Little Adventures

Monday, 1 May 2023

A few Saturdays ago Jo and I went to the central highlands for a mini adventure before a Sunday orienteering event near Lake St Clair.  Part of our motivation for the overnight trip was to avoid having to do the long return trip to the orienteering event all in a day.

Leaving at around noon on Saturday, we made it all the way to the local service station before we turned around and zoomed back to Jo's place as she had just received the news that her lost cat Chico and been found and was able to be returned to her. It turned out that Chico very much knew where he was, he had spent the week living in the lap of luxury at a neighbours place who didn't realise he had an owner nearby (due to his collar having mysteriously disappeared).  Once Chico was retrieved and instantly grounded back at his house, we were on the road again, and with only one wrong turn we arrived at the foot of Projection Bluff 2.5 hours later.

Most websites describe this walk as a good 2-3 hour trip, but they also mention that the path can be tricky to follow, which was our exact experience about 3 minutes into it, as we arrived at a pool of water and couldn't find where the path continued.

With sunset around 2 hours away, we didn't really have too much time to stuff around so we were relieved to finally find some pink tapes through the forest after about 5 minutes of searching.  We then had a good 25 minute climb up to the top of the cliff line, followed by a long walk along the plateau:

Just under an hour from the start, we reached Projection Bluff:

It was a really lovely view in all directions and we still had the sunshine so we stayed a while at the top to soak it up.   About 5 minutes after we left, the only other people who had made it up just after us suddenly yelled at us to wait up - it turned out Jo had left her phone right next to where I was sitting in the photo above.  Ooops! I can't just imagine what we would have done if we had got back to the car and seen it sitting up there on my Jo-tracking map.  The other couple caught up to us to return it and we chatted to them all the way back down to the cars - despite the fact that they both live in Yamba, it turns out we have a common friend - an orienteer - so it was a very Tasmanian conversation. 

After reaching the car we had a 20 minute drive back to Liaweenie, our accommodation for the night kindly offered through Jo's family connections. We tripled the local Liaweenie population that night by staying in the Tas Fisheries house which was right next to the local policeman's house.   It was actually really warm and comfortable as it has been renovated in the last few years.  It was fun to stay somewhere completely different - this was the view out the kitchen window the next morning:

and from the garage:

I should also mention here that the rest of my family also had the opportunity to participate in this adventure but they declined.  

On Sunday we had a one hour back-roads drive to get to the orienteering event at Clarence Marshes, just before Derwent Bridge.  It was great to see even more of the central highlands as we made our way across to the Lyall Highway.

It was another beautiful day which made the orienteering terrain look particularly beautiful - so nice that after I finished my 5k course I took my phone back out to take some photos:

It was beautiful, but generally pretty difficult terrain to run (or walk, or fight) through - in some parts it felt like a bush bashing race, right on the edge of what isn't actually suitable orienteering terrain - but as we only come here once a decade it was super fun to be somewhere so different.   

All up it was a great weekend.