10 Unique & Niche Activities to Try in Tasmania for an Unforgettable Trip

Though Tasmania is small on maps, it is life-size in real life. Though postcard-breathtaking views and nosh are abundant, Tasmania does have its share of offbeat, quirky, and hence memory-creating activities. Regardless of what your passion is, art, food, history, or adventure, here are ten things to get your Tasmanian adventure revved up.

1. Evandale Village Fair
2. Franklin River Rafting
3. Hobart’s Lark Distillery
4. The Agrarian Kitchen
5. Bruny Island
6. Willow Court Asylum Ghost Tour
7. Kuuma Nature Sauna
8. Art Farm Birchs Bay
9. St Helens’ Bay of Fires Trail
10. Stargazing at Pumphouse Point

Race back in time at Evandale.

Imagine streets filled with colonial homes, the residents in costume, and giant front wheel penny farthings whizzing by. That’s life when the National Penny Farthing Championships visit Evandale in February. It is not a festival; it is a procession of nostalgia and reunion, one of the Evandale Village Fair.

If you find yourself off colour in Tassie during February, return in March when Evandale returned to its role as the arts complex. The Glover Prize, Australia’s national award for landscape painting, is when the nation’s top artists submit to the old show pavilion in Evandale for consideration. Mix the painting and the racing, and Evandale shows small towns can provide big vacations.

Raft the celebrated Franklin River

The Franklin River is not water; it’s green battle, wilderness, and history in a nutshell. The river itself was the focus of one of Australia’s greatest green battles in the 1980s when it was rescued from being dammed by fierce conservationists.

Now you can drift up wild Franklin by rafting its twisty rapids, swimming over wide gorges, and drifting down rainforest-fringed stretches of still water. Multi-day adventures are offered by operators like Franklin River Rafting that alternate action and relaxation. It’s not a raft holiday, it’s an expedition into Tasmania’s untamed bush.

Make your own Tasmanian Whisky.

The boutique distillery, since the prohibition of distillation in 19,92 were still raking in awards for spirits made from clean island air and clean water. You can find out how to become part of a two-hour blending masterclass at Hobart’s Lark Distillery and bring your own hand-bottled result home.

For the rest who’d rather use it for the rest of their drinking skills, multi-day immersion courses at Old Kempton Distillery and Killara Distillery exist, from the selection of the grain through to aging in barrels.

Whatever your category, Tasmania’s whisky culture is worth exploring and sampling, and even doing yourself. You can discover more of Tasmania’s rich food and wine culture by exploring the island’s many food and wine trails.

Download Take a Local app to guide your journey with insider tips, trail maps, and must-visit distilleries along the way.

Forage for your Feed

Tasmania’s natural treasures are not that food comes to find you, but that you may stand up and go and get it yourself.

Hear about Tasmania’s history and culture while learning to cook in a class run by The Agrarian Kitchen, where you’ll forage for freshly harvested fruit and vegetables from the garden itself and cook to your heart’s content. 

A pinch of culture is added, Palawa Kipli, with Tasmanian Aboriginal bush foods added to your cookbook and keeping you anchored in the ways of old through activities on the land.

Or if you don’t want to do it all yourself, there’s King Island’s Wild Harvest with paddock-to-plate quality, the island’s best. Whether you do it or not, the slow process of gathering and consuming what you’ve gathered provides a sense of place you simply can’t get anywhere else.

Slow Island Travel

Slow travel in Tasmania is not something to be done; it’s the only option.

Experience slow travel with Tasmanian Walking Company to the Bruny Island Long Weekend, a rich combination of gourmet food, beach relaxation, and day walking.

You can try a six-day walking along granite ridges, secluded beaches, and fissured bush, or indulge yourself in the three-day Maria Island Walk, with a mixture of wildlife observation, historic depth, and easy ambling.

These wanderers entice you to take deep breaths, slow down, and become heart and soul to the world.

Find Architectural Treasures

It is the settler, convict, and community history that characterizes Australian architecture.

Launceston laneways and battered facades have to be strolled alone. For a day out, the Willow Court Asylum Ghost Tour in New Norfolk provides chilling ghost stories of the environment. Horse and cart or foot road twists Hobart through sandstone cottages in a time warp.

With bunks, woodfires, and little else, it’s a surprisingly cozy way to engulf yourself in Tasmania’s heritage.

Feel the Outdoor Sauna Ambiance

There are plenty of saunas everywhere around the globe, yet Tasmania utilizes them and supports them with the lovely outdoors.

The Kuuma Nature Sauna is a wood-fueled sauna floating in the ocean off Hobart’s southern coastline, on which you sweat, plunge into the sea, and do it all again. Derby Floating Sauna Lake, in erstwhile mining camp transformed into hip hotspot for mountain-biking, does it all but in picturesque lake surroundings”.

Penguin and Burnie north suburbs also discovered sauna culture, and Sweaty Penguins in Hobart has a saucy title and ice cool showers, too. Tasmanian Health.

Find Elemental Art

Not all Tasmanian art is in galleries; there is art that seeps out on the roads, where landscape and art collide.

West coast, drive the Western Wilds Art Trail, where statues tower over a breathtaking view. Sheffield buildings are hidden behind murals so that the town is essentially an open-air museum. Artists paint en plein air as they are entering a city festival competition called the November Mural Fest.

South of us is Art Farm Birchs Bay, which combines a sculpture trail with scented native pepper paddocks. There, every one of the hidden hard yards, you’re sensitive to every inch of your body.

Barrel Downhill on a Mountain Bike

Tasmania is the world capital of mountain-biking, and it should be.

St Helens’ Bay of Fires Trail meanders from alpine slope to beach sand. Blue Derby features more than 125km of internationally class trail, through rainforest, ranging from cruisy easy to whoopful downhill.

For uncompromising raw downhill thrills, Maydena Bike Park delivers high-octane gravity-powered action. In Queenstown, the Mt Owen Trail Network soars over moonlit dry plains as stunning as the ride. Adrenaline seekers will discover that mountain biking here leaves one panting.

Chase Twinkling Lights Across the Stars

When the sun goes down in Tasmania, the spectacle is far from its finale–it’s just getting going.

With no light pollution, the island has some of Australia’s finest stargazing. Nighttime at Pumphouse Point, jutting out over Lake St Clair, has the Milky Way shining like it does anywhere else in the world.

The photographers have the option of hiring Luke Tscharke or Luke O’Brien to photograph the majesty of the night sky. And if you are extremely, extremely lucky, you would get to see the Aurora Australis, the southern lights, paint the sky purple and green. As enchanting as it is, when it does occur, it would be one that you would not want to miss.

Travel Tip: For more of the island’s off-the-beaten-path gems, download: Take a local app.

Tasmania invites the off-grid adventurer to venture off the beaten path. Or indulge in rafting on wild rivers or tasting home-brewed whisky, chasing aurora light shows, or puffing and blowing in lakeshore saunas. In Tasmania, the island is an adventure park for the adventurous seeking some of the off-the-grid.

Each alternative festival, underground arts walk, and tourist-tinted bike ride is a tale to be told of Tasmania’s global culture, imagination, and enduring respect.

Do not mark boxes on the top of your must-do list when you return, dive into the unexpected, the niche, and the unforgettable because the memories of Tasmania are the ones that you did not even know you would desire.