Days 5-7: Tasmania

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It's been a few days since I last published an update, mostly because we've been traveling around quite a bit and it's been difficult to find time to concentrate on writing. It's good timing that I'm able to post an update tonight...I'll be able to capture the entire Tasmania leg in one big post!

Last time I posted we were getting ready to fly over to Tassie. We braved the Melbourne public transit system with flying colors on Wednesday morning and made it to the airport with time to spare. Our flight was super early -- we had to be at the airport by 7am. Needless to say both Ali and I were mightly tuckered out and it was quite a chore dragging our collective asses through the public trans. I give us both "Two Fosters Up" for the effort.

Landed on-time in the super-small Hobart airport and whizzed through the drug dog check (yikes!), bag pickup, and rental car line only to find that we'd been provided a minivan. I think the look that Ali and I gave each other was quite priceless -- Tasmania in a soccer mom car FTW. Anyway within 15 minutes we made it to the streets of Hobart and began looking around for food and a roof. Unfortunately Ali hit a garbage can along the way...we'll see if the rental agency decides to allow us "aussie rules" and get away with it 😉

Hobart is a pretty cool little city. Definitely a much slower speed than Melbourne but still with plenty of that patented Aussie "charm." We located food at a little bakery stop -- really when visiting Oz the little bakeries are the way to go with food unless you plan on spending $20+ on a sit down meal. $9 gets you a meat pie which is usually plenty of food to hold you over until the next meal. We also found a local hostel with a room available and we able to setup basecamp for that evening.

Not ones to sit around the hostel all day, we looked up a sweet animal preserve with high ratings on all of the relevent travel sites. Bonorong Animal Sanctuary is located right on the outskirts of Hobart and is renowned locally for its commitment to the animals that it protects. Tazzie devils, kangaroos, wombats, wallabies and koalas occupy the grounds -- many brought in injured and then cared for until ready to be let back into the wild (or in some cases...such as the Tazzie Devils....residents at the sanctuary for life). We were handed Kangaroo food at the entrance to the park and immediately greeted with an open field full of at least 20-30 kangaroos of various age. The roos were eager to greet us as well, having learned over time that human visitors mean that it's feeding time 😊

This was easily one of the highlights of the trip so far. For one - kangaroos are just badass animals. I've seen them on TV plenty of times but you really need to see them in person to grasp their unique method of moving around by hopping with those huge hind legs and feet. Also they're adorable to the point that I wanted to steal one on my way out. My favorite roo was a little guy that would grasp my hand in both of his paws while eating the food out of my hand. Catching a glimpse of the mom-kangaroo with the little "joey" in her pouch was also a cool sight.

A short while later the park ranger gave us a tour and demonstration with some of the other animals. We were able to catch a pack of Tazzie Devils destroying some dead animal carcas prey at dinner time, then we were able to pet their oldest koala, and finally we got a rare daytime glimpse of a wombat which is usually nocturnal. He was sleeping during our visit but his lair was slightly out of the open and I got a good picture of his face.

Tazzie Devils will soon become an endangered animal on Tasmania because of a highly-contagious facial cancer virus that's spreading like wildfire through the island community. It's really a sad sight because despite their sometimes-vicious demeanor they really seem like cool little animals. Currently the Devils at the sanctuary aren't ever allowed to leave the grounds...and they cannot take any devils from the wild for risk of cross contamination.

Headed back to Hobart after that super cool animal trip and spent the evening walking around Hobart and getting some local grub. Found a pretty solid $10 "parmie and pint" special at a local watering hole and then called it a night.

On Thursday we woke up and were greeted with some travel advice from one of our hostel bunk-mates...an woman around 80 years old who used to live in Berlin, Germany during WWII and now lives in Tasmania. Her son lives in New Zealand and was in Taz on business so they were both at the hostel for one night. The conversation with the lady started out innocently enough with her ideas about where to go around Tazzie...but ended up turning into her theories about when WWIII would begin...theories that were predicted by her father 50+ years ago...and a dire warning that we both need to move to either Tasmania or New Zealand as soon as possible in order to prevent our early deaths in the massive catastrophe that's coming in 2017. The debate between whether or not she was suffering from some sort of dementia or if she's just a hard core conspiracy theorist continues between Ali and I at the time of this writing...that said we decided that her advice came at a good time and we would spend the day driving up the east coast as far as possible.

The drive up the coast took most of the day and we actually made it as far as St. Helens, which is in the north east corner of the island. The countryside and beaches in Taz are strikingly beautiful -- maybe not quite at the level of the Great Ocean Road but very cool nonetheless. There's a particular tree that covers the landscape in Taz that makes the island look like something out of a Jurrasic Park movie. Also the beaches are a mix of huge rocks and white sands with clear turquoise waters...much like those found in mainland Oz.

St. Helens was a nice town but we decided to backtrack a ways to a smaller surfer community we passed called Bicheno. We located a small hostel and setup our stuff...then headed out on a quick walk to the "Bicheno Blowhole." The blowhole is just what it sounds like - a hole in rocks overhanging the shore...and when big enough waves crash underheath huge plumes of water jet up through the opening. We spent some time there taking pictures of the water and then walked towards the downtown area in search of food. Of course, Bicheno is a small town so most everything was closed but we found some super greasy fish n chips. Then we headed out to a pub to drink copious amounts of beer "jugs" with the locals--by now Ali and I were starting to get on each other's nerves a bit so some beer drinking and shit talking was key to relieving a bit of tension.

Later that night in a semi drunken state we decided to take a hike up the hill behind the hostel to this rock "viewpoint" that some of the other hostelers visited earlier in the day. The hike itself was easy enough....the only difficulty was the zero visibility in the dark. We made it up and back with the help of my headlamp and on the way back down we came across a baby penguin on the trail! We scared the poor little dude half to death and he scrambled into the shrubs soon after. However we were able to spend a few minutes checking him out from a distance with the headlamp. Yet another cool random event on this trip.

Today was our last day in Tazzie and we spent the first part of the day driving back to Hobart and then visiting MONA (the Museum of New and Old Art). MONA is a crazy museum...art pieces mostly curated by a really rich person ranging from stained glass windows with xray images of people screwing, to a model containing huge lab jars filled with digestive juices that produces fake shit. I'm not a museum kind of person but this place was extremely interesting.

There's more to report but it's late and we're leaving for Cairns ass-early in the morning. More later!

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