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Published: August 22nd 2005
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Air Walk
A bridge through the rainforest canopy. Tasmania
The players:
Adam- Met at orientation, knew very slightly. Turns out, he's super-cool and together, we make a comedy team no man can stop. I call him my fraternal twin.
Katie- Met through Janice at orientation. Sweet techie girl from Jersey with a big smile.
Eva- My co-conspirator and other half, who was with me on the Cairns trip. From UVA, studying in Brisbane. She became the "Backscratcher" due to her amazing abilities with the fingernails on the back. The Greek machine.
Me- Insane.
The Vehicle:
A cranberry red Nissan Pulsar, compact. When Katie drove it, it was called the Tasmanian Devil, due to her wild driving and tendency to pass cars into oncoming traffic. When Adam drove it, it was dubbed the Tassie Cabbie, just because it was.
What happened:
Everything was unbelieveably awesome. We all got along swellily, and thoroughly enjoyed each other's wacky company.
Pre Day 1
Adam cooks us homemade meatballs, spaghetti and sauce with garlic bread. I decide he and I will become best friends because he is a very good cook. We make some plans and then I go back with Katie to her hostel, and we
Horse Poo
Got a kick out of this sign sleep.
Day 1
We fly to Hobart, rent our car, and get some fish and chips right on the water. Hobart is pretty, but as Adam and I are both nature nuts, we decide to go to the Airwalk, south of town. We do the airwalk, which is a suspended bridge through the temperate rainforest, which is amazing. Sort of like Alaska, I guess. It is cold, but fresh, as there is no civilization around. We overnight in Dover, which is a sleepy town with a population of maybe 40..especially since it's the offseason for tourists. As we pull up to the hostel of choice, Far South, we realize we are the only ones there. For $22 each, we get our own 2 story cottage, with a kitchen, showers and everything, on a lake.
Day 2
We woke up to see the sunrise on the beautiful lake and contemplating "borrowing" a rowboat. So then Adam and I got the kayaks out and paddled around for an hour. It was wonderful to move the ol' muscles, and I love to kayak. So we returned the kayaks, and they said "no charge" because they love us. We then drive to
Rocks
Hiking around in the very dangerous area, I stayed on my cliff and, Hark! I saw a bunch of chimpanzees diving into the water. hobart to pick up eva. Eva and I cry, rejoice, do the chicken dance, and get in the car. I'm switching to past tense now, I don't know why I was using present tense. Also, I'm finishing this entry about 2 weeks after I got back, so ... yeah!. We went to Port Arthur, the original convict place with a jail and whatnot, but it cost an insane amount of money, so instead we went to the Tasmanian Devil Reserve. They fed us wine and cheese and sandwiches, and took us on a night tour of the reserve, which included feeding more kangaroos and pandemelons (wallabies), which was fantastic. Tasmanian Devils are really really scary. They make sounds like "ahhhh!!!" and look like the Rodents of Unusual Size from the Princess Bride. We got to throw various kangaroo parts at them (tail, feet, etc.) Slept in a mildly shady hostel that we found out when we got back was the scene of a domestic violence situation that Janice and Karl witnessed. Fannntastic 😊. We also all had really bad/weird dreams.. Maybe those convicts were coming to get us.
Day 3
Day 3 will live forever in infamy. I've
Tassie Cliffs
I love this place! forgotten most of it, but I know Adam took notes, so I'll have to get them from him and update. But we drove through the mountains to Queenstown, a backwater place in the middle of nowhere. It was nighttime, so we drove through the deserted town to find a place to stay. We went to a budget hostel and asked for a room. She took our $15 apiece and sent us to a room. We got there to find it was already taken. We went back and explained the situation and she was surprised and shrugged, "oh" with a sort of nonchalant "I have no idea who is in or has been in the rooms, we don't ever look in them" sort of look. We got another room, which was alright, except that it hadn't been cleaned or updated since 1970. As Eva said, "Where's the dead body?"
Then we went to find a meal, and we found it at the local pub. For $8 we got roast lamb, vegetables and mashed potatoes. We also had some Tasmanian beer which was pretty good. The waitress, a 65 year old large woman, proceeded to hit on Adam, and ask us
Adam on the Rocks, shaken not stirred
on the road above this place there was a dead penguin about plastic surgery. Interesting...quite. After dinner, faced with the prospect of going to Smelly Room, we bought some beer and wine so we could play drinking games, the only coping mechanism we knew. The game prompted all sorts of hilarity which cannot, in good consience, be repeated. Good times by all were had.
Day 4
We awoke to realize we were still in Queenstown. Blast! We woke up in time to get into the Tassie Cabbie to drive to a smallish mountain top and watch the sunrise..Cloudy sunrise, but still great. Then we went to get our stuff and find breakfast. There was nowhere for breakfast but a little cafe that had meat pies and cake. So that's what we ate for breakfast. After finishing eating, we looked at each other and said, "let's get the hell outta here!" And we did. By inadvertently going south for 45 minutes. (Thanks to our resident beauty, Eva..good thing we love her so much!) So back we drove through Queenstown, and up to Cradle Mountain.
We arrove at around noon to the moutain. Adam and I had wanted to hike it but it was too late in the day. So
Adam found a hike that was 3 hours long, and we all got our hiking stuff on and went for a scramble up the rocks. However, Tasmania is like Alaska; in that it is temperate rainforest and thawing tundra, which, for all you non-science nerds out there, means mucky ground. We managed to stay on trail and out of mud until our descent, where I ate it, and I ate it good. I stepped, and sank up to my knees in muck. Delicious. Still, great hike, with awesome views of glacial lakes, and excellent rock scrambles. At the top of the mountain, thanks to Adam's REI thermometer, we found it was 32F. Cold.
After finishing, I was frozen, and so was everyone else, so we pumped up the heat in the Devil, and drove up to...I've forgotten the name of the town. We drove around it trying to find what the Rough Guide to Australia said was the best hostel in town. After much driving, (we were all hungry and tired... Eva was going to kill someone, Adam was barely containing himself, Katie was oblivious, and I was trying to distract distract!) we found the hostel. It looked like
a mental institution, and not a good one. Laughing from the pure absurdity, we piled back in the car to look for a pub to stay in. We found "Molly Mallone's Irish Pub" and there we stayed happily. We also ate dinner at Subway, which was a weird experience. I had a meatball sub...It's the same as ours.
Day 5
We looked for stuff to do in the town with the name I can't remember, and we did it all.. which is to say we did nothing. We drove out of it on our way to Launceston, where we were catching our flight home. After a gas snafu, we returned the car and played card games in the airport. Eva and I had our teary goodbyes.
It was an insanely fun trip.
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