After handing in my resignation
once again I am free to pursue my own vices.
Question: what is it about the quality of employment I keep on finding
my way into these days that has me happily following this path yet again? It seems that in engineering people’s egos are
getting bigger and team work has become nothing more than a catch phrase rather
than a road map to efficiency. The
office environment is becoming a mash up of the usual Dilbert standard of
cartoon and the latest version of the soap opera Neighbours. I look
around me as the good engineers become less abundant, mostly moving on to find
more fulfilling roles in other fields.
No wonder the manufacturing sector is dying in this country. With the loss of the more skilled
individuals, engineering is becoming less of a pursuit for new and ingenuitive
solutions but rather a farcical race to recycle old designs in an attempt to
minimise business overheads. I see in
the news that Australia has some challenges ahead in terms of its standard of
living as we have all grown complacent to these very issues and I wonder where
my contribution is to lie. Things to
ponder while on the road I guess. I know,
I know, what a note to start my next blog on!
So on I role with the more fun
stuff. Despite my dissatisfaction with
my most recent employment, it did pay well.
This has left me enough in the bank for yet another round of travel.
Yay! I’m starting closer to home this
time however. The premise for my next
round of travels is to trek the artic regions of Norway and Sweden with a
little side visit to Iceland. The only
issue with all this though is that these areas are only really accessible to
the kind of trekking I want to be doing during the summer periods of June to
August. I quit my job at the start of
February because I didn’t have the mental fortitude to sit through a few extra
months of dead end engineering. Perhaps a
sign of weakness on my behalf, though more probably a realisation that I would
rather do something/anything but. So what
to do to fill my time? Well that was a brief
10 second pause before the answers started flooding.
My plans are to travel with Emily
my girlfriend around Australia for the interim, visiting mates and seeing place
I have yet to feel underfoot. We will
start with a trip to Tasmania and get some hiking/camping experience before
making a trip to Fraser Island to visit some friends and do some beach
camping. Following all this the Great
Ocean Road looks like a fair prospect with a few other side trips listed as
potentials.
Planning and travelling to
Tasmania requires little effort and it wasn’t long before we had bought some
extra kit, packed our bags and flown to Launceston. In Launceston we picked up a hire car and hit
the road. The hire car was a good choice
as there are so many nooks and crannies to Tasmania and you really need to be
mobile to access them.
Tasmania is a vastly different
beast that I had thought. The cities
seem to be quite bogan with a simple stop to pick up food from Woolworths
having me double and even triple checking the car was locked. Outside the cities however, the countryside
is vast and wild. We found the people to
be very friendly, especially in the north west of the state and their love of
good bakeries had them firmly planted in my book as “okay”.
The amount of wildlife around the
place is astounding. Emily being from
the motherland (England) had never experienced anything of the like and to suddenly
be absolutely surrounded by almost every Australian animal to make a post card
was off the charts amazing. If I can
make any recommendation to others wishing to travel Tasmania it would be to camp
your way around and get amongst the wildlife.
For this reason, I have broken from my usual blog format to provide some
info on where to go to see and do what. It’s
no Lonely Planet guide but that said it is probably 100 times more helpful… So let’s get to the good stuff:
Starting with the camping, we
followed a simple recipe. We had our own
light weight tent, sleeping bags, roll matts, etc. which we were carrying for
our hiking. To this we added a cheap
esky, gas cooker, folding chairs and other cooking essentials bought from Kmart
in Launceston. The grand total of our
outlay was $70 but now we had all we needed to camp for 2 weeks. With the car to ferry ourselves around we
started looking for some free campsites.
Tasmania is littered with free
camping. All you need is a one off national
parks permit ($30 per car) and you are set to go. Free camping in our experience is a good way
to really get into nature when in Tasmania.
The facilities around the place are first rate. They are actually so good that my mind was
boggling at how it all was afforded. The
one obstacle you will find to free camping however is the lack of information readily
available on where you can camp. There
is a simple answer to all this but. If
there isn’t a sign saying you can’t camp there….hello free camping. You will find yourself alternating between
the free camps and paid ones however if only to find yourself a shower.
As for finding animals. How can you not? Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons and platypi
are just about everywhere you look!
Latrobe was one place where we first went in search of platypi though
and to be honest it was a little disappointing.
I think the most disappointing feature was that this was the area where
everyone went to look for a platypus.
Despite the locals telling everyone that they are shy animals and you
have to approach them with this in mind, you always find those who just don’t
get it. In my experience, nine times out
of ten this will be Japanese tourists. We
suffered one of these nine times. I’m
not in any way against Japanese tourists but f@ck me dead, they do my nut in. Not to worry however, we soon discovered that
platypi are in almost every river, deep or shallow. I stopped counting after seeing ten. While camping at the Mole Creek caravan park
I actually awoke to one eyeballing me.
So cool.
The more remote you go, the
better the experience. We took three
days to trek the Walls of Jerusalem, a famous trek in the northern middle(ish)
of Tasmania. What a fantastic hike! The weather can be a little fickle up on the
highland plateaus with snow occurring even in summer but if you prep with this
in mind you will be ok.
Aside from the abundance of
animals we encountered, deadly snakes, kangaroos, wallabies and the odd wombat,
it was the people who really made it fun.
Oh and the scenery was off the chain too which did also contribute. Back to the people however. Running into another hiker would result in a
30 minute chin wag, especially with me leading the charge. On one occasion, we had lunch with two Aussie
lads of after they basically fell off the side of a mountain after setting out
on a self-made exploration. They found
their way to us by the time honoured cooee method. Emily was truly flabbergasted
as to what on earth was happening. In a
second instance, we later met a father and son who were making their own tracks
hiking and trout fishing each of the backcountry lakes to the south of our
travel route. If those guys didn’t have
the most wicked lifestyle in a bag I will eat my hat. I was sooo jealous.
On the way in. The big backpack is mine...
Our basecamp up on the plateau.
A view of the plateau heading up to Mt Jerusalem
Climbing Soloman's Throne
The view from the top.
Just taking a break dangling the legs
Back at the camp, the locals encroach
This is a pademelon. They have less hair on their ears and tail. They are also the size of a small wallaby
And this is a wallaby... (ladies, cue the awwwww)
Just another picture perfect scene
Hiking your way around will have
you crossing paths with a few black tiger snakes. Not to worry too much, just stare em down and
they’ll move on. Long pants or gaters
are probably a very good idea but. Emily,
scared of snakes, sent me forward as fodder for any snakes too lazy to move off
the path. If you think this was a little
rough from my perspective, I should note that I had little to worry about. My girlfriend has the heaviest set of feet
this side of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The only snakes we crossed paths with were those locked to the ground in
fright!
In the Tarkine region of Tasmania
we managed to see two wild and healthy Tasmanian devils. A real highlight of the trip. Here we also saw a bazillion possums and pademelons
plus one very rare black spotted quoll.
Camping at the Julius River free camping area (not the RV one but the
day use area) we also began to realise how treacherous it would be to drive
between the hours of dusk til dawn.
There is that much wildlife around during these times that you need to
be doing either 30km/h or risk damage to your car. This really is because most the animals
around are nocturnal feeders.
Swapping the west with the east
of Tasmania we went to Freycinet national park.
This area is definitely more touristed than the west of the island. Here we stayed a couple of days in Bicheno
where we came across a good number of little (fairy) penguins. Sitting around just on dawn and having 20+ of
the little guys mooching around literally at your feet was a pretty special
moment. If only there were tourists wandering
into the dunes behind the beach and disturbing the penguins nesting sites in an
attempt to grab a photo. There seems to
always be someone who stuffs it for the rest of us.
And Tasmania has beautiful beaches too.
Penguinos! This was just one batch to make it to our feet!
Avoiding the bad weather of the
west coast we remained one more day on the East and visited the Mount Field
national park to see some big trees.
Daaaammmnnn they were big!
As our trip came to an end, the
one animal that had eluded Emily was the wombat. I had seen one but she hadn’t. To rectify this we headed for a caravan park
in Kelso, in the North of Tasmania. We
were told by the nice lady running the park that there were wombats about and
boy was she on the money! We pitched our
tent and bang on dusk were in the midst of a herd of hungry grazing
wombats! You were almost falling all
over them as they littered every square meter of free space. The possums weren’t much better. I took to hitting them with my shoe just to
keep them from getting into the car, our tent and others dinners!
Big and little wombats
And they are approachable too... Maybe because they are blind...
All in all Tasmania has impressed
a true sense of wilderness upon me. The
whole adventure was affordable and quite amazing. I now have plans to return for another round
of trekking. This time something quite
challenging, the South West track.. To
close out I have to thank my mate Matt for hooking me up with his father and a
tonne of free cherries from their cherry farm.
There is probably a solid 200km of sprouting cherry trees on the side of
the road to the Tarkine thanks to all the fruit we ate! And him shooting his malfunctioning plastic
owl while we ate breakfast was a true bit of Australiana for Emily haha.
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