Beautiful Tasmania by Motorhome

Fifteen nights in a loop from Hobart in a motorhome, round Tasmania, with the flights included.

Hobart takes the first two nights in a hotel, with its arts scene and restaurants, before the motorhome is collected. Strahan follows on the west coast, with a morning cruise on the Gordon and Franklin rivers, which are world heritage listed wilderness and were the subject of the dam campaign that reshaped Australian environmental politics in the early 1980s.

Cradle Mountain comes next, with hiking past glacial lakes and rainforest that has been there since Gondwana. Stanley follows, a village on a narrow strip of land below a volcanic plug called the Nut, with a chairlift or a walk to the top. Launceston takes two nights, with the Tamar Valley wine trail and its thirty-odd vineyards and Cataract Gorge in the middle of town, then the Bay of Fires with its orange lichen boulders, and Freycinet for two nights, with pink granite peaks above Wineglass Bay.

International flights, two nights in a four-star Hobart hotel, eleven days of Apollo motorhome hire with zero-excess insurance and the Gordon River cruise are included; campsites are extra. Sixteen days for an island this size is an unhurried pace, which Tasmania rewards: the distances are short and the weather changes fast. The island is a good deal cooler than the mainland and the highlands get snow outside summer, so the packing matters more than it does on a mainland trip. The Gordon River cruise and the Cradle Mountain shuttles both want booking.