TASMANIA – CAPE HAUY – 13 February 2026
Perhaps it wasn’t smart booking a walk up to the edge of a cliff on black Friday (what could go wrong?) … but it turned out that nothing bad happened – other than walking up and down a gazillion steps!
You may recall that I did the Three Capes Walk with Beth last year, but on the last day I decided that I couldn’t face all the steps on (what I thought was) the 8k bounce trip out to Cape Hauy. So, I sat in the shade while Beth did the additional walk and then when she got back we finished the 3k down to Fortescue Bay and the end of a memorable walk. At the time I justified not doing that section of the walk with “maybe when I come back to Hobart I’ll pop down and do Cape Hauy as a day walk”. It’s an easy 10k walk but there are a lot of ups and downs (and steps).
Well, here I am in Hobart and I decided to do the walk, but it’s a bit difficult getting to the start of the walk (Fortescue Bay) without hiring a car, and I didn’t want to do that, so I did a Google search for a commercial operator. And, low and behold, there was a day trip by Tours Tasmania so I booked myself in, thinking, “this will be good, there’ll be a few ‘oldies’ on the trip and I wont have to work hard to keep up (lol)”. Lucky for me, Tours Tasmania has only just introduced this walk.
At 7.30am, I rocked up at Hadley’s Orient Hotel (I’d like to have enough money to stay here!) and Tours Tasmania’s people mover picked me up and off we went … me, the guide (more about him later) and two lovely 20+ yr olds, I was going to have to lift my game otherwise they’d be sitting around waiting for me for the next 5 hours!
Our first stop was a lovely bakery, just across the Derwent Bridge where we picked up lunch and hot chocolate, then we settled down for the 2 hour drive to Fortescue Bay.
Well, not straight to Fortescue Bay, we stopped along the way for a view of Cape Hauy in the distance. There are three parts of the Cape, from left to right, The Lanterns, Mitre Rock and then The Candlestick & Totem Pole.
I didn’t take any photos from the track head at the Fortescue Bay campground, I’d taken a lot of photos when I did the Three Capes Walk. Our first stop is the turn of to Cape Hauy with Clint (Clinton) our guide. Turns out Clint was the captain of the boat that brought us across to the start of the Three Capes Walk (last year), AND his son is a caver who is going to be at the cave rescue exercise next weekend. Small world.
The start of our four k bounce walk, and the many steps. TasParks have done a great job in upgrading this track, there are no eroded sections, and the height of the steps is consistently a good height.
This view is what I found so daunting last time, two very steep up-hill sections both there and back!
But the track is very good, nice and wide allowing people from the opposite direction to easily pass.
Up the first big hill.
The track down the first part with the arrow above pointing to where we’d started the route down. In the middle of the photo you can see a small sandy spot, that’s where you can sit, rest and admire the view (you can just see another walker standing there).
We’re on the first big climb, and you can stop for the views along the way (lovely sunny day puts so much colour into the ocean).
A big sea cave, I’d love to be able to go and explore it, but you could only get there by boat.
Great views, that might be Cape Raoul from yesterday.
We’re up the top of the first hill now, what a relief to walk on flat track.
We’ll now have to drop down to a saddle and then there’s another bit uphill section.
You can almost see the steps on the route up.
So, first we have to walk down to the saddle and then up again. By now I’m pretty much over steps, thank goodness I had my walking pole with me.
Up the top of the last section of the track before we get to the pièce de résistance.
Almost there and the views are stunning.
Signs telling us that this section has steep drop-offs on this part of the track, but the view is fabulous.
Big drop off to the left.
I’m sure that others would step across the rocks to look down into this gaping chasm, but not me, am sure the view would have been great.
We’re at the lookout now, looking down to the right (I had to wait for other tourists to finish taking their photos LOL). There’s a great metal fence (you can see the bottom of it in the photo) to prevent people for falling off the rock LOL.
And this is the Totem Pole, I didn’t realise that it was part of the Candlestick. Note the stunning dolerite formations – like organ pipes. When Beth got back to me a year ago after doing this walk, she said “that it (the Totem) wasn’t as impressive” as she expected it would be and I’m inclined to agree, I thought it would be taller than it is.
Another shot of the Totem Pole. So why am I talking about it? It’s 60m high and probably only 1m in diameter and is a famous climbing challenge. The climbers walk the same track that I did, then abseil down to the water at the base of the cliff, swim over to the Totem and then climb it (so says Clint). There have been rescues from the Totem, some climbers got to the top then apparently dropped their rope, they had to wait for the rescuers to come in, climb up with a new rope then they could get back down to the bottom. I hope the rescuers brought a boat to take them back to Fortescue Bay LOL.
Nice view of the edge with the waves braking on the dolerite.
After lunch we started our way back, basically every hill we came down we now had to go up. Was very slow going for me, I’d had enough of steps by now LOL.
But the views were still amazing.
My watch tells me that the walk was a bit longer than 10k, maybe that’s cause I was taking some smaller steps for a while; the whole walk (excluding lunch) was 4¾ hours which was a good pace. I didn’t enjoy all the steps (even the descents were hard work going down hill) but the walk itself was great. I am so glad that I held off and did it as a stand-alone trip, I think I got a lot more out of the walk as a day walk. I’m predicting that this will be a popular day walk for Tours Tasmania.
We all had oysters and a glass of wine on our minds, so we stopped in at a vineyard, that had oysters on the menu, sadly the kitchen had closed so I had to settle for a Florentine biscuit and a chardonnay, not what I had in mind, but still a nice end for the trip, thanks Clint.