Cape Queen Elizabeth walk, TAS

The Cape Queen Elizabeth track is a 13km return walk up and back to the rocky headlands of Cape Queen Elizabeth, and we set off on this walk in the morning when it was very quiet and peaceful. The walk is famous for ‘The Arch’ – which has apparently become slightly ‘instagram famous’. Normally this would put us off a bit, but our plan was to do the walk when the tide was quite high, meaning that ‘The Arch’ might be partly underwater. All the information online says that you need to go at low tide to see ‘The Arch’.

The first part of the walk went past some really nice lagoons, and then after that there was a choice of track – the low tide route along the beach, or the high tide route over the cliffs. We worked out that it had to be very low tide for the beach walk – even lower than what was needed to see ‘The Arch’. So off we went over the cliffs.

After some nice views we ended up on the beach and we decided to walk towards ‘The Arch’ to see how much of it was underwater. It’s not really visible until you get close to it, and you have to walk along the beach in the other direction from Cape Queen Elizabeth – so it adds a km or two to the walk. When we found ‘The Arch’ we were pleasantly surprised! There was enough of it above the water to see the arch, and with a bit of scrambling we could get round to one side of it without getting our feet wet. We took our official arch photos and then headed back down the beach.

After reaching the end of the beach, the rest of the walk was up the cliffs again, and we got to Cape Queen Elizabeth and had our sandwiches on the cliff. On the way back we saw hordes of walkers, and so we congratulated ourselves on our timing :-). The tide was still too low to use the beach track, so we went back over the cliffs the way we came. Back at the car we treated ourselves to honey ice-cream from the shop across the highway.