TasWeekend: E-bikes are the ultimate way to explore Maria Island
Ride Maria Island like Tour de France champions – and without ever raising a sweat
Picture: James Ricketson
Travel
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IT’S easy to be tempted back to Maria Island, but getting me back on a bike will be hard after riding the isle with Ben Rea — unless it’s one of his electric-powered beauties.
On family visits to the National Park island on the East Coast, we take our bikes across on the ferry from Triabunna or hire them from Darlington, where the ferry comes in.
Now, though, the thought of riding Maria under my own steam exhausts me. After my e-bike ride, I fear I am spoilt for life. They are a revelation, I discover on a day trip with Ben’s Tasmanian eBikes Adventures.
After a quick lesson, our group of five sets off past the penitentiary lodgings where our family usually stays, but by the first hill we have a straggler. James, you need to turn your e-bike on to get pedal-assist!
Without raising a bead of perspiration, our peloton rides like a pack of off-duty champions. We pedal past wombats, World Heritage-listed convict buildings, towering blue gums and glorious waterways – and that’s all in the first few minutes.
Over the coming hours, we cycle about 30km without ever resembling helter-skelter mountain bikers. This is not about riding at a deranged speed. Our legs are moving, but so are our lips. It’s a sociable way to ride.
Ben loves the fun of e-bikes. “You can move through country in a really adventurous, playful way,” he says. ”People with different abilities can keep up with each other and travel as a group.”
Ben won this year’s Southern Stars of Tourism Bright Star Award. His first ride, The Bangor Adventure, is accessed from a private farm near Dunalley. The Maria Island Adventure is his new ride.
We see few people once we leave the Darlington settlement. Ben sees to that. He is not only an experienced wilderness adventure guide, this island is mapped in his mind.
He grew up at nearby Orford and these waters and coves are his lifelong playground. He has serious guiding cred and an intuitive approach to sharing his knowledge – he keeps us fascinated all day, but without ever overloading us with information.
Our first stop is Hopground Beach, where we pay tribute to the Tyreddeme people of the Oyster Bay Nation, who came and went in reed canoes over thousands of years.
Riding south through dry forest and water’s edge casuarina, we break at Four Mile Creek. Swift parrots can sometimes be spotted foraging in the white and blue gums, but not this morning. Maybe we are too focused on the delicious chocolate and date brownies baked by Ben’s mum for morning tea.
Maria is not only a wildlife paradise for visitors but a conservation sanctuary for animals, with resident populations of at-risk wombats, Cape Barren geese and Forester kangaroos all established here decades ago.
In 2012, a Tasmanian devil population free of devastating facial-tumour disease was released on the island in a breeding program that appears successful in its own right, but there have been impacts on little penguin and other ground-nesting bird colonies.
Riding on to Point Lesueur, Ben leads us to the ruins of a convict jail, its line of solitary cells startling against the ocean and sky.
Next we visit the bush site where an enterprising settler built his home. Arriving in 1884, Italian Diego Bernacchi had a go at making everything from wine to silk.
The house once situated here was sold in the 1930s and transplanted to Orford, where it was bought by Ben’s family in the 1940s. Ben grew up in it and the home is still in the family.
Lunch is a picnic feast at Encampment Cove, with local lamb and Tasmanian cheeses.
We return north via Frenchs Farm, abandoned for agriculture by the time the island was gazetted as National Park in 1971.
Then it’s on to the Painted Cliffs. What’s special about these sandstone striations, I ask as we clamber along the water’s edge at low tide. “Two hundred and fifty million years of geology,” Ben says. “It’s a place of profound reflection in terms of the earth and how insignificant we are and how beautiful it is.”
In these terms, the famous French Baudin expedition of discovery to these shores in 1802 – 23 years before its first convict era – is a blink of the eye. And blink I do, for at Maria, every era is easily conjured.
Finally, we ride the island’s northern fringe around to Fossil Cliffs near the Bishop and Clerk summit. After a shower, a rainbow strikes the water. It’s a day of diverse weather, but we agree Maria is beautiful in every light.
The author was a guest of Tasmanian eBike Adventures’ Maria Island Adventure
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