The plan for today was to travel down to the Tahune Airwalk and visit some of the towns on the way. If time allowed then to travel to the end of the road, supposedly the most southerly trafficable road in Australia.
We skipped
Franklin as we plan to go there tomorrow after the boat trip. The town of Greeveston is very
well set up and you need to turn off the main Road into the original main street.
Parking is available off the main road behind the shopping street. This town also serves as the turn off to the Tahune Air Walk.
We stopped at 2 of the lookouts along the road. The first was actually called "Look in Look Out" and was a walk into the forest with a display of an old boiler and winch on wooden rails and a short walk to some very large trees.
Large winch that was used to haul logs up to the road
Steam boiler used to power machinery
The second
lookout was called West Creek
Lookout and had a short track leading to the river and a metal elevated walkway to view the forest and river from.
View from walkway to West Creek lookout
The next stop was the Tahune Airwalk, this was a professional tourist set up with a restaurant and service centre. To reach the airwalk you leave the
visitor centre and cross the Huon River on a concrete
bridge and up the
hill on the other side. There is a reasonably long climb up a gravel track that has some steps. On arrival at the start of the Airwalk you enter a metal walkway that is reasonably narrow and if you need to you can hang on with both hands. The view is great and the section where you can travel out on a canter lever that overhangs the river is spectacular even if it swayed in the wind on the day.
View of Bridge over Huon River from Airwalk Visitors Centre
Walkway up to the start of the Airwalk
View from end of Caterlever of river and forest
The walk out along the cantelever
Leaving the Airwalk after a very nice morning tea in the café we headed back the Greeveston and the road south.
The road was good and as usual had lots of twists and turns. We stopped at
Dover for lunch and sat looking out over the bay and Beaches.
There is a small caravan/camping park that looked
well presented from the road, although it has a number of cabins and didn't appear to have a lot of Caravan sites.
Port Esperence from the picnic ground at Dover
We bypassed
Southport, planning to stop there on the way back and headed to
Cockle Creek. Just as
well we didn't stop as when we go to the last part of the road we found out that the
old bridge is about to be replaced and they are only opening it between the hours of 10am till 4pm and manning it warning people to obey the speed limit and weight limit on the
bridge. The new
bridge is supposed to be constructed during the break in the summer tourist traffic over winter.
View from the end of the track out to sea at Cockle Creek
Chooky and Wobble at the end of the track at Cockle Creek
Returning we stopped in at
Southport where we passed the Hotel and Caravan Park on the way to the town.
The beach and bay is really beautiful.
Foreshore at Cockle Creek Camp ground
Bridge over the Catamaran River
Beach at Southport
We then travelled back to
Huonville to rest up for tomorrow.