Russell Falls

Mount Field National Park, A Good Start

Mount Field National Park – Russell Falls

The journey to Hobart

After a good night’s sleep, we were all set for our flight to Hobart. The owner of the motel drove us to the airport and told us about the sniffer dogs that operated there. They would stop and sit next to you if they smelled high amounts of cash. The latter was new to us, we thought these dogs were only looking for drugs.

The check in process turned out to be more problematic than expected. So we went to the customer support desk for further assistance and discovered that Thai had issued our tickets in the wrong way. Oh my gosh, the start of our trip was very stressful, so we crossed our fingers that it would only get better from now on! And it did!

In Hobart it was raining. No doubt that this was very welcome since the heat had sparked many forest fires the previous weeks and months.

We picked up our car and drove to a commercial centre where we bought a Telstra sim for our router. After reading a lot of trip reports and blogs, it seemed that they had the best coverage on the island and we can only confirm that it worked well.

Two-lane lanes in Tasmania

Heading to Mount Field National Park

Finally, we were ready to visit our first destination., i.e. Mount Field National Park, a one hour drive from Hobart.

The highways in Tasmania were often ordinary two-lane roads and even if they had little traffic on them (compared to Belgium), we found many dead animals in their borders.

B&B ‘Hamlet Downs’

Before heading to the National Park, we decided to drop off our luggage at our B&B ‘Hamlet Downs’. This B&B was located near the park in a nice rural setting.

We first bought a Holiday Vehicle Parks Pass (currently 80 AUD) after which we did our first walk to the Russell Falls. The walk of 1.4 km was easy and took around 20 minutes. This could be more if you plan to take a lot of pictures. The falls themselves were less spectacular this time of the year. However, they were still very beautiful! We were not able to stay very long in the park because Jenifa, our hostess, was preparing us a nice dinner. After having filled our stomachs, we decided to go to sleep to recover from the many flights.

Mount Field National Park – Horseshoe Falls

The 3 Falls Walk

The next day we left around 9am. We had planned to do the Three Falls Circuit, a walk of 6 km that lead us to 3 waterfalls, giant trees and many tree ferns. The entire walk took around 2.5 hours (pictures included…). We did it clockwise to avoid climbing the many wooden stairs (reading blogs and trip reports came in handy!).

Mount Field National Park – Lady Barron Falls

We started with the Lady Barron Falls, followed by the Horseshoe Falls and ended at the Russell Falls. The first hour of our hike, we had the park all to ourselves. But also later on, it never felt crowded. We came across some wallabies (so cute !!!) as well as many birds. All in all, this was a great start of the holiday…