Why 23 days?
23 days in Tasmania seemed like too long a duration for a small Island. We gave ourselves 23 days because we wanted to do a slow drive around the entire place. We wanted to visit the common places where most visitors went and also the “not so common” places too.
We wanted a relaxing trip. A trip where we could wake up effortlessly (8am – 9am), cooked and enjoyed breakfast leisurely (9am -11am) and drive at maximum 2 to 3 hours a day, sightseeing and taking coffee break along the way till we reached our next stay. If we were early at our stay we could do some sightseeing/trekking if we were late we would defer the sightseeing trekking to the next day. We would like to shop, cook and eat a good dinner and sit back to relax and watch a netflix programme, a Korean drama etc etc.
We enjoyed our 23 days tremendously and figured this relaxing pace would become the new normal of our future DIY trips!
Places we visited
We started in Horbart then do a clockwise loop to Mount Field, Queenstown, Strahan, Corrina, Arthur River, Stanley, Cradle Mountain, Launceston, Bay of Fires, Freycinet Peninsula and finally back to Hobart.
We did not go to the south west of Tasmania because these places were not drivable and required days of trekking which we were not up to it.
Accommodation
Half of our accommodation were booked on AirBnB as it was not easy to find “hotels” in the remote areas. Many places did not have hotels but they did have holiday homes which were listed on AirBnB. We prefered to use Booking.com as the listed hotel/apartments were usually cancellable which provided better flexibility.
Whether on AirBnB or Booking.com, we prefered to book self contained apartment where we could cooked breakfast and dinner. This turned up to be a good decision as many places we visited in Tasmania were in the outback where restaurants and cafes were not commonly found. Supermarkets were easy to find as the outback places were residential areas too. So stocking up grocery was pretty easy.
Memorable Places
There were many very scenic places in Tasmania and many of these were out of the usual Hobart and Launceston areas. If we were to list five most memorable/scenic places in Tasmania they were definitely these:
Tessellated Pavement
Trowutta Arch
Cradle Mountain / Dove Lake
Ben Lomond
Wine Glass Bay
Breakdown of Cost
The entire cost of our trip was AUD$9000 for 2 persons for 23 days. The cost covered return international flights, car rental, accommodation, insurance, mobile data plan, etc etc. The breakdown is below
|
International Flight |
15.5% |
|
Rental Car |
15.5% |
|
Accommodation |
40% |
| All others
(food, souvenirs, data plan, insurance etc) |
29% |