What Makes Me Laugh

I was going to call this post, “The Last Supper” and then I realized just how inappropriate that would be on Good Friday.

On our final day in Tasmania and our final night in Australia, we sampled some of the best that the country has to offer. The best rainforest in Tasmania has to be Mount Field National Park, which sits near the heart of Tasmania’s wildest country.

Mount Field's gorgeous rainforest

Russell Falls

We took a beautiful circuit hike amongst the tall trees and waterfalls of Mount Field in the morning, but not before we sampled the best coffee and hot chocolate in Tasmania.

Australians are serious about coffee. Bars (or pubs, as they call them) have espresso machines. Even a lot of gas or petrol stations have espresso machines – although we passed on one that offered espresso made from instant coffee (eeugh). I don’t drink coffee, but I do drink hot chocolate, and I can say that the hot chocolate is much better there too — not so sweet, and a lot finer chocolate than Hershey’s.

Anyway, we stopped at the Possum Shop and had our best coffee and a delectable breakfast of sticky date pudding, which is not a pudding at all, but more of a gooey caramel cake, and scones and fresh raspberry jam. I’m salivating just thinking about it.

Doug was on a quest to find the best fish and chips in Tasmania. Seriously, if he could have, he would have eaten fish and chips for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He thought the best was found in Strahan, on the west coast, but a pretty good runner-up was found in Hobart, where we stopped before our evening flight. The high-end fish is blue eye trevalla, a meaty white fish that is probably most similar to cod in our part of the world.

Downtown Hobart

After the fish and chips

Like a lot of nights while we were traveling, we missed having a proper dinner. This time our flight times interfered and by the time we arrived in Adelaide it was past nine, and past closing for most restaurants (they close really early in Australia). So we dined on takeout pizza on a park bench while listening to a woman playing an acoustic guitar at a local pub cover Green Day’s “Time of Your Life” and watching the intensely bright southern hemisphere stars. It sounds sappy, but it was the best last supper to be found in Australia.

So I went to see an astrologist. Once. In December, when I was hoping she could tell me for sure when winter would end in Montana. Seriously, I went to her to make sure my psychic was accurate. Does that make me a flake? Probably, but she was right about my trip to Australia. She accurately predicted the exact dates of the trip and said that it would be perfect and it was.

And, if I didn’t know better, I would say that we were under some very lucky stars because all of our good timing (ferry departures, activity bookings, etc.). It couldn’t have been easier or turned out better. On our final night in Tasmania the stars twinkled and we lucked into the best accomodations of the whole trip for cheap. Tarraleah.

After a day spent exploring Strahan and Tasmania’s Western Coast Wilderness we did some laundry and hit the curvy road back over the mountains before the wildlife lit out. I had booked two nights in Strahan, but the Harbour Views B&B had a bed about as hard and comfortable to sleep on as a round granite rock and we couldn’t stand the thought of another night in pain.

Ocean Beach

Even the vegetation is wild in western Tasmania

So, we headed into central Tasmania without accomodation booked and hoped that we wouldn’t have to sleep in the car. We arrived back at Lake St. Clair National Park at dusk and checked with the park first for a cabin. No luck, except we saw a wild wombat (which was lucky). Then, we went to the one hotel in town. All they had were backpacker accomodations, which were rows of storage-unit looking rooms with no windows and smelly beds. We passed.

But the manager was really kind and called ahead for us to Tarraleah. Lo and behold, they had a cabin for a reasonable price. We’ll take it. Once again managing to miss all of the noctural wildlife (Doug’s good driving) we arrived at Tarraleah after dark and checked into our “cabin” which turned out to be much bigger than our house at home. Tarraleah is a resort community built from historic houses used by workers who were building a hydroelectrical development in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Tarraleah - the front sitting room of our "cabin"

It was by far the nicest place we stayed while in Tasmania and one of the cheapest. Lucky indeed.

One of my favorite New England yarns from Doug is a story about a tourist who stops at a little town in Maine to ask for driving directions. He sees an old Mainer sitting outside a coffee shop and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Bangor?”

The Mainer looks at him, and slowly drawls out, “You can’t get there from here.”

Puzzled, the tourist asks, “Well, where does this road go?”

“Don’t go nowhere,” the Mainer answers. “Stays right here.”

I wish you could hear Doug tell it in his New England accent. It kills me every time.

During the last part of the trip, I felt a lot like that tourist in Maine. The roads in Tasmania didn’t seem to go anywhere but there.

Before we left on our trip, I studied up on Tasmania, visiting travel websites and keeping a hefty Fodor’s guide by my besides at night. Fodor was pretty good except in one regard. They offered this piece of advice, “Most places within Tasmania are within easy driving distance.” And you would think so, given that Tasmania is about the size of West Virginia and also because I’m from Montana, I have a bit of an ego about driving long distances to get to good spots.  

What the guidebook didn’t say is that the roads are all narrow, mostly curvy, and it’s not at all advisable to drive at night because the woods spit nocturnal wildlife onto the road every five minutes.  

Oh, and then there is the left side of the road thing. Doug did an admirable job of driving, and only forgot a couple times (when we were on very rural roads) that he should be driving on the left, not the right. We probably had the cleanest windshield in Tasmania though because every time he went to turn on the blinker (usually on the left) he hit the windshield wiper instead.

Doug in the driver's seat on the right

So, when I planned the trip to Tasmania I had one of those traveler dilemmas — stay in one place and get to know it really well (i.e. a backpacking trip) or try to see as much as possible because you may never come back. I opted for the latter and booked a couple of nights on the West Coast, which required a drive from the East Coast and Freycinet National Park. No problem, I thought. We can do 4-5 hours in the car. If we get up early we can also hike at Lake St. Clair National Park. No problem.

I know this metaphor may not work for those you not from Montana, but what we did in one day was equivalent to driving 8 hours from Bozeman to Calgary, Alberta with a five hour hike in Glacier in the middle.

To try to speed things up, we took shortcuts across the state, asking people only an hour’s drive from the shortcut road if it was an okay road and finding that some people in Tasmania haven’t left their county in their entire lifetime.

The road less traveled

It was a long gravel road, which was marked mostly by huge logging trucks going way too fast and a forest fire that seemed awfully close to the road when we drove by. Fortunately, it led us to the beautiful Lake St. Clair National Park where we hiked through rainforest up to view two glacial lakes.

Lake St. Clair National Park

At Forgotten Lake

But that wasn’t nearly as bad as the highway to the west coast after we finished our hike. Beautiful views of glacier valleys and mountain cliffs were not seen by me, because I was trying not to gag from the motion sickness caused by hairpin turns that went on endlessly.

We stopped in Queenstown (Tasmania’s version of Butte – it has open-pit copper mining and everything) to grab some meat pies (I abstained do to the nausea) and then crept along for 40 km (it took us an hour and a half) because of all the darting wildlife in the road (rabbits, possums, and wallabies).

We arrived in the coastal village of Strahan at our B&B, drop off the baggage, and leave Hannah to sleep while we search for a “bottleshop” to buy a few bottles of beer to share back at the hotel.

Turns out the only place to buy beer in Strahan at 11 p.m. is at the bar so we turn up there to buy a six pack. Doug approaches to buy the said beer and a middle-aged man with an extremely red face and slurred speech asks us where we are from. In towns of 750, it’s easy to pick out newcomers, even if we weren’t from the country.

We’re having as decent a conversation as you can with a drunk man from Tasmania who is called a “slag” by his girlfriend (apparently that means redneck) until he decides to reach over to unzip my hooded sweatshirt (which didn’t get him very far since I had a t-shirt on underneath).

Doug’s reaction was to sort of gently push him back and say, “Hey now, she doesn’t like to be fussed with.”  

Which is hilarious in and of itself (I now tell him all the time that I don’t like to be fussed with) but I didn’t really help matters because in trying to diffuse any possible tension I said, “Oh, it’s ok.” Very lame.

Anyway, we left without any altercation and the whole incident was fairly minor, but it’s true, I don’t like to be fussed with.

Travel Tip #3: When seakayaking, make sure you choose someone besides your spouse for a partner.

The twilight sea kayakers

After our adventures in southeast Australia, we drove up the coast to Freycinet (pronounced Frayseenay) National Park, one of the most gorgeous places on earth. Imagine turquoise water, white sand beaches, exotic forests, mountains made up of jumbled granite rocks, and most of it removed from civilization’s easy access. Now that’s my kind of place!

Wineglass and Honeymoon Bays at Freycinet Park

 

 

It was at this juncture that our trip became a bit more “balls to the walls” as Doug put it, and after a three-hour drive we hiked five hours up a mountain, across two beaches, and through the forest just in time for another dinner of fish and chips (Doug’s favorite food) at Coles Bay.

Wineglass Bay Lookout

At Wineglass Bay Beach

A wild wallaby on the trail

The next day we hiked to the top of Mount Amos in the morning, and then scheduled a twilight sea kayaking adventure across Honeymoon Bay.

Hanna hikes with her borrowed toque (Canadian), beanie (Aussie), or hat (American)

At the top of Mt. Amos

This went well, except that we have never sea kayaked before, and my driving skills annoyed Doug so much that he used up his quota of dirty looks for the trip.

We managed not to bicker too much (I mostly laughed hysterically every time he gave me a look for steering us in the opposite direction from where we were supposed to go) but Doug mentioned to our guide that when he used to guide whitewater rafting trips the guides called the double kayaks the “divorce boats.” She laughed and said she’d witnessed some awful fights in Honeymoon Bay and actually had couples ask to switch partners during the tea break half-way through the 3.5 hour trek.

The back paddler in a touristy sea kayak steers the boat not with her paddle, but with her feet. You press the right peddle to go right and the left peddle to go left. Or, if you’re me, you press the left to go right, realize that you’ve done the wrong thing, overcorrect and nearly tip the boat while out at sea. If you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, this might not be the position in the boat for you. 

The front paddler in a sea kayak sets the rhythm of paddling and generally tries to keep the boat going forward. I was decent at this except that I kept dumping shovel-full buckets of sea water on Doug when I brought my paddle up and out of the water and he wasn’t too keen on that experience either. So we switched spots during the break, and paddled in last because of my terrible steering skills. 

Sigh. You just can’t be naturally talented at everything.

They might have to rename Honeymoon Bay  Divorce Bay if they keep offering kayak trips for couples across it. Don’t try this at home.

Travel Tip #2: Boats shouldn’t have seat belts

Bruny Island charters - our boat

The art of taking risks is personal. I’m afraid of spiders, Hannah is afraid of snakes, and Doug is a little afraid of missing the last ferry off the island.

Today I had about 15 minutes of pure, intense fear — the kind of fear where you are sure you are going to die, the kind of fear where you are saying prayers to gods you don’t believe in, the kind of fear where perfect strangers become close, personal friends. And what was Hannah doing while I had my panic attack? Laughing. At me. 

Before the terror

The fear arrived when we took a cruise around Bruny Island today in the yellow boats (look for that if you go to Tasmania) and it was truly an unforgettable experience of natural beauty and pure adrenalin. I should have known when we got in the boat and they asked us to put our seatbelts on “low and tight” and didn’t tell me where the life jackets were that I was in for some trouble.

But for the first part of the trip, when we were getting close-ups of the caves and rock formations and amazing wildlife around the island the boating seemed fun — like going on a motorboat ride in a big, pretty calm lake.

And then our boat met the Southern Ocean. Things were relatively calm on the Tasman Sea, but the Southern Ocean held swells about 20 feet that looked like they would envelope the small jet boat we were in. And it was a calm day, they said. 

The swell coming toward me

We ripped through those swells at about 40 miles per hour. Up and fall. Up and fall. It was a 900 hoursepower boat, three 300 mercs — crazy amount of speed and power and really we probably didn’t have a chance of dying, but with every fall I saw the boat shattering to pieces and all of us drowning immediately. Of course, nothing like that occurred, and we were in great hands (Doug kept assuring me) and at the end of all of that terror lay great giant seals on huge rocks with beautiful blue water swirling round and they more than made up for my fear. But I didn’t really breathe easily until shore again.

Seals in the Southern Ocean

What I should have been afraid of was the brown snake Doug nearly stepped on as we made our way down to the beach on our after-boat-ride hike. Copperhead snakes in Australia are some of the most poisonous snakes on earth. Kill you in a millisecond, they will. And yet that didn’t bother me in the least. The snake slithered away more frightened of us than we were of it. 

At Isthmus Bay on Bruny Island

Once again, we had a perfect day, and Tasmania was glorious. Now how do we immigrate here….

Sunset on the ferry back to Kettering