We're back home after two glorious weeks in Tasmania. We flew to Launceston then by rental car to Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park-part of the World Heritage area.
Originally this trip had been planned for late November last year but was postponed. November would have been summer but April is early winter and although there was no snow yet it was cold, particularly overnight.
I visited Cradle Mountain with the family way back in 1988. Back then it was popular but not nearly as popular as it is today. Now tens of thousands of visitors come to the park every year . It was reasonably busy during our visit but the infrastructure for visitors is very well organised. Cars cannot be driven into the park during daylight hours. There are car parks by the Visitor's Centre at the park entrance and shuttle buses take the visitors on the 15 minute drive down to Dove Lake. It seems to run very smoothly. Mass tourism done well.
Back in 1988 some walking tracks were boardwalks but mostly it was 'free' walking on and off the worn trails. Now all the many walks are boardwalks. Dove Lake is the starting point for the 6 day Overland Walk through the South West World Heritage Wilderness Area as well as other shorter walks.
We did the Dove Lake circuit, a 2-3 hour walk, graded as 'moderate'. We were lucky with the weather. On the day we did the circuit it was dry and cool and we were rather pleased with ourselves as we did it in 2 hours and 15 mins at a brisk but comfortable pace set by Rosie.
Surprisingly, given the numbers of visitors disembarking from the buses, we found that there were few doing the full lake circuit. Visitors to the park seem to mostly fall into two groups. The first group are really committed walkers, of which there were many, who tackle the longer walks. The second group are mainly the day trippers who just do the 30 minute circuit to the Boathouse.
The first day of our visit it had been quite warm so we decided to walk only on a short part of the lake circuit as we only had one bottle of water between us. On our third and final day we did some shorter walks in the rain forest and it was cool with some showers. Overall we were lucky with the weather as the area experiences on average 240 days rain per annum.
Dove Lake and in particular, the Boathouse with Cradle Mountain behind, must feature in every visitor to the parks photos. It's almost impossible to take an original photo there so I make no claims as to the originality of my photos below. They were taken with my Leica Q2.
