Maria Island, TAS

Maria Island is a traffic-free island which is also a National Park. It’s a 45 minute ferry ride away from the small town of Triabunna, and as we really enjoyed our visit there nine years ago, we decided to make another visit.

Our place in Triabunna was only a five minute walk from the ferry terminal, and we headed off laden with supplies (there are no shops on the island) to get the first ferry which was at 8:30am.

The ferry took about 45 minutes, and as soon as we arrived on the island we headed for the Painted Cliffs – a striking rock formation that can only be easily visited at low tide – hence making it our first stop before the water got too high. We had to scramble over a few rocks, but we managed to get there before the tide cut us off.

We then did a loop around the north part of the island, following the Reservoir Circuit and the Fossil Cliffs circuit. We arrived back at the historic settlement of Darlington with around an hour to go before the ferry, so we went off in search of wombats.

There were a fair number of people on the island, but it’s a big island and so it wasn’t too hard to get some peace whilst walking the trails. The island is also abundant in wildlife, and is famous for wombats. In Tasmania the wombats come out during the day and not just at dusk like on the mainland, so it’s not too hard to find them!