Hey everyone, welcome to World Heritage Journey.
Today, we're at the Tasmanian Wilderness, in Tasmania, Australia.
So this World Heritage Site is absolutely enormous, it's over a million hectares in size and it takes up
almost the entire western half of Tasmania, the island
just off the southern coast of Australia.
Now it's mostly temperate rainforest here, quite unique for the Southern Hemisphere,
and there's seven national parks that make up the Wilderness Area.
For our visit, we're concentrating on the most impressive: Cradle Mountain, that you
can see behind me. Let's go!
In the World Heritage process, sites are judged against ten criteria for inclusion on the list.
A site only needs to satisfy a single criteria to be added.
The Tasmanian Wilderness area, where we are now, satisfied seven of the ten criteria,
more than any other World Heritage Site, which gives you an idea of how special this place is.
The island of Tasmania separated from the Australian mainland about 8000 years ago,
leaving its plants, animals, and indigenous population completely isolated.
This means for us, that the environment here is totally different to what you find back
in the rest of Australia.
As I mentioned, the forests here are mainly temperate (or cool, non-tropical) rainforests,
which makes them almost unique in the Southern Hemisphere.
The only similar environments are found in New Zealand, and some remote areas of South
America.
Presented with such a huge and impressive wilderness area, it's sometimes difficult
to know where to start, but for our visit we headed for the most famous area: Cradle
Mountain National Park.
We followed a day-long hiking trail that started in the forests, and wound its way past beautiful
creeks and waterfalls,
up through alpine moorlands and grasslands,
across soggy peat bogs,
eventually up a steep rock face, finally ending at the summit of Cradle Mountain where the
views were absolutely epic!
We returned to the car via the gorgeous Dove Lake, and unusually for us we even managed
to spot some Tasmanian wildlife, including wombats and wallabies.
Because of the isolation here, Tasmania has some completely unique plants and animals
including the famous Tasmanian Devil, which we also managed to spot.
Back in the day there was also the Tasmanian Tiger, or thylacine, but the last known specimen
died in a Melbourne zoo during the 1930s.
Leaving Cradle Mountain and beautiful Dove Lake, we headed to Mount Field National Park,
another of the seven national parks in the Wilderness.
Here we saw more incredible and atmospheric rainforest, bubbling streams, and of course,
some amazing waterfalls thundering over Tasmania's craggy geography.
It's also important to mention that the Tasmanian Wilderness Area is a rare Mixed World Heritage
Site, on the World Heritage List for both natural and cultural reasons.
Although we didn't get the chance to interact with any of the sacred indigenous sites, artworks
and other cultural heritage within the Wilderness Area, I think it's very important to at least
acknowledge that Tasmanian Aborigines lived and thrived for thousands of years in all
parts of the Wilderness Area, particularly those from the Big River Nation and the
South West Nation.
All up, the Tasmanian Wilderness is a place genuinely like no other.
It truly is one of the most impressive World Heritage Sites we've ever visited, and we'd
strongly recommend adding it to your bucket list.