Tasmania 2022 Day#3 - Saving Tassie one pub at a time tour

The Deloraine bakery was open this morning so we could inject some much needed funds into propping them up whilst I enjoyed a delicious scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast. We discussed route plans here. The boys were going to go up over the great lakes again before heading back east up through Scottsdale. Flyboy and myself had other plans, we would try and meet up with them at the Pub in the paddock in Pyengana via gravel roads out past Ben Lomond, if all else fails meet up in St Marys our destination for the day.

On the way back from breaky we saw these three 70's Kwaka Z900's in pristine condition. We chatted briefly with the owners who were coming back from some larger ride.

Flyboy and myself took the road back out to Ben Lomond national park, we went through Blessington and Upper Blessington where we stopped for the following photos overlooking Jacob's Ladder. I'm glad we rode up there on day 1 in such good conditions as today was overcast.

We took to the gravel roads up into the hills to Upper Esk and then back down to Mathinna. Mathinna looked eerily like the town that time forgot, definitely banjo country. It was 26°C out today and most little shacks had their chimneys belching smoke inexplicably, it wasn't cold . There was absolutely nothing open here and we didn't see a single sole. So we continued on up the road towards Ringarooma. The road suddenly forked to the left and put is into thick forest and a shortcut to mushrooms.

There just something I love so much about riding through these pine forest roads, I don't know what it is but I can't get enough of it. Maybe it was time spent out in the pine forests camping as a boy scout in my youth, can't put my finger on what it is.

As we were standing here taking photos we looked over into the forest amazed at the amount of rubbish people have been dumping in here. Bottles, cans, car parts and other junk, in such a beautiful spot. People can be absolute pigs at times. Then we saw these little fellas growing right beside the road.

Thank you Tamron F2.8

Still clean but its about to get much dirtier

Just around the bend the road turned to gravel again and wound it's way up through the hills in tight bends through the forest until it came to the top of a ridge line where the trees had been cut down and there were views out over the valley's and surrounding hills.

We continued along from the lookout with mostly good graded gravel road, until the last couple of kms from the turn at Mt Albert Road where the gravel got a bit thick and slippery. Flyboy was kicking up the dust so I slowed down to get a clear run. I was sliding around a bit which slowed my progress a little but was still doing ok. 

Flyboy was waiting for me at the turn off and continued along, with some rather large mountains hills in front of us. Made for spectacular riding through the forest with these big hills looming up in the distance. The road was a mixture of different surfaces but mostly good graded gravel with the odd slippery section thrown in to keep you on your toes. The Karoo3 front seems to be doing great on the tar and pretty decently on the dirt only had 1 front end slide so far, the rear Motoz in the dirt is great also handling everything with ease.

We then came to a turn off to the left that was unsign posted. I'm sure this is the road we are supposed to take so we turned in and stopped and had a quick look at the map. Yep this was it alright. I didn't like the look of it as it was a single car width track that disappeared over a steep hill. I could hear Han Solo's voice in my head saying "I've got a bad feeling about this".

Photo by Flyboy

It turned into a steep descent  down 15 km bends on slippery gravel then throw in a few steep uphill bits on slippery gravel, I was working hard now, crouching over the bike trying to maximise my control of all the levers and gear shift, concentration was high. But to my surprise the big twin just torqued it's way up those slippery slopes with a fair amount of throttle at the bottom to get up there. I was working up a sweat as I still had my warm liners in, I should have stopped and taken them out. D'oh.

Flyboy stopped at the top of one of the hills to see I was still there. I mentioned to him that this is about as narly as I want to do with my rusty dirt skills. He said the same which made me feel slightly better. But from this point on the worst was behind us even though the road thinned out even more to just 2 wheel tracks across some farming land, where we soon got dumped back onto the road just a couple of km's from the pub in the paddock. I said to him "The guys will never believe I rode this bike through this terrain" He gave me a big grin and said "Yeah they won't but I saw it"

Photo by Flyboy

We were finally out on the flat plain and only took us about a minute to get to the pub, that road threw us basically right out on top of it.

We were soon tucking into a bowl of hot chips and a beer to quench a hard earned thirst. The Little Rivers Pale ale really hit the spot, a nice beer.

The pub in the paddock is renowned for its beer swilling pig Priscilla II, Priscilla had passed away a few years back and had been replaced. I tried to text the other guys here but had no reception. We waited about 30 minutes and few bikes came and went but none of our crew. So we made the decision to head off, we would catch up somewhere along the way.

As we got into St Helens I saw a sign for the Bay of Fires only 10kms, we had plenty of time so I said lets go and have a look. So we took the road out to Binalong Bay. The rock formations along here are stunning with their colours, must be awesome at dusk or dawn during golden hour. I didn't want to wait around till then as I'd rather not encounter any of the wildlife after dark and an ice cold beer was waiting for us in St Mary's.

So enough looking at rocks it was time to get to St Marys, we made our way back along into St Helens. Just as we passed the petrol station I save Dave in there, so hooked a u-turn and we rode back and filled up. Dave had kept riding from Scottsdale all the way having too much fun and left the others behind, where as the others turned into the pub in the paddock where we were going to meet.

We decided to not wait and we would meet them at the pub so continued up the pass to St Marys. Why is it that there are no cars anywhere until you come to a sweet set of twisty bends and then suddenly there's 2 or 3 cars to stuff up your fun. Took a while to get past safely but we did and blasted up the mountain pass. Good fun.

The St Marys hotel was a great little pub, awesome meals and super friendly staff. I had  3 lamb cutlets for diner at $24 and they were huge and awesome value.

Cool devil firepot out in the beer garden and looks like the guitar has been used in anger.

Another Awesome day in Tassie. I took my internal rain and warm liners out once we arrived and got out of our gear, so it should be a bit cooler on the ride tomorrow. Great weather so far in the mid/high 20's so far, will be a great trip if this continues.

Pubs Saved Counter:               5      

Bakery's Saved Counter:         2

Day 3 Map Reference

Tasmania 2022 Day#1 - Saving Tassie one pub at a time tour

I'd awoken early with only 5 hours sleep thanks to someone wanting to keep the bar open till 1am.  I thought we wouldn't have much time to get ready but it turned out not to be the case. The ship wasn't rocking so thought we've docked. Getting up on deck the sun hadn't come up yet and we we still offshore. The ocean was dead flat. We watched as the sun came up from behind the tip of Tasmania. Beautiful sight. 

Finally we were allowed to get back on the bikes and disembark the ship. First job was to pack our gear back on and unstrap the handle bars.

We stopped for a quick breakfast just off the boat. The food was lousy and the coffee was luke warm milk with a dash of coffee flavour. 2 mouthfuls and it went straight in the bin. We should have learnt from last time and made for a small town out of Devonport.

Flyboy had flown in 2 days before us and was hogging all of tassies best roads to himself. I couldn't have that now. I was exchanging messages with Flyboy and he was in Mole Creek nearby, I said we were heading to Deloraine to drop off our luggage and then ride. We headed to Railton, just as we came into railton the big Africa Twin blasted past the opposite way around the bend, a bit of a wave and we waited in town for him to catch up. We dumped our gear in at the Deloraine Hotel where we were staying for the next two nights and headed out for the Great Lakes.

Then we blasted up the Highlands lake road and stopped at the look out over the lake for a quick break and catch up. There was plenty of road kill on the way up to the lakes, dead wildlife every few hundred metres. It was an awesome day for riding the temps were in the 20's.

Great Lakes

Tuono's in Paradise?

It was a steep twisty decent after the lookout which opened up into sweepers and then straights. The boys on the faster machinery that didn't know where they were going pulled out ahead and straight past the Poatina turn off. We waited for about 10 minutes or so, messaged them and then continued on towards Poatina. Dave said the road to Bothwell was straight and boring. Heh heh....pays to know where you're going and not just blindly follow.

As we came down the side of the mountain towards Poatina the views out in front of us were spectacular. I pulled over as did Flyboy. I said to him "Is there a lookout up here, this is spectacular".

"Dunno" came the reply, then he looked around and saw a huge sign on the other side of the road that said lookout with a camera on it. D'oh we couldn't see the sign because we were so busy looking at the views. So up the dirt track we went to the look out, then were soon joined by Geoff and Scotty.

Stunning views from up here on a pristine clear day. There was a headrace tunnel here at the lookout, it allowed water to flow down from the great lakes through 6kms of tunnels down across the western tiers to Poatina Power station then  and out across the plains.

Found this diagram of the power stations here in this area on the Hydro Tasmania website. Great place for power generation.

Did I happen to mention how stunning the views were today. Oh yeah.

 

We dropped down the side of the western tiers and then had a brief look in at Poatina, nothing much there. It's an old Hydro community looks like something that hasn't changed since the 60's.

Poatina turn off looking back at the Western Tiers

As we came down into the farming lands below the mountains we crossed this interesting little tiered  irrigation channel, this is obviously the outlet from the power station. Amazing how it drops a couple of feet every 100 metres or so.

We stopped for some lunch at yet another bakery in Longford. The pies here were also exemplary, JJ bakery cafe in Longford, look them up when you are there. A few messages back and forth and the other guys were in Cressy about 10kms down the road. 

Scotty(Nigel) and his mates

Flyboy and I decided that we would go up Jacob's ladder today whilst the weather was great, as you never know what we will get in 2 days time. Geoff and Scotty got scared off by the small amount of dirt and returned to the pub in Deloraine. It was just on 1.30pm and it was only about 170kms return from Jacob's ladder. We came to ride tassie's roads not sit in the pub all day. We would be in the pub by 5pm.

Dave did a few poor navigation choices here and it felt like we were going around in circles popping up in the lower suburbs of Launceston before eventually coming into Evandale. There was this cool water tower to get a photo by at least.

We got to the turn off into Ben Lomond National park, where we were descended upon by bees' buzzing around our bikes. A quick pic and off we went again. This will be the first dirt riding I've done in over 20 years and up a steep hill as well. You might say I was a little nervous but also determined, these days I'm more Rusty Demon than Crusty Demon as I don't have much experience on dirt. At least I had the tyres for it and Dave has some video of me riding down at walking pace. I think a little old lady with a zimmer frame would have overtaken me down the mountain. Oh well better to take it easy than bust the bike or myself on day1.

The ride up through the forest was interesting. I was finding it difficult to stand and hold on to the bike. The tank was wide and slippery and the reach to the bars was a long way down and changing gears standing up was blowing my mind. I think I was spending $9.90 of my attention just trying to ride and control the bike let alone looking where I was going. Arriving in the bottom viewing area we were greeted with spectacular view above and below us, with rugged rocky peaks above and forest below. The road winds its way steeply here up to the top with switchback bends a bit like Stelvio pass in Italy, except that is paved and this is gravel.

We made the climb to the top, it was easier than I thought it would be but the last two switch backs at the top got a lot slippery than the one's below. I wouldn't ride my R1 up here on road tyres but the AT handled it pretty well. We arrived at the top carpark/lookout and took to the viewing platform to take in the sights.

Top carpark

Jacob's Ladder

There was a bit of haze in the sky from a bushfire/burn off in the forest on the other side of the valley. Still the views were superlative. Think I've run out of words to use.....

Hazy views

It was now 3.30pm and time to get going with about 85kms to get back to Deloraine Hotel we made our way down. I found it much easier and went faster on the trip down as I could hold onto the bike better going down the hill by pushing my legs against the tank. Still had a few slip and slides here and there but the tyres were handling this not much problems.

The ride back across from Ben Lomond is a fantastic hilly sweeping ride and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We arrive back at the pub around 5pm just in time for beers. They boys were already par-taking in the beery goodness. Dave mentioned he has done enough straight roads in Tassie, lets do some bends. Have an idea of where you want to go I say. My ride is not going to be the same as their ride on this trip. There will be much more gravel, those Tuonos wont like the gravel. But all good we will meet up at the end of the day for beers and tall stories.

Deloraine Hotel is highly recommended with new rooms and bathrooms $55 per night and fantastic meals.

Day 1 Map Reference