Just got back from a five day holiday with Megan Foltz touring, hiking, and biking around the great island of Tasmania (an island about the size of West Virginia off the southeastern coast of Australia) I kept a journal of my travels, so I'll give you some of the highlights of each day. Warning: you may need to read this in different parts, its super long.
Saturday- Our first bus on the way to the airport at 8:45am was driven by a mumbling middle aged man who kept swearing and people on the road and talking to himself. Interesting way to start five days of traveling. Flew from Perth to Melbourne and then further south to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. We shuttled into Hobart at about 9:30pm, and had to use the after hours entrance to get into our hostel and find our rooms for the night. We had called them to say we would be later then the desk closing at 9pm, so they gave us an access code to the back gate and had our keys and linens ready to go in the registration area. Megan and I needed food, so we headed downtown to a business district looking for a 24 hour bakery that we had heard about. Hobart was beautiful at night.
Wet leaves lay on the ground that had fallen from trees (remember it's fall into winter here, and most trees in Australia don't lose their leaves during Fall). Some of the trees were lit up with white lights like during Christmas time, and the whole shopping/club square that we visited had a warm and crisp feel to it. We eventually found the bakery after failed attempts at a Taco and Italian place, and filled up on sandwiches before heading back to the hostel and bed. Wake up call the next morning: 6:13am to meet the tour bus at 6:25am. Too bad really, Hobart is easily the most interesting city in Tasmania.
Sunday
Grabbed a granola bar and two banana bread muffins Megan and I had made especially for the trip, brushed my teeth quickly, checked out of the hostel, and walked to the meeting point to meet our Adventure Tours Australia tour guide & bus. Megan, I and five other tourists were going to be led around the West Coast of Tasmania for the next three days by an Adventure Tours guide, seeing the best spots on the west coast and learning about the history, biology, and geology of Tasmania. The first stop after the HQ was big national park right outside of Hobart with some pretty awesome waterfalls. I'm going to make the pictures small so that I can fit more, but simply click on them to supersize them.
Our tour guide, Triso (from Christopher), was an Australian tour veteran. His memorable phrases include:
"No wuckers!" - no worries "gnoshing" - eating "too easy" good job guys, lets go somewhere else
"feral" wild, uncivilised, and lots of other funny Australian saying.
This is Russell falls at Mt. Field Park. We stopped here, hiked to the falls, and learned about the Eucalyptus trees that dominated the cold climate rainforest (one of three in the world)
We then stopped at Lake St. Clair for lunch, the deepest lake in Australia. Kind of an overcast day, and there were no kayaks/cool mountains around, so it was pretty much just a lake. Still, good place to eat lunch though.
Next it was onto the Franklin River. Because of the lack of snowmelt at this time of year, it was a Franklin time stream. Still cool though, because protests in the 70s opposing the damming of the Franklin River in Tassie actually started the Green Political Party (Environmental) Good on ya. Also did a wilderness trek around the river, and learned about shield ferns and razor ferns (soft one way you touch them, serrated the other way)
Moved on to Laffey Falls, and probably some of the most beautiful waterfall/forest scenery ever. Tassie (Tasmania) was starting to reveal why it is an awesome place to be.
After finishing up at Laffey we stopped quickly in the boom silver town of Queenstown, and then quickly moved on to Strahan to stay for the night. The Tour company actually owned a house in Strahan, so we were able to hang out in a really nice house, eat a great dinner of stir fry, and watch the 80's adventurer Alby Mangles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVG1A5Ow9k0 (Hilarious, just has random adventures around the world and makes some of the worst decisions ever about surviving in the Australian outback.)
Monday
In the morning we explored the coastal town of Strahan in which we were staying. It was a beautiful town near the water, and famous for Huon Pine (a slow growing tree that can reach over 3,000 years of age and is rot resistant). A store owner actually gave us a free slab of Huon pine, so I'm planning on shaping carving it into something.
Next we moved on to a beach on the Western Coast of Tassie and learned about the currents that cause the weather to be so extreme and the whaling that happened in Tasmania in the 1800s. It was a great beach, but the average wave height was 3-6m (9-18 feet), so not exactly the kind of beach where you might go for a swim. After the ocean Megan and I explored a dunes system, (we were supposed to 4 wheel over the dunes, but the operator was on a month holiday), and then ate lunch.
After the dunes, we started moving into the reason that we came to Tasmania: hiking. After lunch and about a two hour drive we arrived at the base of Cradle Mt. National Park in the northwest of Tasmania. The clouds lifted for a bit and revealed part of the mountain peak, just as a rainbow came into view. We explored the forest (I saw my first wild wombat!), were introduced to the park, saw the mountain chalet that had been built by an Austrian man about 100 years ago, and prepared for tomorrow's hike around the mountain.
So after some cursory exploration, we went back to the cabins where we were bunking for the night and ate dinner. It was a rough night socially because our group wasn't the most talkative and there isn't a lot to do in a mountain cabin without a deck of cards, but dinner was great and I was excited for the hike in the morning.
Tuesday (if you are wearing down, this may be a good time to take an intermission from reading)
We woke up around 8am, made our lunches for the hike, and bussed out to the mountain.
There is me right before the climb. We weren't climbing to the very top, but we were circling around the lake through the mountains, reaching about 3 smaller peaks, and getting the view from the top without actually going there. If you look at the picture, we climbed to the point where the vegetation ends on that mountain and the rock face becomes vertical. We followed the path along that line all the way across the main peak, which is why the trail is called the "face track".
(There were random beautiful lakes along the path, like the one on the left. The picture on the right was taken as we neared the face of the main peak)
It was an pretty rigorous hike. There were sections where you had to pull yourself up steep hills with chains, and our guide was a vigorous hiker and kept the pace moving swiftly. Luckily, we stopped often for pictures and water, and it was only about a 4 hour hike, so it wasn't taxing to the point of complete exhaustion. Megan, I, and another hiker shared a beer at the top of our hike during lunch. We had definitely earned it. We stopped at a couple of peaks for a picture break on the way down, and made it back to the car park at around 12:30pm. (We had left at around 8:15am)
After the hike we stopped in a great little town called Sheffield that had beautiful murals on almost building, and Reeses Peanut Butter cups, which are impossible to find in Australia and cost $5. But it was so worth it. Then we stopped at a chocolate factor and grabbed more candy, and then were dropped of in the northern port town of Devenport for the end of the adventure tour.
Megan and I, now on our own, had been dropped off in front of Molly Malone's, and Irish backpackers in Devenport. Just a bit about Devenport. It's a port town of about 20,000 on the northern coast of Tas with beautiful views of the ocean. Other than that, Devenport is boring.
Simply put, there is nothing to do in Devenport after a 30 minute tour of the shopping places in town. The first local that I saw was a 13 year old kid sliding down a ramp of cardboard on a grassy hill in a town park. That's Devenport. The first night we planned a bike rental for the next day, ate a delicious and massively portioned dinner at Molly Malone's, wrote about the adventures of the trip and went to bed.
Wednesday
Megan and grabbed some breakfast at a small little bakery with huge pastries at cheap prices and then picked up two bikes at a rental shop in south Devenport. The rest of the day was spent pleasantly riding around the coastline and nature parks in Devenport. After riding out of town and into some random country, we came to a beach called Don Heads. Across the water we could see where we had started riding from, but an inlet separated up from the other side and the only cross was a railroad track.
We met a nice local who told us two things: One, trains only came across the tracks three times a day, so we could cross it as long as we did it before 1pm (it was about 11:30am). Two, we could reach a secluded beach along the coastline called paradise cove if headed up this slightly hidden trail, hopped a couple of fences and climbed down the side of a mountain. Half an hour later after passing a private property sign and running into a barbed wire fence, Megan and I abandoned hope of finding such a cove. (Although I did explore past the barbed wire fence, much to the dismay of Megan). Even though the man had led us astray in this regard, the railroad seemed like a great piece of advice, because the trek back the way we had come would had taken at least an hour.
Crossing the first half of the railroad couldn't have gone more smoothly. The river was shallow and about 30 feet below (a fall would have meant certain death), but the bridge was wide enough so that it was a comfortable walk across, at least without a train. I decided that this would be a great moment to photograph, but I stopped, took a picture of Megan, and passed her the camera. As she was about to take one of me standing proud on the tracks, we heard a small whistle in the distance. My mind thought, hmm, that sounds familiar... a second louder whistle made Megan quickly abandon the picture idea, grab our bikes, and sprint to get off the second half of the track. We made it, only to realize that the trail whistle we had heard was from a small tourist train in a neighboring park, and not coming near our tracks. Still, my heart pounds just remembering how I felt when I was sure that I had to get off the track as quickly as possible or face certain death under the wheels of a massive locomotive.
(There is Megan before the train, and a dramatic reenactment of me running after we realized that we were safe.)
Last of Wednesday and Home on Thursday
Wow this has been a long summary, so I will wrap it up. We at lunch, returned the bikes, explored the shopping area of Devenport in the afternoon, ate a great dinner again at Molly's, had a fun night, and then went to bed. The next morning we learned that our flight was delayed 3 hours, but with nothing to do and a check out time six hours before our flight, Megan and I decided to hike the six miles to the airport through some country road. It reminded me of roads in Mt. Angel, except for the beach. After about three miles a nice old man picked us up and brought us the rest of the way.
(Out walking to the airport in the country)
Our flights got delayed or switched around about 5 times, which resulted in $40 of free airport food courtesy of Qantas. Finally, at 9:00pm (it was supposed to be 7pm, then 9pm, then 5pm, then 9 pm again) we made it back to Perth and got a taxi to the train station to ride back to Fremantle.
Tasmania was one of the best places that I have ever been. The scenery was great, our tour guide was hilarious and full of facts and Australian phrases, and Megan and I had a fun time traveling around.
