On our travels we passed through various small towns
along the way, the best of which was Sheffield.
What a pretty little village! Coming into the town, there
was the usual sign saying "Welcome to Sheffield", with the
interesting addition "town of murals" ... as it turned out,
nearly every shop along the main (and only) shopping drag, had a mural
on the side depicting what goes on inside.
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You wouldn't think there would be work for a
blacksmith in this day and age, but further down the road we saw
that at least one villager keeps his horse in the front garden,
so I daresay the blacksmith does a spot of shoeing. |
On a cold and wet afternoon we stopped on the bank of
Lake William, near Derwent Bridge, where some trees were standing in the water - a weird sight.
We also saw a sign pointing to Kimberley (my
home town in South Africa) so we turned off to visit it. This metropolis
turned out to comprise three houses, a church and a fire station. Is
this place inhabited by pyrophobes?
Another day, we saw a viewing platform and stopped to
climb up and view what we expected to be a marvellous vista. What did we
see? We saw the sea. Never mind the view, you are better off looking at
us on the platform.
The ugliest town in Tasmania has to be Queenstown. The
road to Queenstown is a bugger: hairpin bends through the mountains, and
once you get there, you wish you hadn't.
They have been mining copper there since Pa fell off
the bus. The first thing you see when you come over the
last hill are the Bare Hills which have been degenerated by years of
mining, bush fires and sulphur fumes from the smelters which thankfully
were closed in 1969. A lot of the sulphur rose into the atmosphere and
returned to the ground as acid rain contributing a lot to the
degeneration.
It is a sad and bleak sight. We lost no time pushing
on to Strahan.
