Travelways

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Spectacular sights right on our doorstep

THERE'S a thermometer in my carport telling me that it's 5 degrees in Launceston. This is late Monday morning, this week, and it's raining. I wake with a plan to walk the Zig Zag Track to the First Basin. The kids are at school, wife's at work so there's just me and the challenge of leaving a warm bed. The bed wins. For a while, anyway, but I find the rain jacket and cameras and drive to the city side of Kings Bridge. I park in one of those three-hour spots and ponder the fate of Penny Royal Gunpowder Mills, or Penny Royal Oder Mills as the decaying sign so sadly proclaims. The accommodation still operates, but the wonderful old tram doesn't look like it leaves the shed often and the tram line between the mills and its sister attraction, the flour mill, is overgrown. A few years ago the sloop-of-war Sandpiper would be discharging its cannons and tourists would be floating around the gunpowder mills' canals. It was a great place to take the kids. I loved the whole complex because it was such a bold collection of unrelated old stuff. A tram from 1913, a fighting ship from the 1700s, mills from the 1800s. As theme parks go, and sadly this one went, it had been thoroughly "ye olded". (The Examiner ran a story in February saying that plans to refurbish and reopen the attraction had fallen through.) But ye olde Penny Royal World still marks the start of the Zig Zag Track so I put my laments to one side and started the steady, uphill walk. In five minutes the walker is rewarded with a view of the Tamar's yacht basin; another five minutes along and you are on eye level with houses in upper Trevallyn. It's past midday and the mercury has breached 10 degrees. I arrive at the First Basin and see the inclinator - a mechanical lift that can haul people up and down a small section of the steep entrance to the Basin. The inclinator costs nothing. I press a green button to summon the small, windowed room and it slowly makes its way up. A ride down the inclinator is the precise opposite of one of those "big drops" at an adventure park; it's glacial. Somehow there are four levels. Spoilt for choice, I select level two, which promises a cafe. The inclinator is a wonderful innovation for the mobility challenged, but using it reminds me of a scene in an Austin Powers movie where the hero tries to turn around an electric car in a narrow corridor and conducts perhaps a 333-point turn. My ludic micro-adventure complete, I slide open the little room's door and push open a second safety door to emerge near the cafe. I snoop through the glass doors for fear that my coffee request will lead to a foam cup of the dreaded instant stuff, but spot a glass tower of beans and feel reassured that the Basin Cafe is a player in the great odyssey of caffeine addiction. The coffee is good. It turns out that the owners of the highly regarded Gorge Restaurant, just a chairlift away, also own the Basin Cafe. A woman at a nearby table is praising the salt-and-pepper squid so I look at a menu to discover upmarket offerings such as creamy seafood chowder and roasted pork belly. I'm a bit of a chowder hound and know that The Gorge Restaurant does a good version. Same owners, same chowder? Apparently not: different chefs, different chowder. I saunter towards the causeway track to the northern side. It's closed because the river's swelling and might surge over the top any day now (the closure strikes me as a little premature: perhaps the sign needs to be carried in the inclinator and authorities are keeping 30 hours up their sleeves). If they close the low road, I'll take the high road, and I'll be at Hogs Bottom afore ye. There was once a diving board at Hogs. It had gone by the time I started haunting the Basin as a teenager in the 1970s, but the concrete base remains. Then, as now, one of the rites of passage for a Launcestonian was to jump off Hogs several metres to the swirling South Esk water below. Further along the track, the suspension bridge is supervising the rising river. Directly underneath, the confusion of white water I call the bubble bath is moving into jacuzzi overdrive. A fresh shower arrives to drive away these summer memories. Up at Alexandra Lookout I can see  a peacock on the lawns near the public swimming pool. I wonder where they'll be in the wet, because the area around the northern side's restaurant is usually peacock central. As if on cue, two peacocks are standing sentinel at the eatery's entrance. There are still people about. A smattering of tourists; hardy Launceston types taking a walk; youngsters at the kiosk. I wander back along the northern track towards the city. There's wonderful artwork along this bitumen path. The split Ben Lomond granite of Richard Tipping's 1998 sculpture Sounding Silence; a seat poem by 2005 Cataract Gorge artist-in-residence Brigita Ozolins; mysterious, shiny single letters glued on the rock walls; the petrified-wood style of a trackside shelter. Supervising the walk is duck rock, or dog rock, or as a colleague suggested this week, "it looks like a bear''. The dolerite formation jutting over Cataract Walk has seen it all. Each year, the numbers filing past its beak, or snout, grow. Last year Launceston's favourite attraction drew 212,000 visitors. It's worth a wander.