It wasn’t actually raining this morning and the forecast is for it to get warmer as the week progresses so with a positive outlook we loaded up the car, filled it up with Petrol, brought some snacks for the journey and set off for Queenstown where we planned our first stop. Queenstown is basically a Copper mining town and the mine is still operating although in a very limited way, as you drive towards the town all you can see is the massive mine on the side of the mountain. This is the biggest mine on Tasmania but unfortunately they don’t do any tours of the mine. It is now owned by one company but in the early years there were a number of claims on the mountain all competing against each other and the two larger ones both had smelting works running 7 days a week 24 hours a day, they say you could see the sulpha cloud over Queenstown 20 km away! In the 1900s when the smelting works, brickworks and sawmills were all operating the town had a population of just over 5000 and the district 10,000, in the 2016 census the town had a population of 1755, which unfortunately shows when you walk round the town. We pulled into visitor information which is also the home of the town museum. This is housed in an old hotel and each of the rooms has pictures and artefacts that reflect life in Queenstown through the ages. There are actually 33 rooms in the museum and they have loads of fantastic old photos, unfortunately they are not very well displayed so you have to work quite hard looking round the museum, having said that we actually spent 2 hours in there so it obviously held our interest. Unfortunately by the time we came out it had started raining agin and was actually quite cold. There is a Main Street in the town called Ore street where most of the old buildings are and of course the railway station which compared to Strahan was massive. We walked up and down Ore street but a lot of the buildings are closed down and we decided against driving up to the lookout at the top of town as the cloud was so low we probably wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. Instead we decided to have some lunch to try and warm us up. We went to the pub which offers a Thai or European menu so we opted for Thai and had a couple of very nice dishes, although they weren’t amazing the food was good and did the job or warming us up, all with the added befit of the fact the steam train came back from this mornings tour while we were eating lunch and as the only people in the restaurant we had been able to pick our seat by the window so we could watch it arrive and turn round on the turntable. After lunch we had another quick walk round the town then headed over to Lake St Clair, which is a natural freshwater lake in the Central Highlands area of Tasmania. It is part of the Cradle Mountain – Lake St Clair National Park although you can’t drive directly from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair! It is glacial and is approximately 45 square kilometres with a maximum depth of 160 metres which makes it Australia’s deepest lake. We are staying at Pump house point which was exactly what it sounds like it was a pump house built on the lake. There are two buildings the Hydro substation which is where we have breakfast and if we want it dinner along with some bedrooms and a bar area and the other building which is the Pumphouse which originally was home to four water-pumping turbines and now has rooms effectively in the middle of the lake. We checked in at reception and then transferred our cases to the golf buggy to get them to the pumphouse. We are on the first floor (middle) in a great room which obviously has a fantastic view of the lake! We settled in and just relaxed for a while hoping that the sky’s are going to clear over the next few days.
