Oh man where do I even start with Tasmania, it was all a blast! Im not sure what drew me to go there, maybe the awesome name or the amazing wilderness, probably both actually, but I knew it was just someplace I had to go. I bought my tickets flying into Hobart and departing 3 hours north from Launceston 6 days later. At this point I had zero plans and in a worst case scenario I would spend those 6 days just trying to get to Launceston. I began to look into places around there to couchsurf at in Hobart for the first night. For those of you that dont know what couchsurfing is let me fill you in. Couchsurfing is an internet based community that revolves around traveling (kinda like Facebook where you can "friend" people and see their profiles). This internet community allows you to find other people that will host you at their house for a given length of time and in return you offer those same services to someone who might be traveling around your home area (and of course you have the right to deny people, they dont just show up at your doorstep). So I began looking for a host using this community, then I thought about posting on the community page and seeing if anyone would like to take a road trip around the island. I was looking to hopefully get 4 people or so to travel around and split the costs. So I wrote up a short message and posted it on Hobarts community page, shortly after posting I found a post someone else had made stating the same thing! and most importantly he was leaving out of Launceston the same day I was, PERFECT! (turns out we were actually on the same flight...weird) So this was how I met Adriano a 23 year old bloke from Brazil. We tried to find some more people to travel with us. At one point we were up to 4 people and even had a free VW Bus at our disposal. But if theres always one thing you can rely on its change and before we knew it we had lost the 2 others and our bus... :( I was really looking forward to the bus.
I caught the train into Sydney and flew off to Tasmania. On the plane I sat next to this nice 20 year old guy named Joe from Sydney who had some awesome dreadlocks (dont worry mom I didnt get dreadlocks....yet). We had some great conversations and he told me all about Tasmania. (Joe if youre out there I lost your contact info, sorry man.)
I touched down in Tazzy (as the locals call it) and looked around for Adriano as he was to pick me up at the Airport with the car. . .but things are not always that simple. I got a text from him saying that plans have changed 1) we are now traveling with 4 of us! which is awesome I was super pumped for that! and 2) that they were not at the air port and I was to catch a shuttle to address "X" about 30 mins away where they would be. So I found a shuttle hopped on and off I went. The ride had great views going into hobart and saw (Russell Falls)
my first of many rainbows in Tasmania. I had a pleasant conversation with a lady named Pip whos from south of Sydney but raised in Tazzy. She was very nice and invited me to stay with her family. (Pip if youre out there I lost your contact info, sorry, thanks for the
offer). Well I got dropped of and looked at my phone and there was another message. Adriano messaged me saying that they had been kicked out of that place and that they were no longer there and I was to walk to the corner of "Y" and "Z" to find him. It was pretty cool I felt like I was on the TV show The Amazing Race just chasing checkpoints around a foreign city! Not to long later I finally found Andriao! He told me that he had met two other people in the hostel the night before that would like to travel with us so we went to go meet them.
Under an overhang of a building trying to escape the wind I met Monika, a 26 year old female from lithuania who now lives in Denmark. Monika is a great person who made the trip a ton of fun and always had a cool story to share. Working in Copenhagen she has served breakfast to some very famous people including, Prince, Whitney Houston, Steve Wonder and Boyd Tinsley from Dave Matthews Band. Here I also met Cristian a 26 year old male from Chile. Cristians in Australia studying at the University of Queensland.
Together we made quite the international group. Its hard to say what places is my favorite of the ones I have traveled to so far, its like comparing apples to oranges. But, I can say that Tasmania has been my favorite method of traveling. Meeting three complete strangers and jumping in a car for a week to explore some of the worlds most impressive and untouched nature was just an amazing experience! I can not speak of it highly enough.
So we spent the next few hours walking all round Hobart trying to rent a car. It proved to be quite tricky and we ended up departing a few hours late but it was great to finally hit the road. Our first stop was Mount field National Park. We got there quite late and decided to go for the hike knowing we would return well into the dark of night. We hiked to Russell Falls which is one of the most famous and beautiful waterfalls on the island. It was absolutely stunning! we took some pictures and then continued down the trail onto the Tall Trees Walk. These are the second tallest trees in the world just behind the great Redwoods of California, but they do hold the record as the tallest flowering plant in the world. The trees here are Eucalyptus Trees and are very beautiful. A neat thing happens to these trees, as they get older they shed their limbs on the way up and as the limbs fall to the ground they tare off the bark all the way down kind of like string cheese. So the trees look pretty gnarly sometimes with their bark just all tattered. A lot of times it just sits in big piles at their base and across the trail. Hiking back in the dark we start to see the wildlife come out. We saw our first Wallaby and it was so cool! Just this little kangaroo like guy hopping around. Then we saw another! and another . . .and another . . . . . .and another . . . . . . . . they were everywhere! We got back to the car park and there was a small field with a good 25 of them or so.
Cheers,
Evan
(standing in a fallen tall tree)
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