The Tasmania Ring: 1,182 km, and not one boring hour

Every other ride on this site is about covering distance. This one is about not needing to.

Tasmania is roughly the size of Ireland, and you can ride around the entire thing in a week without hurrying. The full ring — Devonport, Launceston, up the east coast, down to Hobart, across to the west coast and back — measures 1,182 km. That is less than Melbourne to Brisbane. It is also, corner for corner, the best week of riding in Australia.

The ratio is the point. Fourteen hours of engine time, seven days of trip. Everywhere else in the country, the road between two good things is the tax you pay. Here the road between two good things is one of the good things.

Why it is not part of the Big Lap

Worth clearing up, because people ask.

The Southern Cross Lap is a continuous sealed road around mainland Australia — you can ride the whole 14,791 km without ever putting the bike on a boat. Bass Strait breaks that. Tasmania needs the Spirit of Tasmania out of Geelong, about eleven hours across, and the crew strap your bike to the vehicle deck.

So Tasmania is not a detour off the lap. It is its own closed ring, and it stands on its own.

Book early. Motorcycle spaces are limited and summer sailings go months ahead.

Anticlockwise, and here is why

From Devonport most riders go east first — Launceston, Scottsdale, St Helens — and there is a good reason beyond habit. It puts the west coast at the end, when you have your eye in.

East coast (Devonport → Hobart, ~450 km). The Great Eastern Drive runs the Tasman Sea side through St Helens, Bicheno and Swansea, with Freycinet hanging off it.

The Tasman Peninsula. An hour south-east of Hobart, and the detour most people skip and then regret. Sea cliffs up to 300 m — the highest in the southern hemisphere — and Port Arthur at the end of them.

The west coast (Hobart → Devonport, ~600 km). This is the reason to come. Out through New Norfolk, past Lake St Clair, and into the descent to Queenstown — a series of switchbacks cut into a hillside stripped bare by a century of copper smelting, which looks like nowhere else on earth. Then Strahan on the harbour, north up the Murchison Highway through rainforest, and the climb to Cradle Mountain.

The west is emptier, colder and wetter than the rest of the island. It is also where the riding stops being scenic and starts being serious.

What to actually plan for

Weather changes fast and hard. The highlands can do four seasons in an afternoon in any month. Pack for cold and wet even in February.

Fuel is closer together than the mainland but the hours are shorter. West coast towns are small; do not roll into Rosebery at 8 pm expecting a pump.

Wildlife at dawn and dusk is a genuine hazard, not a caution sticker. Tasmania has more roadkill per kilometre than anywhere else in the country and the animals that cause it are the size that will put you down. Ride the middle of the day.

The roads are narrow and the surface varies. Log trucks use the west coast highways. Gravel patches appear on corners after rain.

Ride it, then ride it again backwards

The other thing about a 1,182 km loop is that it is short enough to repeat. Riders who do the ring clockwise one year and anticlockwise the next will tell you it is a different road — because it is. Corner entry, camber, where the sun sits, what you see coming.

That is a luxury a 15,000 km lap does not give you.