Penguin!

We'd hired the car for 8 days and were planning to do a similar itinerary to the backpacker tours in Tasmania, only we were going to do it better, more thoroughly and with more style. I think we had the style thing covered purely because of our sublime 1986 Nissan Pintara - already the Tasmanian babes were eyeing me up at we cruised through Launceston. They don't get out much in Tasmania...

We got up early drove to Cataract Gorge which is pretty much in the centre of Launceston. This is something the tour groups also do, so just to beat their experience we walked a little further and a little faster and on average took 23% more photos.

Then we drove up towards the North Coast, stopping off at a lake for a picnic lunch. Due to an unfortunate misinterpretation of the scale of the map (my bad) we didnt get there until 3pm, but the lake was pretty nice and because only a fool would drive into the middle of nowhere we had it to ourselves. Then it was back on the road towards our destination for the evening - Stanley - but first a stop off at a small town called Penguin.

You'd think that with a name like Penguin you could see some penguins there wouldn't you? And you'd be right - they're everywhere, but they're all made out of plastic. The litter bins are penguins, the shop signs are penguins, even the old lady in the post office looked (and smelled) a bit like a penguin. But if you came to see real penguins you'd be disappointed and would have to drive 20km West to Burnie, where there is a smallish penguin colony that you can view from behind protective wooden fencing.
My theory is that there used to be a colony in Penguin but they got scared away by the 20 foot fibreglass model that the residents put on the beach to liven up the place. It's not really what you want to see when you're waddling home after a hard days swimming. You probably just want to flop down on the rocks and put your flippers up, regurgitate some fish fingers for the kids, maybe watch a documentary on killer whales or something. You don't want to be stared at by some outsized plastic relative as you come up the beach. The penguins probably thought the whole town had got a bit tacky and moved down their colony down to Burnie where the property prices were more competitive and the locals were less obsessive.

We were a bit penguined-out by the time we got to Burnie, so we couldnt be bothered to wait for the sun to go down in the hope of seeing them, so we pushed on to Table Cape Lookout to watch the sun go down, then drove to our overnight stop at Stanley.