Sport Cragging, Tassie Style...

Having spent so many weeks keeping airplane seats and hostel couches warm, our atrophied climbing muscles and shrunken lead heads were thankful that "Climb Tasmania" had selected a humble, urban sport crag as a warm up.

Urban is perhaps not the best choice of words, as we quickly learned after leaving Devonport that Tasmania is a very strange, far away land. We camped minutes outside Launceston, the second-largest city in the state, but found ourselves in farmland that, were it not for the Dr. Suess-esque gum trees, could have been 1950's America: dirt roads, children waving, locally owned shops operated by chatty country-folk - and all the while struggling to remember which side of the road to drive on! Nighttime brought aggressive possums and the eiree sounds of black currawongs and kukaburras - alien bird calls to us, and enough to inspire nightmares of ring wraiths.





Hillwood, Launceston's sport cragging destination, was a small gorge of strangely formed rock, tucked away on private farmland. It's surfaces looked like cracked dinosaur egges and were bolted probably out of desperation brought on by the freqeunt rain. But the short, densly packed climbs were enough to teach us that Tasmanians were serious about their ratings.