Lake Gairdner Campground in Moina, Tasmania is a free, dog friendly campground a little under 4 hours from Hobart or 1 hour from Devonport or 1 hr 40 mins from Launceston. It was our base for visiting Cradle Mountain and Mount Roland. Cradle Mountain is a 30 minute drive from the campground.
Lake Gairdner Campground is located 3 kilometres down Moina Rd, a gravel road easily accessible to all vehicles. It sits alongside the Iris River and overlooks Lake Gairdner. The campground is quiet, surrounded by farmland, plantation forest and bush land. It also has platypus!
When approaching the campground there is camping on left hand side before the bridge suitable for smaller rigs and on the right hand side after the bridge is a large grass area suitable for large rigs.
The campground has no facilities with most people being self contained and others made like a bear in the surrounding bushes. If you do the latter please make sure you go far from any water source, dig a suitable hole, bury or pick up any rubbish. Disappointingly we saw a numerous little piles of toilet paper left behind by a couple who had camped with their young child. Never to ceases to amaze us that some think it is okay to leave toilet paper and baby wipes lying around.
It is necessary to bring your own water for drinking; we used the river water for just about everything except drinking. The local town Moina has no shops for getting supplies like groceries or fuel so best to come with supplies.
We found this campground very suitable for our dog Chika with its large grass area where she enjoyed running around when there were no other campers. She also found us watching platypus fascinating.
The water in the river was cold however we witnessed a few people brave it for a swim. It is suitable for children to swim under supervision.
The highlight of this campsite is definitely the platypus that are frequently sighted under the bridge. We saw them two out of the four nights we stayed. It pays to be patient as they like to hide under the rocks that hang over the river. This was where we had our first sighting of platypus in Tasmania and it was brilliant.
Also interestingly from the rock wall under which the platypus like to hide, there is water coming out of the rock like a water spout. It was bizarre and is hard to describe as we have never seen anything like it. The water was literally squirting continuously out of a tiny hole in the rock. Google searches found us nothing so if anyone can shed any light please leave a comment.
We really enjoyed the Lake Gairdner Campground. As noted above, it is a good base for day trips to Cradle Mountain and Mount Roland as well as fishing, swimming (for the brave), relaxing or as Daryl discovered practising his golf shots when its quiet.