Journey to the Apple Isle: Bye Bye Bicheno

After spending three nights in a lovely cabin in Bicheno it was time to hit the road again......

On the road again la la la........etc.

On good authority we drove up Elephant's Pass to St Mary's. It was a very windy road climbing quite high, there was not, however, any views at all. Even if there had been somewhere to stop - there was simply nothing to see.

Once we got to St Mary's we then went down St Mary's Pass to the bottom.

Not far away was St Helen's, where we visited the visitor info centre where we found this dragon. This is only about half of him. There was also a museum with artifacts found that had been left behind by Chinese gold miners.

First stop out from St Helen's was Binalong. I think this is the whitest sand I have ever seen! It looked lovely, but we were on the trail of the Bay of Fires, so we turned north..........

..... to The Gardens, where we could view the start of the Bay of Fires. The Bay of Fires is actually a series of bays that stretch along the north east coast for quite a distance. The name comes from the red rocks that line the bays.
Unfortunately we didn't see much evidence of "fires" but it was a lovely area anyway.

I thought I had a better picture of this, but that rock formation in the distance looks a lot like a fist displaying "the rude finger".......

The next detour was to St Columba Falls. These are reputed to be the longest falls in Tassie at 90m. The falls were lovely, but the surroundings were even lovelier.

This was our first look at the falls on the way down......

It felt like you were walking through a forest of Man Ferns, there were much taller trees, of course, but you could barely see them.

It was like a different world, this time rather than looking for dinosaurs, I must confess that I was looking for fairies.....

We did eventually reach the falls......

After our walk through fairyland we stopped off at a cheese factory called.........

Next stop was a very small village where they have what is a very large and impressive memorial.

Many towns in Australia, at the end of WWI, planted trees as memorials to their fallen soldiers, in Legerwood the trees that had been planted in the park had become too big and were becoming dangerous and needed to be removed.
Instead of just chopping them down, an artist/carver was called in. He designed the carvings that he intended to do in each tree and then the trees were cut down to that point. then he began.
It was about 6 months actual worked that was stretched out over a 12 month period.
Each tree is dedicated to a particular person and each have been funded by different bodies. For instance, one was funded by the Department of Veteran's Affairs, one by the family of the soldier, and yet another by a local community organisation, etc..
There are no words to describe how fantastic these things are.......
Two of them have multiple carvings, the rest are single figures......