Tasmania!

Jonathan has two weeks of autumn school holidays, ending the day after Easter. We had been looking at maps and we knew we wanted to visit Tasmania while we were so close by in Australia. We also knew that because Tasmania is even further south than Melbourne, the weather would be getting colder and colder there. So we knew we had to plan our visit for these autumn holidays (in April).

When I was invited to speak at the conference in Sydney just before the first week of Jonathan's school holidays, we decided that we'd spend a few days in Sydney followed almost immediately by our trip to Tasmania. We decided to take the overnight ferry, with our own cabin, because it sounded like the most enjoyable way to get to Tasmania.

Jonathan in front of the Spirit of Tasmania ferry.

Tasmania is an island shaped like a shield. We had three nights, plus two on the ferry, and so we picked destinations for those three nights that sounded most interesting, and reserved hotel rooms. Tim reserved a rental car at the ferry terminal. But that's it. I was supposed to come up with an itinerary while I was in Sydney, with daily activities. But if you didn't figure it out from all the Sydney posts, touring Sydney was too exhausting. I couldn't take the time to research Tasmania. Not even to print a few maps that showed our destinations. So we caught the ferry somewhat unprepared. 

Friday night it was raining in Melbourne. We ran with our suitcases through the wind and rain from the tram stop to the ferry. Once aboard, the captain announced that the seas would be rough. But we sailed for a long time through the bay of Port Phillip, adjacent to Melbourne, which is calm and protected, even in rainstorms. So we went to bed thinking we could handle these "rough" seas.

In our cabin, ready to handle rough seas.

Around 1:00 in the morning, we all awoke bouncing in our beds. The sea outside was shaking us up and down and side to side. I could feel myself falling from the top of every wave, and then pushed up again by my mattress as we climbed the next. No one in our family was sea sick, and the vessel wasn't troubled by the weather, but we three did not sleep as well as we had anticipated, shaken around in our beds for an hour or so in the middle of the night. And the boat docked at 6:00am, and we had to get off at 6:30.

Off the ferry at 6:30am in Devonport, Tasmania.

Rental car. Because we hadn't even printed maps, Tim added a GPS device to our car hire. We programmed in our first destination: Cradle Mountain National Park. Then decided to reprogram the device to send us to Coles supermarket first, to buy some breakfast (they call it breakie here) and picnic lunch supplies. Ok. Next destination. Cradle Mountain National Park.

The GPS told us kindly which way to drive in the pleasant computerized voice of an Australian woman named Karen. "Turn left in 500 meters." "Turn left here." "Continue for 27 kilometers." We drove past scenic farmland into hills. The road narrowed from two way traffic with lines painted to divide the lanes, to two way traffic without lines, to narrow roads large enough for about 1.5 cars. Karen kept cheerfully telling us to stay on the road at the upcoming junction, rather than taking the unpaved cow track. After a while, we began to wonder why we were seeing so many cow tracks, and why were the roads so narrow? Weren't we headed toward a major tourist destination? Where was Karen taking us? 

Scenic overlook, along some small road in Tasmania.

Finally, after a few too many winding roads, Karen instructed us to turn right back onto a larger highway. Ah! There was the road we should have been taking so far! Karen was fired.

At the visitors center for the national park, we paid our entrance fee, and, because we hadn't done our homework, we asked the woman selling the tickets what we should do and see if we had only one day in Cradle Mountain? She kindly pulled out a map and suggested that we take the shuttle to the very end to Dove Lake, and walk the two hour circuit around its banks. We thanked her.

Now in possession of a map, we checked out the other things to do. Rather than taking the shuttle to the end, we could get off at the first stop, at an interpretive center, and take a short rainforest walk past a waterfall. Actually, that sounded like a better warm up to the day (it was a little chilly, by the way) than the two hour trek around the lake. We would do the lake next. So we hopped off the shuttle at the first stop.

"Why is no one else getting off at the first stop?" Tim asked.

The interpretive center was completely empty. Exhibits and signs, doing their interpretive thing alone, hung on the walls to greet any traveler who dared to break the silence. Somewhere, the looped soundtrack of an interpretive film echoed off the empty floors.

Feeling like we were doing something wrong, we snuck quickly out the back of the center to the rainforest walk. We had the boardwalk to ourselves. Except for the pre-existing animal poos lining its edges. After walking for a few seconds, we realized that the poos were actually nearly cubical in shape.

Cubical poos.

And then we remembered from our trip to Healesville that wombats marked their territory by pooping cubical poos. And that is when we realized we were walking with the wombats! Kind of. At least, we were walking their territory! We had reached wombat land!

Yes, two pictures of poo in this post.

Rainforest.

Waterfall.

Jonathan's photography.  Do you see the waterfall?

Time to wait for the next shuttle. The sign in front of the deserted interpretive center suggested that on busy days we should take the shuttle backwards, or we wouldn't get a seat. We looked at the map again. Only a 3km walk along a boardwalk to the next shuttle stop. The signs said it should take an hour. But surely we walk faster than 3km per hour, we said to ourselves. Rather than wait for the shuttle, why not take the boardwalk through the button grass? 

On the boardwalk.

The boardwalk was abandoned. But the views were amazing.

Through the button grass.

"Why is no one on the boardwalk?" we asked, but this time we knew they were crazy for missing this spectacular walk, straight out of the Wizard of Oz.

That speck is Jonathan.

Around us, tiny lizards scuttled into the grass. Birds flew by. And all along the boardwalk the little piles of wombat poo continued. Wombats! Here, in the wild! Sure, they're nocturnal. But look carefully, and you might see them.

Tim and Jonathan, looking and walking.

We stopped for lunch, and for frequent photos. And to look for wombats and platypuses (we didn't see any).

Jonathan trying to find a platypus.

In the end, it took us nowhere near one hour to walk those 3km. It actually took an hour and forty-five minutes.

While we waited for the next shuttle, and then the one after that because the first was full, we pulled out our national parks map. The next shuttle stop, read the brochure, is where wombats are often seen in the wild.

Wombats! Let's get off there. Who cares about the lake?

So we hopped off again at Ronny Creek and took the boardwalk back toward the button grass.
Five minutes into the walk we were rewarded. There was a big old wombat way up the hill!

That speck way up the hill is a wombat.  Trust me.

And then we turned the corner to see two wombats, mother and child, eating grass on the slope just above us. 

There they are!  In the grass in the middle!

In case you have missed this whole wombat craze that has overtaken our family, I should explain that wombats are kind of like giant guinea pigs. They are marsupials the size of a small pig, with the cutest fuzzy faces ever. They dig burrows in the ground, and spend the days there sleeping (sometimes with their feet in the air). They cuddle with zoo keepers who bring them sweet potatoes. Jonathan has decided he wants a wombat. While a wombat pet is somewhat impractical, at least we were hoping we could find one in the wild. And as you can see, we found three! Three wombats in the wild!

Click to see their cute faces.

Well, nothing could top that, but we decided to finish the walk anyway. Again it took us a lot longer than the 40 minutes that had been recommended. In our defense, much of that extra time was spent taking pictures.

A picture we took.  Pretty, eh?

And then Jonathan went a little off the track to explore a pond, and ended up with a leech in his shoe (without getting his feet wet at all -- it must have just fallen in when he brushed against a bush).

This might have been the leech pond.

By the time we finally made it to Dove Lake, the lake we were supposed to start at and walk around, by the time we made it there we were tired.

Us, finally at Dove Lake.

And although it was pretty, it was just a lake. By some nice looking mountains. But we come from the western United States. We have seen lakes and mountains before. We took a poll. No one wanted to walk two more hours around it. Not after having seen real wombats in the land of Oz. And our feet hurt, and it was late enough that we could check into our hotel and put those feet up for a few minutes. So after taking some pictures, we joined the shuttle queue, and caught the fourth shuttle out of the park (apparently everyone who had taken the shuttle to the lake all day long decided they had had enough at the same time).

Cradle Mountain over Dove Lake.

 Our hotel was in the middle of nowhere.

"You will definitely see wildlife during your stay here," promised the guy who checked us in. "Go out to the boardwalk just before dark."

Out on the boardwalk just before dark, it had already been 12 hours since we left the ferry. There was a bench looking off into bushes and trees, and a sign posted in front of the bench said simply "Shhh!".

We sat on the bench, waiting to be awed by wildlife.

Off in the distance, we could hear a family of cockatoos screaming at each other in pure evening happiness.

Jonathan's toe began to tap.

"Shhhh!" said Tim and I.

"What?" he said, continuing to tap.

"SHHHH!" said Tim and I. "Your toe!"

He rolled his eyes. "You ask me to shhh, but I am a lot quieter than those cockatoos." Indeed, they were still screaming at each other somewhere nearby.

"The cockatoos are natural," we tried to explain. "You are unnatural." No, we didn't say that. But sitting quietly, apparently, was impossible. So we got up and walked around. We did manage to startle a couple of wallabies. But that was it. No more wombats. Oh well. We already saw wombats.

Since we were in the middle of nowhere, we were limited in our choice of food. In fact, there was basically nothing except the hotel restaurant for miles and miles and miles of twisty mountain roads coated in huge kangaroos whose sole job it is to run in front of your rental car and crush it. I know this, because there were yellow and black signs all over the roads with pictures of kangaroos crushing cars. So we had to eat at the hotel restaurant. For 30-40 bucks a plate. Every cheap gene in my body was screaming out in agony. But whatever. Vacation.

There was a wallaby just outside our window in the dark. Tim took a picture.

Glowing eyeball in the center is a wallaby.

And then finally we enjoyed a full night of sleep, undisturbed by someone shaking the beds up and down in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean.

And in the morning, the wallaby was still there!

 

With a friend. 

 

 

This post is too long.  I will stop for now.