Advertisement
Published: February 8th 2010
DSC01320
boats in HobartI arrived in Tasmania first thing in the morning and caught a shuttle bus to where I was staying in Hobart. I spent the morning exploring the dock and Salamanca market and then in the afternoon I called practically every single cherry orchard in the state looking for work! I'd heard cherry picking wasn't bad as you can make some decent money and it's one of the less strenuous fruit picking jobs.. but still after 3 days of non-stop cherries, I decided I wasn't going to make much money or have much fun and threw in my job to go travelling round the island with a group of others. Before we left I managed to fit in a cruise around Bruny island, which is right at the south of Tasmania where we got to see loads of seals and some dolphins by the side of the boat.
After I got backI met up with the others a (pretty mulicultural group: 2 girls: one from Germany and one from Norway and three guys (from Canada, Holland and Switzerland) and we set off in our 2 cars to the Tasman peninsular which has got a really beautiful coastline
DSC01479
Seals on Bruny island with lots of caves, blowholes and arches. We made our way up the east coast, where we stopped for the night in Bicheno and saw the tiny penguins coming back to the beach at dusk.
We spent most nights camping in national parks which, in order to get to, you have to drive up a long dirt track with lots of dust and potholes. Our car, which we rather ironically named "Speedy" was really not designed for this. The boys got the better car, the "Albino Rhino", (you have to pronounce this like a Canadian so that albino rhymes with rhino).
Once we got to the north of the island we did some wine and cheese tasting and also visited a tasmanian devil sanctuary where I got to hold the most adorable baby wombat. (Soooo cute, i want one). They also had lots of kangaroos, some very random species of eagle and, of course, lots of tasmanian devils! We did see our fair share of wild animals though, we had at least one kangaroo hop out in front of the car, several possums trying to steal our food, a couple of echidnas and
DSC01525
The remarkable cave we also stopped to let a Wombat Mum lead her little baby across the road (she was very lucky I didn't steal it and take it home). We went for a hike at the Walls of Jerusalem NP which was absolutely beautiful. The craziest wildlife we encountered here was lots of deadly poisonous snakes which some members of our group decided to throw rocks at to get a good picture... hmm...
We also visited cradle mountain, headed west to try out some sandboarding at the sand dunes in Strahan and visited Queenstown, an old mining town which really looks like a Hollywood film set. We then headed back to the east coast as Freycinet NP, where the famous wineglass bay is, was shut due to high fire risk when we'd been there before. We camped on the beach in Coles bay and finally got to see the famous beach before heading back to Hobart.
It was sooo worth scrapping my cherry picking plan to drive round the island as the transport there is so bad. Tasmania is so beautiful- it has pretty much every sort of landscape you can imagine: beautiful beaches, rainforest, mountains
DSC01556
Watch out for devils rolling hills... but you can only travel between the main towns on the bus and even some of those buses only run once a day so travelling by car is really the only way! Plus it was so much more fun in a big group! But by now I really needed to earn some money so it was off to Melbourne to get a job...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.071s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 6; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0343s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
