Tasmania

Hobart is one of the world's most appealing small capitals — a hilly sandstone city wrapped around a working waterfront beneath Mount Wellington (kunanyi), whose summit road or hike gives a sweeping view over the city and the Derwent. The Saturday Salamanca Market fills a row of restored 1830s warehouses with food, craft and produce, and the harbour serves some of Australia's best fish. The game-changer, though, is MONA — the Museum of Old and New Art, reached by a fast catamaran upriver, a daring, subterranean private museum that mixes ancient antiquities with confronting contemporary art and stages the midwinter Dark Mofo and summer Mona Foma festivals. South of the city, the Tasman Peninsula adds dramatic dolerite sea cliffs, the wildlife cruises of Tasman Island, and the Port Arthur Historic Site, a UNESCO-listed 19th-century convict settlement set in gardens above the water.

The island's wild heart is its greatest draw. Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park, part of the vast Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, frames the jagged dolerite of Cradle Mountain above the still water of Dove Lake — the Dove Lake circuit is one of the world's great short walks, and the park is the start of the six-day Overland Track to Lake St Clair. To the west, the landscape turns to deep, dripping temperate rainforest, button-grass plains and wild rivers: Strahan on the harbour of Macquarie Heads is the gateway, with cruises up the tannin-dark Gordon River into the rainforest and the West Coast Wilderness Railway climbing through the ranges. The Franklin River, saved from damming in a landmark 1980s campaign, remains one of the planet's premier wilderness rafting trips. Further north, the Tarkine (takayna) holds one of the largest tracts of cool-temperate rainforest on earth.

Tasmania's east coast is the sunny, beachy counterpoint to the wild west. Freycinet National Park, halfway up the coast, is the star: a peninsula of pink-granite peaks (the Hazards) above a coastline of white-sand bays, with the famous lookout walk to Wineglass Bay's perfect curve and longer hikes around the peninsula. North of it, the Bay of Fires runs for kilometres in a sequence of bright orange-lichen-covered granite boulders, turquoise shallows and squeaky white sand — among the most photographed beaches in Australia and a destination for guided lodge-to-lodge walks. The coast between is dotted with oyster farms, quiet fishing towns like Bicheno (with its evening penguin colony) and the Wine Glass-to-Coles Bay food trail. The drive from Hobart up the east coast and back across the centre is the classic Tasmanian loop.

Tasmania's cool, clean climate has made it one of Australia's finest larders, and eating and drinking are central to a visit. Bruny Island, a short ferry from south of Hobart, has become a self-contained food trail of oysters, cheese, fudge, whisky and wild coastline. The Tamar Valley around Launceston in the north produces some of Australia's best cool-climate and sparkling wines, with cellar doors strung along the river. The island's single-malt whisky distilleries have won the world's top awards and now anchor a tasting trail of their own. And the wildlife is everywhere: wombats grazing the Cradle Mountain buttongrass, pademelons and echidnas by the trails, little penguins on the coast at dusk, and the endangered Tasmanian devil, best seen at conservation sanctuaries such as those near Cradle Mountain and on the Tasman Peninsula, where breeding programmes protect the species.