Chain of Lagoons -> Freycinet peninsula

Alice’s stats:
Distance cycled: 69.9 km
Ave: 21.7 km/h (it was 22.5 for the fully loaded portion!)
Max speed: 49.9 km/h

Flis & Jessi’s stats:
Distance cycled: 62.6 km
Ave: 17.7 km/h
Max speed: 46.8 km/h

We had originally planned to stop in Bicheno, but it was making the length of cycling days awkward for getting to the Freycinet peninsula. One of the main attractions was the colony of penguins who live in town. Sadly, in the last few weeks, penguins have not been returning to their burrows in Bicheno. Experts are citing warmer ocean temperatures as the likely cause, driving penguins further for food, and driving food down below the depth penguins can dive.
It’s distressing to read that over a matter of weeks this town went from a hundred or so penguins coming home every night to 8, to none.

We enjoyed a delicious brunch feast. Somehow that 500g of butter we bought is almost gone…

I had been deliberating about a multi-day hike in the national park ahead, and finally made a decision: My legs were feeling fresh enough and the weather looked cooperative, so I would tackle a 2 day hike, starting today, I just needed to get myself to the trailhead with time to hike for about 3h.

So while F and J stayed to visit the creatures, I transformed myself into Alice tomato-face speed demon, and rode the remaining 40km to our Airbnb in Swanwick.

Natureworld:
After Alice sped off down the road to Freycinet Park, F and I decided to venture into Natureworld, a privately run “East Coast Wildlife Park”. Along with providing tourists an opportunity to see Tasmanian wildlife, they also focus on conservation, rehabilitation of injured animals, and protection of endangered species. Since we had only seen squished Tasmanian Devil roadkill thus far, we were excited to see some live devils, and we finished brunch just in time to see a Tasmania Devil feeding session… which was quite the display. I am not sure exactly what I was expecting. Maybe someone tossing bits of food to a  Tasmanian Devil? Maybe small cubes of meat in a dish? I am really not sure. But what we were not expecting was for the staff to toss in an entire wallaby leg, including the tail, and for the 8 devils in that enclosure to immediately form a melee pile snapping and tearing and crunching on the hunk of wallaby. The guide said that within 20 minutes, the devils will consume everything; meat, fur, bones, tail, foot, everything. It was really quite an impressive thing to behold. He also said that if left to their own devices, a Tasmanian devil will consume 40% of their own body mass within 30 minutes. Felicity and I were suitably shocked and started trying to figure out what we would have to eat to achieve those sorts of statistics. Scary stuff.

Alice and Jessi

PS from Felicity: Alice’s odo has been a source of contention on this and other trips. When the three of us all ride together – on the exact same route – Alice’s odo will report at the end of the day, just a wee bit more kms covered than mine or Jessi’s.  But on a longer riding day, this can be up to 5kms more than us! 5kms that it’s claiming she rode that apparently we didn’t! But on this trip, her odo has proved that it’s more³ fickle than benevolent: it cuts out randomly, and has sometimes skipped more than half a day. Mwahahaha