To the East

I woke early to the sun peeking through the clouds. Our bus departed the station and drove around the area to pick up all of the kids in town. There's no school in Strahan, so apparently the service doubles as a school bus to Queenstown where the nearest school is located. The 45 minute ride with young teenagers was rather annoying. The braces boy next to me talked to his friend across the aisle in horribly constructed code about girls at school and the tourists on the bus. At one point he offered me an earphone to listen to his iPod. I opted to read my book while a boy in the back sang loudly to Avril Lavigne and Blink 182.

We had a brief stop in Queenstown for breakfast. The tiny town was cute, but appeared both proud of and stuck in its mining heritage. In the 1890s there were 42 companies in the western mountain area mining for nine different minerals. Queenstown was plentiful in copper, ore and silver. Nearby areas also had tin, iron, lead, zinc, nickle and gold.

There were paintings around the main drag, mostly in mural form, all of which related to mining. Several sculptures were around as well. Through the town's pride of its heritage, there are plenty of old buildings still standing, though many had fallen apart to the point where I would be scared to step foot inside.

Back on the road we passed through the mineral-rich mountains. Even underneath the clouds you could see the earth's glorious shades of orange, red, brown, white and occasionally teal. The road was also quite fun to ride along as it essed around the cliffs.

Again, I was enamoured with the rapid change of scenery. After the orange mountains we passed a lake where the fog had settled.

Our driver tended to speed so it was difficult to snap pictures. I was surprised how well some turned out.

The next stop was at Lake St. Clair, the end of the Overland Track. We had an hour break there with access to several small tracks near the visitor center. I went for a brief walk over to the lake and a bit into the bush. It was still cloudy out and quite cold so it wasn't incredibly beautiful. In fact, parts of it were rather bleak with baring trees and little greenery.

Birds were still out, however, and I managed to see a pademelon not far from the visitor center. The species used to be referred to as small wallabies but have since been renamed, leaving the former "large wallaby" to simply take the full name.

After the brief walk I stopped into the visitor center to take a look around. The building was interesting in that it not only had souvenirs and maps, but half of the area was a museum about the area. There were old photographs of some of the first bushwalkers on the Overland Track, history of the land, descriptions of native species, and a hologram of the Thylacine.

The Tasmanian tiger, now thought to be extinct, was the largest carnivorous marsupial in Australia. Though it became extinct on the mainland about 2000 years ago, it survived in Tasmania until the early 1900s. The last known Thylacine was a female in the Hobart zoo. She died in 1936.