Freycinet Peninsula

So there we were, driving along the East coast looking out at the Freycinet Peninsula smoldering away. As you can tell from the photo MadHatter was driving, hows that for trust!! Not bad for an avid control freak I thought!

After a bit more driving we came across another bush fire. This wasn't too surprising. A few days earlier it had been 42 degrees in Melbourne and everything was very dry.



We even drove through some smoldering bits. Extreme touring!!



The wildlife park had narrowly escaped the blaze.



But enough of the life threatening bush fires, we had peninsulas to explore! Winglass bay has been rated as the worlds most beautiful beach and we couldn't come all this way without having a wee nosey.
So we drove along the peninsula keeping an eye on the tower of smoke. The 'friendly beaches' were off limits because of the fire (gotta love the Ozzie names) but lucky for us Wineglass bay was quite a distance from there.

We arrived at Coles Bay and had a look through the info centre. Coles bay was really nice, the rocky mountains in the background are called the Hazards, another great name :-)
I couldn't resist the temptation and broke into another Hockney photographic frenzy.



It was here that we discovered that the track to Wineglass bay was a 1.5hr walk OVER the hazards. So we decided that it probably wasn't all that fancy afterall and bought some postcards of it instead.

Homemade berry icecream = good
1.5hr walk over hazards = bad

So we decided to venture on to St Helens and go and look at the Bay of Fires instead.
Along the way we stopped at this very beautiful beach...



Ah yes all very beautiful, but I tell ya - you could smell the sharks! And surprise surprise not a single person swimming :-)



Don't be fooled, you may think that a big nasty shark would never live in such a beautiful spot but Mr Teeth is out there just waiting for you to dab your toes in the water!

We later discovered that this was just the first of lots and lots and lots of similarly beautiful beaches. We didn't bother stopping to photograph the rest. "You've seen one, you've seen them all"...

After a short zip up the coast we found ourselves at St Helens. A rather small town with not a lot to do at 5:05pm. Reasonably pretty though.





How lazy is that! I couldn't even be bothered splicing these two photos into a panorama. You'll just have to use your imaginations.

We checked into our 'Luxury Suite'. This meant it was on the 2nd floor and so could see the water. That was about the extent of the luxury, although they did have the greatest kitsch bedside lamps that I would have swiped if they hadn't been bolted to the cabinet (thought walking down the stairs with cabinet may have roused suspicion).
The carpet wasn't too crash hot though...



Still, it was a place to stay and we had flaming bays to go and look at...