Day Sixteen- Burnie, Tasmania

Burnie's major industry was the paper industry.  You'll see the huge, now empty paper mill in one of these pictures.  The mayor met us at the boat and the people all welcomed us to their visitor center where they had many local artists and a papermaking museum.  The other three pictures are people cast from paper.



Because of the paper industry much of the north end of Tazmania has been planted in forests.  It takes 25 years for these trees to grow and so many of them were planted before the paper mill was shut down. The forests have almost a red cast.  Sadly the come in and just cut down a full forest so you drive past miles and miles of stubs and the junk left after the loggers have finished.  We suggested to each other that they at least should leave 10 feet of trees by the road just for aesthetics.

We saw some interesting birds, a spiny ant eater, and then visited a reserve for protecting and breeding Tazmanian Devils and a little animal that I have never seen before called a quoll.  The devils do sound very vicious and I guess can be when they are a bit older but the 2-year-olds that we saw were quite docile.

Tazmania was also lush and green.  Our driver, who was a substitute that didn't know quite what he was doing, decided to take us to see a ghost town and got lost.  We did experience lots of the bush country and giant ferns but we saw very few vehicles for about 30 minutes.  He finally turned around and headed toward Cradle Mountain National Park.  The fourth picture is of cradle mountain.  He was to take us into the park and let us walk around a lake but we took another approach instead.

As we came down from the Cradle Mountain area things became greener again the we got close to the sea.

It was fun to get to the boarding area for the ship and find bagpipers there playing for us.