing and everyone on the boat who had tickets decided it would not be very comfortable to walk around the very small island for 40 minutes in the wet.
So that was it. Our entry also included lunch but we had had a late breakfast driving down so when we finished the tour we had a bowl of soup and they put our lunch, pie for Chris and veggie focciacia for me in bags and we grabbed a couple of soft drinks and 2 slices and jumped back in the car to head for Port Huon, another 90 minutes away.
I found Port Arthur to be very interesting, I guess so much time has passed and we know so much about what happened to the convicts and the hardships they endured that the site is just a reminder of this and I didn't get a 'bad' feel for the place at all. I have to say that standing there in the rain and seeing the small prison cells and feeling the weight of the leg irons I really wondered how any of them survived. Although we didn't go to a couple of the buildings that the guide said are haunted, because to the weather and the limited time we had. There is very little mention of the massacre in April 1996.