Australia: Fabulous Freycinet

 

The well-maintained trail to the Wineglass Bay Lookout is pretty steep. It takes about 
an hour to reach the lookout, but the downhill return is considerably quicker. 

If you do any Internet research on Tasmania, you'll soon read about Freycinet National Park, a peninsula north of Hobart with beautiful beaches on both sides and challenging hiking trails.  Deciding to visit there is a no-brainer. 

The drive up from Hobart is mostly inland, but there are glimpses of water here and there. We didn't have GPS available on our non-Australian phones or in our rented Kia, and we ended up stopping at a winery, Devil's Corner, to make sure we were on the right route. We didn't do a tasting there, but we later had its wine and we regretted not tasting it there. (We were on the right route, by the way.) 

We stayed two nights at Edge of the Bay in a large room with a deck a few steps from a stunning beach on Coles Bay on the west side (not the ocean side) of the Freycinet Peninsula. Lunch both the day we arrived and the next day was at Freycinet Marine Farm, an oyster and mussel farm a few miles north of our hotel. Mussels here and in New Zealand are probably the best in the world, meaty and full of flavor, and the Pacific oysters are as good as those anywhere else. There's also crayfish (lobster) and other seafood, as well as a respectable list of wines and beers.  

Dinner our first night was at Lure, the restaurant at Edge of the Bay, though not part of the hotel. Excellent fine dining. The next night we had hamburgers at Geographe,  a very casual place in the village of Coles Bay. 

We made the steep hike to a viewpoint overlooking iconic Wineglass Bay, but we didn't make the longer hike down to the bay itself. We also visited photogenic Friendly Beaches farther north but still in Freycinet National Park.

Here are some photos:

The trail to the Wineglass Bay lookout is mostly uphill and pretty steep. Not 
that the elevation gain bothers runners like these.

The reward for making the climb are a couple of lookouts
such as this for viewing Wineglass Bay.

The name may be the most intriguing thing about Wineglass Bay. Its sandy
beach forms an arc within the curved inlet. We didn't make the hike
down to the beach, but I imagine that the sand is soft and the
water rather shallow, tame and relatively warm, 

The trail from the lookout down to the parking lot is an easy downhill.

The blackboard at Freycinet Marine Farm. It's impossible
to overstate how much I liked this place.

Food ready for your table at Freycinet Marine Farm. Even the salads were good. We didn't
try the pickled mussels.

Oysters "natural,' left, and BBQed, which just means
a dab of sauce.

The view from Geographe snack shop includes the waters of Coles Bay,
mountains and an ice creamery.

The waters of Coles Bay from the beach off our
room at the aptly named Edge of the Bay Resort.

A wallaby came calling at Edge of the Bay.

Friendly Beaches are at the northern end of Freycinet National Park on the Tasman Sea
(east) side of the peninsula. Somewhat white rocks here, red on the other side of the peninsula.

Another view of Friendly Beaches. Even though we
were there in February, the height of summer in the 
Southern Hemisphere, beaches were as unpopulated
as winter beaches in the U.S.