Tasmania is the adventure capital of Australia, a land of roaring rivers, temperate rain forests, sparkling lakes and hundreds of kilometers of hiking tracks, where rainfall is plentiful and it can snow at any time. Nearly one-third of Tassie is national park land and the World Heritage Crater Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park is the jewel of the system.
Tasmania's national parks are expensive, $A24 per day plus another $A35 to camp; quite a change from our parks in the US. We purchased a two-month pass good for the parks in Tasmania, and booked 2 nights in the campground.
No, we didn't walk the 5-day, 65 km Overland Track. Our backpacking days are behind us. We've put in enough miles on rough, muddy uphill trails and have the blisters and leach scars to prove it. Besides, we sold off all of our backpacking kit, the perfect excuse!
We did take advantage of the decent weather and hiked the 11 km Shadow Lake loop, a pleasant 5-hour walk through a variety of vegetation to a scenic lake. The trail is rough in spots and has boardwalks across the many boggy areas, more to protect the environment than to keep hikers' feet dry. We saw no other people, surprisingly few birds and one curious pademelon, an endemic Tasmanian wallaby.
We didn't have any luck spotting the lake's platypuses, (platypi?) those shy nocturnal duck-billed zoological anomalies said to inhabit the shores of Lake St. Clair. The lake is the deepest in Australia at 200 meters and is the source of the Derwent River which, it seems, we have crossed dozens of times.
