A Week's Worth of Adventures in Tasmania

Apologies to everyone in advance. If you don't have a lot of time to spare, stop reading this right now. This post is gonna be a long one! Jen's added her comments on the trip - they appear throughout in bolded italics. So as long as you've got some time, sit back and enjoy!

Also, for whatever reason, Blogger isn't allowing me to post pictures - so I'll try again at a later date to share the pics from this adventure. Gah.

SUNDAY, September 30

Let's see... where to begin... let's go back to last Sunday, Sept. 30, when I was last in Sydney. I caught an early morning flight to Melbourne and landed at the airport here at about 8:30am. Jen was supposed to meet me at the airport but she missed a connecting bus and was still in transit when I called her to let her know I'd arrived. No problems, I figured. This'd give me enough time to go collect my luggage, get a cup of tea, and find the bus stop where she'd come in to meet me.

Well. The luggage carousel had issues. Most people came and got their luggage, the carousel was empty, and it eventually shut off. Problem was, I didn't have my luggage - but then again, neither did about 20 other people, so I felt a little better. We waited for what seemed like forever until an airport technician came to look at the problem. I guess there was a piece of luggage jammed in the belt, because in the end they had to move all our luggage onto another belt before we could get it. The long and the short of it is it took me almost an hour to get my luggage. I headed for the bus stop around 9:30.

Missed the bus. I swear the Melbourne airport is one big conspiracy to make you spend money. I could've hopped on the Sky Bus (for a measly $15) to go straight downtown, but then would still have had to get on the local transit system to make it to my new place. Ugh. Anyway, through a series of frantic phone and text messages to Jen, we finally managed to meet up – I basically sat at the airport at the bus stop until she came to get me. Hooray!

Then it was a 2-bus ride to our new place, 6 Balmer St. I will write more about the house at a later date. It’s pretty nice but I haven’t really met any of the other folks living here yet, and am feeling rather shy. We basically dumped my stuff in our new room and took off again to go and get Jen’s stuff from where she had been living, about a 25-minute walk away. Wow, the house she’d been living in for the past three weeks was a pretty serious hole. It was a prison!!!!!! It smelt like pee! I was finally liberated and moved to the nice place. If you can, check out her facebook page for some sketchy pictures of the Miller House. We met her former housemates Jess, Tony and Tarra, grabbed Jen’s stuff, and headed back to Balmer St. We stayed home long enough this time to unpack our stuff and stow away our suitcases, and then Jen took me downtown for a quick orientation/tour.

The rest of the day passed in a bit of a blur. I was feeling the beginning of a cold coming on, and it was a cold and windy day, and I was a new kid in a new house and a new city. I think I’ve retained enough information from that whirlwind tour to not get myself totally lost when I next go downtown, but that’s about it. That’s a lie, Becky is going to get a lost. I am just waiting so that I can laugh and come get her. My first impression of Melbourne is that it is very similar to Toronto. Lots of trams (streetcars), little shops, big skyscrapers, and a cosmopolitan population. Melbourne seems to be much more diverse than Sydney, a little less touristy, a little more down-to-earth. But we shall see. It is also bloody expensive but has a great chocolate shop!

We ate dinner at Jen’s old house on Miller; it is apparently tradition in these rooming houses here that the rest of the house hosts a dinner for the outgoing person. It’s also tradition for new folks to host an introductory dinner in their new place, so Jen and I will have to start planning that too. Fiesta time but we are not paying for the booze! The Miller house was very chilly, and I could feel my cold worsening all evening. Jess, Tony and Tarra were all very nice and we did have a lovely dinner, but I couldn’t wait to get home to bed.

Tarra came with us to our place on Balmer; she went with us to Tasmania and it made more sense for her to sleep at our place overnight because of the joy of having to catch a very early train. And oh, how early it was!

MONDAY, October 1st

We were up and out of bed at 4am on Monday morning – with me hacking up a lung. Apparently it was time for me to have my annual fall (spring?) cold. I would like to point out that this was my birthday, the day I was getting up so ungodly early. I would like to point out that it was saving us 12$ each and that everyone agreed that it was a good idea to do this because we wanted to do this trip as cheaply as possible. Tarra and Becky were both being sucks because they didn’t get their daily dose of caffeine. Sucks!
So, after having had only about three hours of sleep, we were up again at 4am and out the door to our Tasmanian adventure at 4:30! We had about a 15-minute walk to the train station, where we caught a train downtown, then switched to another train, then to a bus. We couldn’t take the nice, short, easy route that Jen had used the day before to come and get me – oh no, those routes don’t operate early enough in the morning. We arrived at the airport around 6:20am, and our flight didn’t leave until 8:15. There was no other way for us to get to the airport on time.

The flight to Tasmania was only about an hour long. When we arrived in Hobart, it was pissing rain and the wind was howling. I began to dread that this was the weather we were going to have all week! I think I’ve been cold forever. All of my layers put together didn’t stop the wind cutting through. We had to pay $20 to take the shuttle bus from the airport into town (again, no other choice, it was too far to walk and no other public transit), and got dropped off outside the Montgomery Inn, a youth hostel. We checked into the hostel, dumped our bags into storage, and set off to explore Hobart.

We had a few shocks as we explored Hobart. First thing we tried to do was rent a car. I don’t know what big exciting event was happening in Tasmania, but almost every rental place we contacted was completely booked. Yikes! We eventually found Select Car Rentals, a rather sketchy place that rents older cars, and we rented from them. So for the rest of the week we drove around in Bruce, an older-model Nissan Pulsar. Bruce had a teeny weeny fuel tank (like probably 30L), a wonky driver’s seat and no power steering (this is because Becky doesn’t drive standard, if we had a standard car it would have had power steering), but at least he drove reliably! This was, after all, to be our first experience driving on the left side of the road. We arranged to pick Bruce up from the rental place first thing the next morning.

The next shock was the price of food! Food everywhere here is expensive, but doubly so in Tasmania. Imagine our horror when we walked into a local grocery store to buy breakfast items to discover that produce and other staple foods like bread were four times as expensive as we pay in Canada. There is NO WAY I can swallow buying grapes for $14/kg. Or $10 for a coffee and muffin. YIKES. Food was definitely going to be an issue on this trip. We put off the food shopping for a while and tried to explore some more. This is because we went to a sketchy grocery store that didn’t have a lot of selection. I had to pat Tarra hand so that she didn’t freak on the manager.

The pissing rain and howling winds had not let up, so spending any time outside was not fun at all. We ended up ducking into the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, which had the double benefits of (a) being right across the street from our hostel, and (b) being free entry. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon there. It’s not a big museum, but it did have some interesting exhibits on Tasmanian animals, minerals, and history. We loved the Antarctic exhibit. I hadn’t realized (although it sure makes sense) that Tasmania is a popular jumping-off point for Antarctic expeditions, and that many of the world’s most famous explorers have come through here. You could play with snow in the Antarctic exhibit, tempting but I didn’t make a snow ball.

Once we’d had enough of the museum, we decided we really did need to find some groceries. Our plan was to buy breakfast and lunch stuff at the store, and then to go out each night for dinner. Problem was, there was no ‘real’ grocery store anywhere near Hobart’s downtown core, where we were staying (the one we’d stuck our heads into earlier was more like a corner store). And we didn’t have the use of the rental car until tomorrow. So in the end we hiked about eight zillion kilometers out to North Hobart to go grocery shopping. It was well worth the time though! Then we ended up at a little Japanese restaurant for dinner (mostly because it was the only place we’d managed to find where we could eat for under $15), enjoyed noodles and green tea, and headed for bed.

This was my very first time staying in a hostel. In the end I’ve decided it’s much like going to camp, where you may share a bunk room with people you don’t know. But we had a clean room with warm beds, showers and TV available, and a kitchen where we could store and prepare food – all for about ¼ of what you’d pay for a hotel room. We shared our room with a girl from Korea who had come to Tasmania to learn to speak English. I thought she was VERY BRAVE! She’d come all that way by herself, and was now basically stuck in a small town where she didn’t know anyone and didn’t fully understand the language for six whole months. Wow. Kinda makes my wanderings look easy! She also hadn’t found a place to stay yet for the next 3 months and she was going to spend the next day trying to find someone to room with.

And that’s how I spent my 34th birthday. Jen still owes me a cake. There weren’t any at the Japanese restaurant. Jeez, we are in Tasmania for your birthday, suck it up!

TUESDAY, October 2nd

Well, we knew the time was coming sooner or later, and today was the day. One of the purposes of this Tasmanian trip was to learn how to drive on the left hand side of the road. The funny part was that none of us was particularly excited to be the first one to drive! That’s because it is on the side of the freakin road in the city! Did I mention it was the city with a lot of cars around and one way streets. In the end Jen volunteered that’s right I took one for the team, I navigated, and off we went. The first little while as we drove through Hobart was nerve-wracking, but she did OK (Ok?, I did freakin beautifully, no crashes, no screaming and no one in the fetal position during the drive) and soon we were on our way to our first destination, the Hastings Caves and Thermal Springs. The drive through this part of the Tasmanian countryside was so beautiful – the region is apparently known for its apples so we passed lots of orchards in full bloom. (I keep forgetting it’s spring here until something like that reminds me.) What was interesting was that the orchards were, for the most part, surrounded by these huge nets, I guess to keep out pests.

We arrived at the Hastings Caves and went on a 45-minute guided tour. I’ve only included a couple of pictures here, if you know how to find it, go to my facebook page for the whole deal. This was the first cave I’d ever been in and WOW was it cool. (It was a cave, 'nuff said.) The Hastings Caves are unique in Tasmania in that they are formed from dolomite, instead of calcite, which I guess is more common. It was so cool. They had the lighting all rigged so that only the portion of the cave that we were currently in was lit up, and everything else was in darkness. I hadn’t thought of it before, but even the minute amount of light that is brought in by the tourists alters the cave’s natural environment, which has been developing in complete darkness for the past 40 million years. We saw some fantastic stalactites, stalagmites, and other rock formations like sheets and straws. It was wonderful.

There were no bats in this cave, but there was apparently lots of other wildlife, mostly insects. I’m just glad that we didn’t run into the Tasmanian cave spiders, which are prehistoric in body plan and up to 18cm long! We did see some spiderwebs but that was it, which was fine by me!

After the caves, we went to the thermal springs, to go and bathe in the pool there. The water was advertised as being a balmy 28C, but there’s NO WAY the water was that warm! The air temperature was probably about 12C, and the water might have been all the way up to 18C, but no warmer than that. We stayed in long enough to say we’d been in, but that was it. And the change rooms were FREEZING COLD – especially the floor! There was also only 2 showers, so once again Jen took one for the team and waited on the cold, cold floor in her bathing suit for the other two to have their nice warm showers first. Nothing here is heated unless absolutely necessary – it is much more common to find space heaters for the rooms, and never central heating (or air conditioning!). I swear I spent this whole adventure cold. Having a cold sure didn’t help!

We had eaten lunch at the thermal springs, so now it was time to head off to our evening destination – Port Arthur. To get there we had to drive an hour and a half back the way we had come, back through Hobart, and another hour and a half out the other side, down the Tasman peninsula to Port Arthur. Port Arthur is notorious as the penal colony where convicts were sent if they reoffended after being sent to Tasmania in the first place. It was a very modern-thinking prison for its time – at Port Arthur they tried not to just punish the convicts for their wrongdoing, but to mend their ways through counseling, religious worship, and vocational training. Not that it really worked, but at least they tried. Anyway, it’s a fantastic place. We were booked in for a 6:30pm ghost tour, so we had to boot it to Port Arthur in order to get there in time.

Problem was, we hadn’t yet found a place to stay for the night. There were no YHA hostels listed for the Port Arthur area (Jen and I are now members of Youth Hostels International, so we get discounts at their hostels and a bunch of other places – including the tour we did at Port Arthur!). In fact, the guide book I have for Australia listed very few accommodations in the area. We figured we’d get to the town and then see what was available. The only trouble was, there WAS NO TOWN. Port Arthur is JUST the historic site, and there’s no town around it at all – but it’s marked on the map as having a town on the site. ARGH! Anyway, the lady at the info counter at Port Arthur pointed us back up the road to a small campground, which was advertising ‘backpacker’ accommodation. So back we went.

The campground itself was very nice – but the backpacker accommodation turned out to be a bunkhouse, with each room having three TRIPLE bunk beds. No sheets, no nothing. Thank goodness we packed our sleeping bags! We tossed our stuff in the room, locked the door, and headed back to Port Arthur for the ghost tour. Tarra called it the “orphanage” and I agree with her. It was sketchy and it took forever to figure out how to work the lone, tiny, teeny heater in the room. She also sang snippets of Annie.

The tour was really good. Our tour guide was a pretty good story teller and told us tales about some of the residents of the town from the 1860’s. At the convict-built church we learned about how, when it was under construction, one convict killed another in cold blood and then was tried and hanged for the murder… and apparently this was a common occurrence because convicts who had lost all hope would make deals with each other, where the one would kill the other. The trick? By committing murder and then being executed, both convicts end up dead, but their souls are not put in mortal peril since they did not commit suicide. They therefore retain hope of eternal salvation. I got to carry the lantern the entire time but they didn’t let me keep the lantern at the end which is unfair. I also got to be at the end of the tour group and it was my job to herd the stragglers along. It was a perfect job for a teacher.

There were other stories too, and they were certainly creepy… we all jumped while we were in the dissecting room underneath the surgeon’s house, where we learned how convict bodies were sometimes used for anatomy lessons, and the gruesome details of how the bodies were cut apart for study, and how they were disposed of. Ick.

Once we’d finished the tour, Jen, Tara and I were all sufficiently creeped out! We drove slowly back to the campsite, partly because we weren’t really looking forward to sleeping in that icky room, and partly because we were afraid of hitting a wallaby on the road. Almost all the mammals in Australia are nocturnal and we’d been warned not to drive after dark if we could avoid it. I refused to have my first experience with Australian wildlife to be scrapping it off the front of the car and trying to figure out how much it would take out of the car insurance.

But when we pulled into the campground, a wallaby (or at least we thought it was a wallaby at the time) bounced across the road in front of the car – and stopped! It was damn stupid, whatever it was. This led to about 45 minutes of us creeping around the campsite very slowly in the car, looking for marsupials. They were everywhere! We found out later that what we had thought was a wallaby was actually a relative called a pandemelon. They were so tame I could get really close with my camera – and I did! In fact I had to, because at one point, one hopped in front of the car and stopped and wouldn’t get off the road! I got out with my camera to take pictures and try to shoo it away. How cool is that? Jen and Tarra and I were all giggling rather hysterically by the time we got back to the bunkhouse – we had just done the equivalent of stalking raccoons. But it’s definitely way cooler to stalk the wildlife in a foreign country!

I thought our long day had finally drawn to a close, but no. Another group of backpackers had taken up residence in the room next to ours – three (pretty darn good looking) Irish boys and a German girl. We ended up talking with them on the porch outside our rooms for two more hours! So we didn’t get to bed until well after midnight – and then shivered our way through the rest of the night because the heater in our room was not so helpful. They had hired a car from the same place as us and named their car “Erica”. They thought that we needed to name our car as well so we christened the car “Bruce”.

WEDNESDAY, October 3rd

We woke up pretty early on Wednesday morning, mostly because it was so flipping cold in our room. Most of the space heaters here are set to only run for so many minutes, and then they switch themselves off. While this is a logical safety precaution, it is a pain in the butt when it’s been a cold night! We ate yummy caramel muffins in our room as we packed – we wanted to get out of there as soon as we could. Then it was back to Port Arthur for a guided day tour.

Port Arthur is not nearly so scary in the daytime, but still an awesome place. The site was huge – we could have easily spent the entire day exploring, but didn’t have the time. And apparently only 20% of the original colony is still standing. We toured the penitentiary building, the insane asylum, and the ‘separate prison’, where the worst criminals were kept. All creepy and very interesting. All the architecture was beautiful, and I had to keep reminding myself that everything we saw was built by convict labour. How ironic is it that the prisoners had to build their own prison?

Anyway, we finally took our leave of Port Arthur around 11:30, and took off up the east coast of Tasmania towards Freycinet National Park. It was my turn to try driving, and let me tell you, it takes some serious adjusting to driving on the other side! For one, it felt like there was a vast space on my left hand side, and I was constantly driving off the left shoulder of the road (just a little bit) because it was hard to judge the distance on that side. (The fact that Tasmanian roads are so narrow with NO SHOULDERS AT ALL doesn’t help.) Second, I found myself only using the right-side mirror, and not the rear-view mirror at all. This is because as a left-side driver, we’re so trained to constanly flick our eyes up and to the right to catch the rear-view mirror. Third, the transmission was on the ‘wrong’ side. But most annoying was that in our car, the windshield wiper controls were on the left-hand stem on the steering wheel, and the signals were controlled by the right-hand stem. This resulted in me (and everyone else) constantly turning on the windshield wipers when we were trying to signal a turn. This is apparently only switched in SOME Australian cars, which is even more confusing. I’m just glad we had an automatic car – I think having to learn manual at the same time as all the rest of this might have driven me batty!

We decided to take a short cut down some of the side roads. This turned into quite an adventure as the side road quickly degenerated into a dirt track, which felt barely wide enough for one car, let alone two! (It was much easier driving on the left when there was a nice white line painted down the middle of the road to let me know where the car shouldn’t be!) The road was insanely twisty and windy and hilly and with crazy switchbacks. Suffice it to say that by the time we got to the other side, I had white knuckles and was no longer afraid of driving on the left! But the detour was totally worth it – the scenery was beautiful with huge gum forests, pastoral farmland, and occasional glimpse of the brilliant blue ocean. We didn’t die! Woohoo!

We got to Coles Bay, just outside the park, around 2pm, and signed into the hostel there right away. Good thing we did, too, ‘cause it sounded like we got the very last beds available! We stopped only long enough to sign in and claim our beds, and then we were off to the park. The goal was to get to Wineglass Bay, one of the most famous beaches in Tasmania. Turns out that there’s a significant hike up a HUGE mountain and down the other side to get to the Bay. We climbed something like 1000 irregular stone steps up to the pass and again down the other side to the bay, and then back again to get back to the car. I had my knee braces on but let me tell you, that was one painful hike. I kept myself going by reminding myself that (a) I was in Tasmania, (b) the beach at the far end would be worth it (and it was), and (c) at least I wasn’t doing this hike with a canoe on my head.

The hike was spectacular – there were all these huge boulders we had to pass which looked like a giant had dropped a bag of marbles or something. We encountered a wallaby (a real one this time) at the lookout at the top of the pass, and saw dolphins down in the bay on the far side. The sand was big-grained and white. The bay itself curves in a perfect arc – and we were the only people down there except for one lone nature photographer. It was awesome. Who was the only person to go into the water? That’s right, it was me even though it was cold, it was necessary.

The sun was setting by the time we finally got back to the car (it was about a 3.5 hour hike by the time all was said and done), and we headed back to Coles Bay to find some dinner. It was creepy – the town was totally dark! There were no streetlights, and no lights in most of the houses, either. It got to the point where I jokingly told the others that we’d found a nest of vampires. Where WAS everybody? Well, we found ‘em eventually – they were at the ONLY restaurant/bar/café in town! It was not a tavern, it was a cafeteria. I don’t care what the sign said. It took a while for our food to find us, but it was really good. Afterwards we stumbled back to the hostel and practically fell into our bunks, we were so tired. Poor Tarra had a hard time sleeping, because the lady in the bed under her snored worse than I do! (Jen and I had elected to sleep in the bunk bed at the other end of the room, with the theory that at least the two snorers would be together and Tarra might get some peace. Not so much!) She complained that the bed shook, the lady snored so much. It probably did.

THURSDAY, October 4th

We had decided late last night that today we would get up really early (groan) so we could make it up to the Bay of Fires before we had to take Tarra back to Hobart. She had to work on Friday, so had to leave us on the Thursday. (The reality is we didn’t plan this very well; she should have flown back from Launceston, not Hobart – that way we wouldn’t have to double back on our route.) So we were up and out of the hostel by 6:30 am (we actually woke up the hostel staff accidentally; the office wasn’t supposed to open until 8am! Oops.) and on our way. We ate breakfast in the car on the way. Tarra is an excellent traveling chef. She can whip up a sandwich out of nothing.

In Bicheno, we stopped randomly because there was a small sign at the side of the road for a blowhole (which wasn’t, I’d like to point out, indicated on our TOURIST map). This was really cool! A blowhole is an opening in the rocks at the beach where the ocean gets forced up through the hole as the tide comes in. Since, in the Pacific, the ocean is constantly rolling with swells, so water came shooting through the blowhole every minute or so. It turned out to be rather hard to photograph, though. At the biggest swells, the blowhole shot water at least 30 feet!

We made it up to St. Helens by 8:30 in the morning, much earlier than we had expected. (It is very difficult to judge how long it’s going to take you to get anywhere in Tasmania; with the roads being so windy and hilly and all.) We ducked into a grocery store to refill our breakfast and lunch supplies, and enjoyed a hot drink at a local coffee shop. Then we were off to find the Bay of Fires.

The Bay of Fires is so named because the first European explorers to see it sighted numerous Aboriginal fires along its length. It is another incredibly beautiful long stretch of pristine white beach, with low scrubby sand dunes behind, then sweeping up into farmland. Again, we were the only people out there. The wind was whipping up wickedly and it was pretty darn cold (again I was wearing almost all my layers), but at least the sun was out and the water was an incredible brilliant blue.

Tarra took a bit of a nap on the sand, contemplating the waves, while Jen and I walked pretty much the entire length of the beach. We picked up a ton of seashells (hard habit to break) as we walked all the way to the end of the bay, likely at least 3-4km down the beach. Then when we turned around to walk back, the wind was in our face and it felt like we were being sandblasted! My legs felt like they were going to fall off and Becky got caught by the waves and got her shoes wet.

There was some pretty awesome wildlife, too. On the rocky headlands at either end of the bay we found numerous small lizards basking in the sun, although they quickly scurried for cover when we approached them. I saw terns and gulls and white Australian pelicans soaring overhead, and one huge bird that might have been an albatross, although it was too far away for me to get a good look. We will let Becky have the one about the albatross because it was her birthday week but it was just a seagull. Shhhhh! We saw pied oystercatchers and other shorebirds too, and some really funky sea stars. Overall it was definitely a great morning.

By 1pm we knew we had to be on our way so we could get Tarra to the airport on time. We drove back to Hobart on highway 1, a different route than we’d taken to get up to the Bay of Fires, just for a change of scenery. This is also the main north-south road on the island and so was the closest thing to a wide, North American style highway that we’d found. The middle of Tasmania is made up of huge rolling hills that have mostly been cleared for farmland, so we passed endless fields of sheep and horses on our way. It also had cell phone signal and radio stations with music since Bruce only had a tape deck and we had forgotten to bring out tapes. We dropped Tara off at the airport around 3:30, then Jen and I headed off to find a place to stay for the night. Our plan was to head to Mount Field National Park in the morning, which was somewhere on the far side of Hobart (again), and we didn’t want to stay in the city. So we drove out into the countryside on the far side of Hobart and came across the small town of New Norfolk. It was here that we decided to stop for the evening.

By the time we got to New Norfolk, the tourist information centre was already closed. We found a telephone number with the note “backpackers welcome” taped to the door of the information centre, so we called it and ended up staying overnight at the Garden Hotel. The hotel had only been open (reopened, actually) for three weeks, and the place was completely deserted when we got there. It was run by a very nice old man, who gave us our pick of rooms (would’ve been shared accommodation if anyone else had actually been there) and showed us the rest of the facility. What a great place! I’d definitely stay there again.

We had noticed on our way into the town a big complex of old, abandoned buildings, and Jen asked our hotel man what they were. He told us that they used to be a hospital and asylum, but had been closed many years ago. Although there had been some plans to refurbish them and use them as retail space, that had fallen through, and so they were just sitting there empty. For whatever reason, he had a key to get into one of the buildings, so he took us on a tour. It was eerie and a little sad, these big old beautiful buildings, with great architecture, sitting there with their insides gutted and half-rebuilt. It had been an asylum because of all the inbreeding in the town because no one ever left or came to stay.

Jen and I needed to find dinner by this time, so we headed for the main drag of New Norfolk to find, once again, that the entire town had curled up and gone to sleep by 5pm. Nothing was open! We finally got pointed to the “best pizza place in town” (New Norfolk is NOT a big place; just how many pizza places could there be?) and ordered pizzas for dinner. We went back to the hotel to eat and discovered that we were no longer alone at the hotel – another pair of backpackers (honeymooners from Oregon) had arrived and were staying in a room down the hall. We sat in the common room together and ate our dinners, then they retired to their room and Jen and I enjoyed a night off, watching TV. It was hard to keep our eyes open, we were so tired, but we made it all the way to the end of the premiere of Bionic Woman. This is a show I’ll definitely be following this year!

FRIDAY, October 5th

We enjoyed sleeping in, in our warm and cozy beds, until 8am, then headed to the common room to eat our breakfast. The couple from Oregon had already left the hotel, so we were completely on our own again. All I have to say is thank goodness for TEA. Like all the other places we’d stayed, this hotel was not heated, and the outside temperature was maybe 10C. Although we had a heater in our room, the common room was definitely cold. I don’t think I’d truly appreciated the wonders of central heating before coming to Australia. I promise I will never take it for granted again, once I return to Canada!

The destination for the day was Mount Field National Park, about a 45-mintue drive away from New Norfolk. Once there, Jen and I hiked along several beautiful trails through incredibly lush rainforest. Mount Field is famous for its waterfalls, among other things, and we enjoyed three of the falls – Russell Falls (supposedly the most photographed falls in all of Australia), Horseshoe Falls and Lady Baron Falls. We also walked the Tall Trees track and saw the tallest hardwood trees in the world. These are swamp gums, which grow almost as tall as the redwoods in California. The one pictured here was as big around as a small car and about 90m tall. WOW. Did we ever see a platypus? No! Promises were made and not kept!

The rainforest we walked through was amazing. Everything was lush and green and wet. There had been quite a lot of rainfall in Tasmania recently, so the streams were all flowing really quickly. That was a bit of a bummer because we were so hoping to spot a platypus in the wild. No luck, unfortunately. When we got back to the visitors centre to buy postcards, we laughed at the pictures they showed of Russell Falls, with graceful slim trickles of water sliding over the rocks – the waterfall we saw was a glorious raging torrent!

We had some time before we needed to be back in Hobart, so we decided to drive up the mountain to see what it was like at the top. How incredible that was! We drove for about 20 minutes up these crazy, steep, switchbacked, narrow dirt roads, and ended up on an alpine moor – complete with snow and scrubby growth. And it was COLD! We ate lunch in the car, just drinking in the beautiful view. Then it was time to (carefully!) drive back down the mountain and head back into town. Becky wanted to build an inukshuk just to mess with the locals' heads.

When we had been exploring New Norfolk yesterday, we’d come across a really cool poster advertising an exhibit of 19th century nature art in Hobart – so when we got to Hobart, we tromped around town until we found the library (it was closing in 10 minutes, we didn’t tromp around town, we ran and nearly mowed over a few people to make it there before it closed for the night and it wasn’t open on Saturdays) where the exhibit was, ‘cause I really wanted one of the posters. Turned out that the exhibit was free, so we went in and enjoyed it too! Cat – you would have LOVED this. It was all about the beautiful, anatomical drawings done by the naturalists and explorers of the 19th century. The library itself was really neat too – it had displays of all this 200-year-old furniture, books, and other artifacts. Well worth the visit.

We ate dinner at the same little sushi place we’d eaten in on our first night in Hobart, then strolled around the harbor for about an hour before heading back to the hostel to go to bed. You could tell that both Jen and I had had about enough of sharing bedrooms with other people – there was a lady we were sharing with this night that we didn’t really want to talk to (all she did was whine), so we stayed out as long as we could so all we’d have to do when we got back to the hostel was go to bed. I was also surprised at how much of a difference it made that it wasn’t windy – again the temperature was probably only 10C, but unlike our first night in Hobart there was no wind, and it was quite pleasant to stroll around. (Well, either that or I was finally getting acclimated to Tasmania’s crazy weather!) She made me get ice cream. After all the moaning about the cold, she bought ice cream. Nutter!

SATURDAY, October 6th

Jen and I had to head back to Melbourne today, but we’d booked the later flight on purpose. Each Saturday, Hobart hosts a huge open-air market at Salamanca Place. For those of you who’ve been there, imagine the St. Jacobs Market suddenly materializing on a typical downtown street for a day. It was a wonderful place, full of great (cheap!) food, local handicrafts, and all sorts of neat things. I caved and bought my first ‘real’ (i.e. not a postcard) souvenir of the trip – a glass fish to add to my growing window aquarium. It took forever, she would wander by and then think about it and then wander away and then back again. We wandered around the market until almost 3pm. I also really liked the random art exhibit we found… put on by a local private school, and displaying the artwork of kids at the school from kindergarten all the way through to grade 10. Very cool.

We caught the shuttle bus back to the airport around 3:30 and let me tell you I was more than happy to (a) sit down and (b) be somewhere warm. I swear I’d been cold for a week at this point. It was pretty heavenly to just sit in the airport lounge and sip a mug of tea, even though it was ridiculously expensive. We discovered when we arrived that our flight had been delayed by about a half hour, so we had a lot more time to kill than expected. Jen found some internet terminals and we each paid for 20 minutes of internet time, which allowed me to catch up on some of the eight kajillion emails I got while I was away (thanks for all the birthday wishes, by the way!).

We finally boarded the airplane around 6:30 and were back in Melbourne around 7:45 – to find that the last local city bus had left for town around 6pm. GRR. So we ended up having to take the (EXPENSIVE) Sky Bus into downtown Melbourne, then walk two blocks and take a tram back out to our suburb. On the way we picked up some subs for dinner – by now it was about 9:30pm and all we really wanted to do was go to bed. I was so happy to see our house! I was on a rant most of the time about Skybus and Subway but Becky just laughed at me.

There was, however, one more surprise waiting for us. We opened the front door of our house to find a ton of little kids (????) music, and a serious party going on! Apparently it was Lorenzo’s (one of my new house-mates) 40th birthday – and it felt like half the planet was in our house. We were so tired that it was all a little overwhelming, and we snuck up the stairs and went off to bed. The problem was that our bathroom (each room in this house is assigned a bathroom) was down on the ground floor – right by the kitchen – and so we needed to go down into the middle of the party in order to get ready for bed. Keep in mind that I had had basically no chance to meet any of the folks I’m now living with, I was exhausted and grouchy and wasn’t really in the mood to socialize. So unfortunately I went to bed last night feeling more than a little un-neighbourly. Things got better today though. But I’m going to save that story for tomorrow – ‘cause really, this blog is already long enough!