The Roadside Beauty of Tasmania

Luck would have it that as I was skimming through a bunch of photographs I took whilst travelling around Tasmania I found a few hidden gems. It’s been well over a year since Matt and me set out around the island exploring – we’re home, by the way, I know how that reads. In the last 14 months or so I’d sort of forgotten about some of the “unlocatable” pictures I’d taken.

Snapping from the passenger window at 100 kmph is challenging enough regardless of where you are in the world – hopefully not in a 30 zone though. If you take enough shots eventually you’ll find something salvageable, as I did.

The sad part is that I couldn’t tell you exactly where this picture was taken. I know it was at some point during our 2nd day whilst we were heading down the west coast of Tassie from Cradle Mountain to Hobart. We took a detour into Queenstown because we needed to refuel.

The thing is that so many parts of Tasmania are inherently beautiful. It’s no secret that the place is littered with amazing landscapes and rugged terrain. The weather isn’t always the best but with so many of these lakes-to-a-mountain-backdrop situations it’s really difficult to place them on the map.

So you shouldn’t.

Just enjoy the views from the side of the road as you drive around. Take the rain when it comes (or snow, it happens)

It’s completely impractical to stop at every photo taking opportunity. There are just far too many. Granted, you’ll want to stop to fill your faces with raspberry soft drink and Timtams. That is almost a necessary part of an Aussie road trip.

Before I get onto the images from our leg-stretch-period, I’ve got one last picture from the water-saturated skies above the Tasmania. It’s up there as one of my favourite pictures from the trip – granted I had to edit it a fair bit to crop out more car-blurred greenery.

The thing I like about this photo, and the scene when I took the pictures, is that despite the horridly grey skies, the pretty cold weather and it being an overall grim day, you still get the odd ray of sunshine creeping through the clouds.

That sort of sums it up about Tasmania. Like Melbourne, the weather changes so quickly you’re not sure whats going on. Despite that, you still get to enjoy a shaft-lit mountain across a freezing cold lake – even when it looks like the heavens are about to open and drown you.

Pretty neat stuff if you ask me.

If only I’d managed to take that picture with a tripod set up, who knows.. a National Geographic feature piece? Probably not, but that isn’t the point.

As I mentioned, after a while we parked up and took a bit of a stroll down a short track to see a waterfall. It was more so that we could stretch our legs and eat our chocolate, but lets not get too caught up on the minor details.

If you enjoy a nice rainforest-esque walk down a dark, wet trail, this is probably right up your alley. It wasn’t actually that bad, just really moist. Difficult to get a nice picture though, dark forests and bright waterfalls tend to clash, sadly.

You’ll probably know from some of my other posts that I’ve seen some pretty magnificent waterfalls in my short time. But they don’t have to be hundreds of feet tall and at full flow to make for a good sight, or to take some nice photos.

So if you’ll excuse my beautiful face.

I’ll end it there, you’ve seen my pretty pictures, and I’m sure you get the idea. What I’m essentially saying, is go and do the same as what I did because it’s fun and cool. Simple.