Bruny Island – day 1 (part 2)

My criteria for a campsite are quite simple. I like my comforts. Specifically, I like to stay somewhere with an “amenities block”.

I have done roughing it camping (aka Proper Camping) in the distant past, so to distinguish that from what we normally do, I shall refer to our weekend as a “tenting” weekend rather than a camping weekend.

The public campsites on Bruny are, as far as I can tell from the Parks & Wildlife website, Proper Campsites. For people who do Proper Camping.

We stayed at the Captain Cook Caravan Park, near Adventure Bay, which is on South Bruny.

Adventure Bay was named after the ship “The Adventure”, which was the ship of Captain Tobias Furneaux, who first landed there in 1773.  Captain James Cook also landed there, in January 1777, and reportedly collected grass, water and wood. The area has several monuments and plaques commemorating the landings of various ships’ Captains from years past.

The caravan park has a mix of cabins, van sites and tent areas. Some privately owned sites, some basic cabins, some on-site vans, some new villa units and lots of families with kids. It has a huge “campers kitchen” with stoves, a sink, and basic appliances, plus kitchen tables and even a TV. There’s a barbeque area and, most importantly, an amenities block.

There are no designated tent sites if you want an unpowered site, so you can just set your tents up anywhere within the tenting areas.  The day we arrived there was heaps of room, so we didn’t have to set up anywhere awkwardly close to anyone else. And we were comfortably close to the amenities block. (You can see this is important to me can’t you?)

Once we’d set up the tents (which I’ve become an expert at due to weekends tenting with Juniordwarf in the back yard last summer), we went for a drive to the Mavista Nature Walk. It’s a fairly easy 45 minutes return walk through some pretty rainforest. It’s similar to the rainforests at Mount Field.

And there were funghi (reminds self to take tripod on next rainforest walk to avoid this kind of result).

After we did that walk, we went for a drive through some of the wet Eucalypt forest along Coolangatta Road. Wet Eucalpyt is the predominant forest here, with tall Eucalypts and a dense understorey of small trees shrubs and ferns – there are patches of temperate rainforest growing in the more sheltered areas. (Thank you to the sign at the Mavista Picnic Area for this information.)

We found one of the lookouts along Coolangatta Road, which gave us a decent view of The Neck that joins North and South Bruny, looking towards the Northern end of Adventure Bay.

Dinner tonight was at the Hotel Bruny near Alonnah.  It seems like a very popular place, and was very busy.

Apparently they are famous for their chicken parmy. So I went for the salmon. As you do. It was very good.

We weren’t there quite late enough to see the spectacular sunsets over Sunset Bay, but there was some very nice light to take some photos by as the sun began to set.

I used an app called Autostitch for this photo.

This looks a lot darker than the sky actually was.

We got back to the campsite just before it got too dark. I’m not a fan of driving at night at the best of times, and even less so on roads I don’t know.

After it got dark, I wandered over the road to try and get a picture of the rising moon between the trees, over the water. Phone cameras are not ideal for this purpose but, sans tripod, mine did a better job than my camera did.

I’d like to say I slept very well on such a beautiful night, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Never mind. It was nice to be away and outside.