River cruise and steam train (now with Pixs)

We are in the town of Strahan at the moment and have had 2 great experiences. The first was going on a 150+ year old steam train up to Queenstown. This train had been shut down in the early 1960s and was restored to services in the last 5 years.

It cost them about 34 million dollars to restore the line and it actually took longer to restore the line than it took to make it originally. I guess railway regulations have come a long way since then.

The train went from right on the coast (south west Tasmania) inland along the King river. The gradient was so steep at times that they had to either build a tunnel or use a cog system called the abt system. They decided to use the abt system because they weren't sure how long the train system would run.

Here is a picture of the train and the rainforest we went through on our way to Queenstown.



The train was built to support the copper mines at Queenstown. Queenstown was amazing to see because the town looks like a moonscape. In order to feed the smelters with fuel, they denuded the hills of all trees over a fairly short period of time.

Then, soil erosion took over and not only the top soil was washed away, but also the clay under the topsoil leaving just rocks.

The whole trip took most of our first full day in Strahan. Today, our second full day here was a cruise around Macquarie Harbour, visiting Sarah island and going up the Gordon River.

Here is a picture of the view on the Gordon River. Normally the weather in this area is quite windy but we had an extremely rare calm day, you can see by the reflections in the water.



Sarah Island is the penal colony they ran before they figured out it was cheaper to keep convicts at Port Arthur.

In Macquarie Harbour we say the outlet to the ocean which is called "Hell's Gate" because for the convicts it was a gateway to a dreaded penal settlement on Sarah Island.

We also saw salmon fish farms and had a great time cruising up the Gordon river. This is World Heritage Wilderness area. Evidently, there are 10 criteria to become world heritage listed and an area only has to satisfy one of the 10 criteria. This area satisfies a full 7 of the criteria, there is only one other place (in China) that rates as high. Thank goodness the "tree huggers" saved it from the planned dam in the 80s.

Here is a 2006 "tree hugger". This tree is 800 years old, it is a Huon Pine and she reckoned that any tree that small after 800 years needed a hug to keep it going. These trees only grow a millimetre a year and are found only in two areas of Tasmania.



Another feature of our tassie trip was coming across a tour sponsored by a british bike owners club that included a number of riders from New Zealand and they even let a few BMWs join, here is the coolest one I saw.



We kept running across these bikes on the road, so much to Hilary's disgust, instead of being ambulance chasers we became bike chasers.

The bike above is a 1938 R51, a rare beast indeed and in excellent condition and I couldn't resist adding it to the blog just for you, Davis!