Strahan – Pencil Pine Lake

We awoke to enjoy a walk around to the Train Station. They also offer fabulous heritage train trips up through the hills and its supposed to be very good. Its surprising how many of the town’s folk are involved in the tourism industry. We watched the 3 staff getting the passengers on board, followed by the three or 4 engineers involved in driving the train, and then two vans pulled up with a further 5 or 6 people unloading all the food and drink to be consumed on their trip.

We walked back along the old train line back into town. The tracks have been removed and a lovely walk path now exists to walk into town around the bay. Its such a pretty spot, but supposedly it rains all the time! The picture above is of the Piners Punt. The Piners were the Huon Pine collectors who used to go out in one of these little dingies with all their food (two people) for 3 months at a time. Often with their hands frozen to the oars they'd row up the Franklin River to find the trees, cut them down and get them to the waters' edge to get them to barged back to town. It must have been a very hard life. Especially as the trees were harder and harder to find.

We stopped at one of the many cafes along the waterfront for breaky. Then headed off up the road to Queenstown. It was a little more alive since our last visit, but sadly the town was quite run down. There was a pub for sale for $250,000! A bargain in anyone’s language. But desperately in need of repair and a liquor licence to go with it. There was also a cinema for sale, but we didn’t get to find out how much that was.

Unfortunately due to the cheap price of houses the town was overrun with bogans and down and outs. I’m sure there are people trying to make it work, but I don’t think I could buy here as it would be just too hard (even though the cinema is very interesting)…

We then moved back up the rocky mountainside into the national park. We went to Lake Sinclair and did the Figure 8 Loop around Platypus Lake. It was very pretty with many different types of foliage. It was fabulously beautiful.

We then kept going further up the road till we started to see too many animals beside the road and we pulled up beside this untouched beautiful lake. We and Sharon & Wayne had this part of the lake to ourselves. The silence was deafening!