Great Southern Land

We went down as far south as the road goes in Tasmania to Cockle Creek on the Recherche Bay, which like everything in that whole D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Huon Valley is a seriously beautiful area of small bays and winding coastline. Recherche Bay is also where the forest comes right down to the edge of the ocean, and there are so many mountains in the distance. Recherche Bay is famous for being where Bruni D’Entrecasteaux camped for 4 weeks on an expedition looking for La Perouse - and don’t all the names reflect that fact!



It was down at Cockle Creek that the sheer number of shacks in Tasmania first became really apparent – and so many inside the boundaries of the National Park. Apparently the State Government has been sorting out the tenure of these shacks for some time, but seemingly all in favour of the shack owners – because there still seems to be heaps of them on Crown Land! Like this one...


Cockle Creek is also where the South Coast Walk finishes – from all accounts a fairly intense week-long walk. Seeing so many hikers around made us really wish we were kitted out for overnight hiking – but since we are already carrying SO much stuff and had already spent so much money, we couldn’t really justify another whole set of camping gear! But we did do a wee portion of the South Coast Walk into the South East Cape – the southern most point on the Tassie mainland.