After our early morning at the market in Hobart, we packed up the rental car and started our Tassie roadtrip. Everything and everyone has a nickname here in Australia, and ”Tassie” (rhymes with “snazzy”) is the one Aussies (pronounced “OZZeez) have given to Tasmania. We were headed towards an area called “Wineglass Bay” so we obviously figured we should have some wine first; we stopped for lunch and a tasting at Devils Corner winery.
Wineglass Bay is a highlight of the beautiful Freycinet National Park. The park is located on a peninsula of land on Tasmania’s east coast. In the middle of the peninsula is a narrow neck of land between Coles Bay and Wineglass Bay that you hike up and over to get to to the Wineglass Bay viewpoint. The bay gets its name because from the lookout directly above the beach it looks like a wineglass (or a champagne coupe, in my opinion). We did not have time today for the 3+ hours to hike to that lookout, but the view from this one was pretty breathtaking anyway. You can see a few tiny sailboats anchored in the bay down there -- brings back some memories of our sailing days and anchoring off of other remote beaches!
So the Wineglass Bay feature is better known and more photographed, but in my opinion the views from the nearby Cape Tourville lighthouse are even prettier. From here you can see “the Hazards”, Mount Freycinet and Mount Graham on the peninsula jutting out into the Tasman Sea.
We continued up the coast to the town of Bicheno. Situated right on the coast, the town has several great beach walks, a blowhole, and some beautiful seafront rocks on the walk to the blowhole. The orange tint on the rocks is a type of lichen found all along the eastern coast of Tasmania. In northeastern Tassie there is a rocky bay that is so covered with this bright orange lichen that it’s called the “Bay of Fires”. I had wanted to go there but it’s too far to drive on this trip, unfortunately. But the rocks in Bicheno’s Esplanade Reserve were a fairly decent substitute!
But the main reason we wanted to stay in Bicheno was because of the adorable Little Blue Penguins. There is a colony that nests here, and we booked a night tour to watch these little guys come back to the beach after a day of feeding in the ocean. Our guide told us quite a lot about the Little Blues (also sometimes called “fairy penguins”). They are tiny, much smaller than all other penguins, and they actually do have slate blue feathers like their name.
These penguins mate for life and when it’s time for the female to lay her eggs (always two eggs—a male and a female chick) her mate builds a sturdy nest. Or here in Bicheno, he chooses one of the locally built nest boxrs, which are even sturdier. Once the chicks are hatched, the parents go out fishing in the ocean and return every night just after dusk to feed their babies. We were able to watch a “waddle” (that’s the term for penguins on land) come ashore and cautiously approach the beach. This is a very dark and out-of-focus photo I took with my camera.
But here is a professional photo, so you can see the cuteness of the penguins up close and in focus!
At this time of year, most penguin chicks are fully grown and most of the penguins in the colony have moulted. So it’s actually a kind of quiet time where not too many penguins come back to the beach on schedule at dusk. So we only saw about ten penguins on our tour, whereas if you come after the chicks have hatched you might see hundreds coming up the beach. However, we were lucky because there was still one pair with young chicks so we were able to watch Mom and Dad come back to the nest box and feed both chicks. Our guide briefly lifted the lid of the nesting box so we could see one of the cute fluffy chicks inside. Such a great experience to see these birds in the wild, being protected and cared for by the local community!
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