"Many faces I have know
Many way in which I've grown
Moving closer on my own"
What to do when you lose Passport in foreign country? Well, I guess this trip wouldn't be complete if I didn't have to find it out. But let's start the story from beginning. Last tuesday March 3rd I hopped onto Adventure Tour bus at 6:30am and started 6-day tour around the island with 9 other people.
Day one
First day included lot of driving towards wild west coast. West coast of Tasmania is basically one big National Park with one road going through it. It is complete wilderness without even footpaths. There are some short walks from the one road but that is it. We did some of these small walks, even though weather was just crazy. High winds and heavy rain all day. But rainfall ment that waterfalls were nice :)
During day we managed to see couple of more rare Australian animals in wild including this Pandemelon(or something), smalles marsupial in Oz
...and Echidna.
Towards late afternoon we arived to a funny little town, Queenstown. Place was not quite the same as Queenstown in New Zealand as you can see.
Queenstown is perfect example how delicate nature in Australia is to human influence. Few decades ago Queenstown was thriving mining town with beautiful forests surrounding it. Population was close to 20,000. As miners extracted rock from mines and burned it, they didn't realise that rock in the area had lot of acid in it. This acid then got released into air and result was acid rains which destroyed all forests and native plants in area leaving Queenstown area looking like a crater from the Moon. Population decreased and is about 1,500 these days and is not increasing despite the fact that area is slowly healing and plants are returning. Our guide summed up Queenstown like this:
"Guys, if you ever need to escape from the world, there are some really cheap real estates in Queenstown."
Anyway, all were happy to leave Australia's Queenstown behind after 15 minutes and we headed to our first night stop in Strahan. House we stayed in was pretty cool with nice kitchen where we were really able to get to know each other while having quite a few beers.
Day two
Second day we woke up to extremely heavy rain and winds. We stopped for morning coffee in Strahan were main attraction I guess were these suicidal ducks.
We continued road up the west coast and stopped first at a "beach". Apparently this beach was one of the nicest in west coast and people quite often came there to swim and surf. Well, it wasn't really a weather for either of those :)
I think our tour guide put it best when he said:
"Anyone wanna go down to the beach and poke the dead seal?"
Yup, there was indeed dead rotten seal in the beach. I didn't take a picture of it cause it was honestly quite grosse. But I guess that summed up the beach well enough...fact that there was dead seal right in middle and it had been rotting there for quite a while.
So, next stop was sandhills where we had some luck and rain stopped. So we engaged into some childish activities like jumping down a 50m sandcliff.
After sandhills we headed to next destination...more waterfalls! This one was suppose to be one of the biggest in Tasmania and was called Montezuma falls. Montezuma falls was named by aboriginal people who met early seafaring Aztecs and exchanged gifts way before any Europeans stepped on Australia...yea right :-D Our guide told us that story and we almost believed him. He said that he is amazed the amount of bullshit he can tell to tourists and most of it they actually believe.
Walk to falls was quite long, little over hour through very wet and cold rainforest. That is why we were very surprised and shocked when all the sudden we stumbled on this Tigersnake right in the middle of the path.
For the record, Tigersnakes are 4th most venomous snakes in world so not something you want to get too close with. So now I have seen 3 out of 4 most venomous snakes in world: Taipan in Cooktown, Western Brown in Rottnest and Tigersnake in Tasmania. Only thing missing is Eastern Brown.
Finally we arrived to waterfall and yea, it was big and pretty. Almost worth getting completely soaked :)
After waterfall we headed to our 2nd night stop in Cradle Mountains. Since our hut was at 900m altitude, temperature dropped to +2 during night, damn it was freezing! Again we stayed up quite late with help of beer and 2 norwegian girls :-)
Day three
Third day was our big hike day. We set off from our hut to Cradle Mountain.
I was really hoping to walk to summit, but weather wasn't permitting it. There was actually a snowstorm up in the summit so I wasn't going to walk up there with my summer sneakers. Some of us did manage to climb up to first lookout about half-way to summit but the snowline started even from there so we did't continue and instead took our silly photos from there(Christ, I had to jump like 10 times before Tatjana managed to press the button at right moment).
After about 5h of walking and getting snowball to my head from Steffi we jumped back into the bus and headed to Devonport, our 3rd night stop. On way there, our guide told us quite interesting things about Tasmanian aboriginals. After this story I can safely say that indians in America were treated like royalty compared to what settlers did to aboriginals in Tasmania.
First of all, last full-blooded aboriginal in Tasmania died over 100 years ago. When Tasmania was settled, aboriginals were hunted and killed to almost extinction. There was an actual martial law against them which allowed anyone to shoot aboriginal and no questions were asked. Tasmania had 0ver 10,000 aboriginals before settlers and that number decresed to 150 before someone thought "hey, maybe this is not right". Unfortunately it was too late.
At Devonport we took our first big group photo at the lighthouse there since Chris was leaving us and heading back to mainland from Devonport.
Day four
On (now infamous)fourth day we started to move towards east coast. On the way we said goodbyes to Chris and picked up 3 more passengers from Launceston to join our tour. Funny, Tasmania is not that small island but its not big. It's actually little bigger than Ireland, but contrasts are huge. Whereas west coast was full of rain, waterfalls, rainforests and mountains, then east coast is the tropical side with very dry landscape and beautiful beaches.
First stop for us was Bay Of Fires in northeast corner, gorgeous beach where 2 of us(Johannes and I) were actually brave enough to go swimming...it was cold, shrimp cold.
Now, this is where it happened. We headed off from Bay Of Fires towards Devil's Park near Bicheno where we were going to watch Tasmanian Devils being fed. Our tour guide forgot to lock trailer in our minibus and during the 100km drive door in the trailer opened and everything fell off...without anyone seeing or hearing anything. Hmm...sweet, my passport was in my bag.
Well, we still went to Devil's Park and our guide headed back to road in desperate effort to find our lost luggage. At this point our spirits were surprisingly high and we didn't really think about the lost luggage and insted just wondered how cute and cuddly the Tasmanian Devils are.
After about 1.5h Jason came back...no luggage. At this point we knew that some of the bags would never be found, but we still kept our spirits high. We went to our 4th night stop in Bicheno and guide continued on back to where we came from in search of the bags. He eventually came bnack at 11pm with just 2 bags.
Day five
Ok, we forgot about the bag episode this day because otherwise it would ruin the visit to Wineglass Bay, widely regarded as one of the best beaches in entire world. Weather was beatiful for hike up the hill for view of the beach...omg, now THIS is a beach!
After hill walk and nice leisurely walk down to beach for more silly photos(this time I only had to jump 3 times before Hester got the photo).
What a gorgeous beach this really was!
We were also treated with very surprising visit, all the sudden I saw like 5 thins in the water coming towards beach, Dolphins. They came just within 30m from beach and played around with swimmers, was quite amazing to see it. Unfortunately I had my camera tucked away at that point so I couldn't get photos.
After about 6h in Wineglass Bay we headed off south towards Tasman Peninsula and our 5th night stop in Port Arthur where we had yet another great evening drinking, playing pool and cards.
Day six
Port Arthur. Now, this place is one of the most popular tourist attractions in entire Australia. Port Arthur was a penal colony back in 19th century. It was founded 1830 and closed down 1877. During it's time, it was said to be too inhuman and cruel. Now, if they said it was inhuman at 1830, I can only imagine how cruel place it actually was...no, I can't really understand.
Port Arthur is also infamous about episode in 1996 when young man went to Port Arthur from Hobart and killed 35 people within an hour or so. As a result, Australia completely changed their gunlaws. These days this country has one of the most strict gunlaws in entire world. Dammit, more I spend time in this country the more I wonder how RIGHT Australia has it. I mean...in Finland we had 2 school massacres within year and what has government done to improve things?? Nothing!! We have so fucking much to learn from Australia.
Anyway, back to present day. So Porth Arthur has a very black history. They actually tried to change town name while ago to attract more people to move in but since Port Arthur penal colony site was so popular tourist attraction, they kept the name.
We arrived very early in the morning which was nice since by the time we left the area, there was literally thousands of tourists and more coming in all the time. Area itself was huge, I could have spent all day there reading stories about prisoners but we only had about 4h.
As we started our way back to Hobart we stopped few times to see coastal features of Tasman Peninsula and grabbed the last group photo.
*sniff* was kinda sad to finally say goodbye to all the friends I spent last 6 days living, breathing and eating with. Here is pic of the route we took around Tasmania.
So now it's time to come back to reality with the passport issue. After few calls and police reports it looks like I have to visit Consulate in Sydney very briefly because they are only place who can issue new passport. Dunno if my travel insurance will cover the flights to Sydney since I'm not really planning to stay there again so I'll be flying there in the morning and back to Hobart in the evening. I'll keep updating situation...
Whew, done. I was dreading to write this entry and actually had so much more to say but even now this has taken me 2.5h internet in Hobart is not cheap. I guess it's good thing I didn't get all things to this entry, have some stories still left when I get back home...wherever that will be.... :-)
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti