Our East Coast Adventure

Hello! Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days. I know some of you have been on tenterhooks waiting (you know who you are) so here is a blog. Enjoy.

Jump Tours are a company that do tours around Tasmania, and one of the tours they do is the "East Coast Adventure". This leaves Hobart early doors on Monday morning, before taking in some of the sights of Tassie. However, the reason it leaves Hobart so early is so it can get to Launceston (up north) (where the tour actually starts), and it then works it's way back down Tas until reaching Hobart on Tuesday evening. So it starts and finishes in Hobart. This wasn't made massively clear when booking, and messed up the plans of a few people. But anyway, we got moving out of Hobart, and then something which would prove to mess up more plans; the bus broke down.

It didn't break down initially. But 5 minutes out of Hobart, we had pulled into a petrol station to allow the radiator to "cool down". After spluttering our way to Launceston (normally a 2 hour journey, but took 3 1/2 hours) we picked up other members of the tour, and set off. The bus had been struggling all along, and when we got to a small town in the middle of nowhere, it had enough. We pulled over, everyone got out, and we had a wait by the side of the road. Luckily, we'd stopped in a town. Unluckily, all that was in this town was a petrol station, a small shop, and the house of the person who probably owned both. And that was it. After being told it would be a bit of a wait, we all decided to do the only possible thing in this town; a trail up a mountain. We had no idea how tall this mountain was, but we were going to conquer it. After a solid hour of trekking up this moutainous road, we heard traffic behind us. It was our bus! We all climbed back aboard, and after being told that the mountain was 26km high (we'd got about 1 km up it) we got back onto the road. While the bus had been fixed, it was more of a short-term fix, and wouldn't last to long. So we headed back to Launceston where there was a replacement bus for us to change over into. As you can imagine, the first bus had seen better days - both as a piece of machinery, and as a nice place to be. The second bus was bigger, taller and had aircon. So without too much argument we set off on the tour route through the mountains.

Due to the long delay, we weren't able to go and do a cheese tasting at the cheese factory. But we went to the town of Legerwood, where Tasmanians who died in the First World War have been honoured. Originally, 9 oak trees were planted in their name (9 Tassies died), but they became a bit of a nuisance. The council wanted to cut them down, but a local chainsaw artist saved the day by carving wooden statues of the dead. It looked quite cool. Sadly, due to sudden time constraints, there was the option of either looking at the sculptures or getting some lunch. I was hungry.

After there we headed onto Binalong Bay in the Bay of Fires. Binalong was called one of the Lonely Planet's Top 10 beaches of 2009, so obviously it was a good place to go and see. The beach itself was beatiful, with sand dunes and a lagoon one side, and the sea at the other. So we got changed into our swimming stuff, and ran into the sea. And then ran out again. Stu, our tour guide, said that the water would likely be in it's high teens. It very clearly wasn't. I think I lasted about 10 seconds before I had enough of the icy waves; nobody lasted more than 30. But at least I can say I went swimming at Binalong Bay.

We then got to the town of Bicheno, where our hostel was (where we were staying). The town is where penguins come in from the sea at night, and tourists can pay $25 to go for a tour where they take you to the best places to see them. After dinner (and probably long after the penguins had been tucked up in their burrows) a few of us decided to brave it, and see if we could see anything for nothing. The fact that we didn't know where we were going didn't help. We eventually found the beach, but only the rocky bit. So we spent a long time jumping from rock to rock, until we found some sand. And then we had to go back onto more rocks, to get onto the actual beach. And again. After a while, we stumbled across two locals who told us to get to a path and go round further, because we weren't going to see any penguins where we were. So up we went on this track through various hedges, until we saw something in front of us. It was a penguin! Immediately we got our cameras out, before we remembered that we weren't allowed to take pictures of it (bright lights startle it). So for some reason, Kate and I half walked after, half chased this poor, frightened penguin further down the track, until it reached a rock, which it dived under for cover. I took a picture of the rock, but it was too late. After this shock sighting, came the inevitable question. Was it actually a penguin? Someone piped up saying it was "probably a rabbit", but I'm standing by the fact that it was a penguin. And ultimately, none of you would know any different, so I'm sticking by the penguin story.

After finding a nice, wide rock far enough away from the sea that we wouldn't get wet, we sat and chatted. It's great meeting people on tours like this, as everyone has a story of how they got to here, why they're here, and where they're going next. On our penguin search party we had Benedict, a German student studying in Australia; Brenda, on a uni exchange from Lancaster to Adelaide, Kate from Glastonbury who is seeing the world, and Harriet who lives outside Hobart. And me. (You should know my story, it's all in the blogs). After spending time out in the bright moonlight, we headed back to the hostel, and promptly woke everyone up with our noisy clattering around (everyone else in my room had gone to bed long ago).

Day 2 started with an optional wildlife park visit. I fancied it, so I went along with 8 others. I fed kangaroos (very cute), saw eagles, geese and pelicans, but my favourite animal (and possibly my favourite ever animal) was the Tasmanian Devil. The Tassie Devil, made famous of course by Taz the Tasmanian Devil, is a lovely little animal that looks very cute. It has a bad reputation for attacking and eating anything, but it's quite sweet (I think). I saw a few Tassie Devils at the park; two were sleeping happily in the sun, and one little feller was running round and round and performing for the crowd. It was made really special by the fact that I was the only one in the crowd. He was a lovely little thing. I would have picked him up and given him a hug, had he not probably mauled me if I did. Sadly, the once huge numbers of Tassie Devils in the wild are massively dropping. A Facial Tumour (which is a type of cancer) has been steadily killing Devils over the past few years. Devils love biting each other on the face, either as a sign of endearment, or when fighting for food, and this passes the tumour on from one to the other. Scientists think that by the end of 2011 (this year) there won't be anymore Tasmanian Devils in the wild. This makes me sad. So dig deep and do what you can for the Tassie Devils!


The Wildlife park finished, the rest of the tour-ists woke up and got on for our trip to Wineglass Bay. Wineglass Bay is famous amongst all Tassies, and is in the middle of a national park. So there are no roads to it. To get there, we had to walk up one side of the mountain, and then down it. And to get back to the bus, we had to walk up the other side of the mountain, and then down it again. So all in all, about a 2 1/2 round trip. It was absolutely knackering. We had three hours from start to finish to spend (from leaving the bus to being back on it) so we only had about 30 minutes to spend on the beach itself. After posing for all of the pictures from the lookout and other random times on the way down, we finally made it, and raced into the sea. One positive about this was that it was warmer than the previous day. Sadly, not by much. After sticking it out for about 10 minutes (props to Brenda and Benedict for lasting longer) I had enough and came out to dry off. And then we tackled the horrific walk back. It wasn't fun. But we got through it (somehow).

And then, that was sort of the end of the trip. Our drive back from Wineglass did include a stop in the town of Ross, but that was probably the quietest place in the history of tourism. There were two bakeries, so I had a Cornish Pasty. There wasn't anything else to do there. We got back to Hobart later in the evening, and a few of us arranged to meet up later on.

I enjoyed the trip, and am glad I went on it. Like most of these things, much of it's about the people you meet on it, and I was lucky that there were some great people to share the (albiet short) time with. We met up later to go have fish and chips, and go to MOFO, and we then went on to a bar to have a couple of drinks (I'll talk about what happened at the bar in a new, exciting blog!). And we all now head our separate ways around Australia and around the world!

Until next time, (literally, about 5 minutes until I write a new blog) - Will