“We’ve got a few days in Sydney, then we’re off for bike touring in Tasmania - where the weather forecasts look pretty cold and possibly wet too... perhaps when it comes to cycling in the Southern Hemisphere around Christmas - less South is a good call?” These were somewhat prophetic words at the conclusion of my last post.
Based on temperatures alone, yes, ‘less South’ would have been a good call. It snowed on us on December 29 in Mt Field National Park in Tasmania. True we were at a bit of altitude, but not that much, only about 4000 feet, and it was in the high 30s or low 40s F at the hotel down at lower elevation.
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| Austral Summer bushwalk! |
We had a great time wandering Sydney in the days preceding Tasmania, mostly fine weather and we had a blast visiting museums, hiking up and over the top of the arch of the Harbor Bridge, and all over town and out in the Blue Mountains.
On our way to a professional soccer game, we saw a huge flock of fruit bats - fruit bats are enormous by North American standards - imagine a squirrel sized body and probably close to 2 foot wingspan. The urban wildlife in Australia is wonderfully exotic to our eyes: spoonbills, hooked billed kinda birds, parrot type guys and cockatoos all give your average pigeons and seagulls a run for their money. (Unfortunately I don't have any pictures that do much justice, so you'll have to just imagine or fire up your Google thingy to find some, sorry!)
We got to Tasmania at the same time as our friend Ross,
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Ok, so this is actually later in the trip, but this was a great photo of us all....
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built the bikes and had a nice day wandering about in Hobart after we built our bikes. The following day we headed off for a hike with our bikes and gear behind the car in a trailer. Day 1 we had planned to ride out of Hobart to a hotel near Mt Field National Park. But our wonderful Hobart host, Gavin, suggested that we really should all drive up together to do this hike instead. We wouldn’t miss much in terms of riding - a good portion of the day was going to be spent on the roads in and around Hobart getting to our first stop. Plus, we’d get a chance to see some high alpine vistas that we weren’t likely to get in that area. So that’s how we ended up in the snow. It was beautiful and memorable, to be in the driving snow on our Southern Hemisphere Summer Holiday.
The cycling was wonderful - very quiet roads, wonderful people we met in all of the towns we stopped in, amazing and varied scenery.
Our travels took us out to and back from Strathgordon on the only paved road (dead end) for many miles around - the whole of SW Tasmania is essentially wild. Several days we rode for hours and hours without seeing a house, a business or anything at all save for wilderness around us. We got all the way out to the West Coast to a town called Strahan, after traveling through Queenstown, which could have been in the Colorado or Utah - almost from central casting for ‘mountain mining town’. Our final stop was Cradle Mountain National Park
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| An iconic view from Cradle Mountain... this is on all the postcards, posters and calendars, we got to see it ourselves. The funny part is that this boathouse is actually quite a bit smaller than you'd guess, not for model boats, but not for regular sized ones either. |
and we took a day off the bikes there to do a wonderful hike. We ended our bike travels in Devonport and rented a small van and drove back to Hobart.
The weather was mostly cool to cold temps, and a few days of rain on and off, some mostly on, and one day entirely ‘on’…the bonus was that that day was really cold and windy too!
One of the highlights of the trip was on that very cold, rainy, windy day, a family stopped at the top of a pass with their camper van and offered us hot coffee and some shelter from the rain and cold. We felt a bit bad as we made a wet mess of the interior of their van, but they were cyclists too and said they felt compelled to stop. We learned that they were staying at the same campground as us that night, and we had a cabin reserved there, so we invited them over for dinner - it was a family of 5 in a small van camper, so I think this was a welcome break from the confines of their rig.
We hiked the next day and were able to meet up with bike tourist we met a few days prior. Esther is a very kind and nice woman traveling solo all over the world by bike. She left her home in Vancouver BC headed for Scandanavia, cycled through as much of Russia as her visa would allow, then on to Mongolia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Victoria, and from Australia she was bound for Portugal and Spain.
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| The shorts and short sleeves were still a few days hence, after a bunch more cold and rain! |
We had extra space in the cabin so she stayed one night with us and we all rode together to Devonport the next day which was big fun - and, the first day on the whole trip where we were actually warm on the bikes - as we went down in elevation and as the weather warmed up as well, we ended up doing the last 10 miles or so in short sleeves and shorts for the first time vs all the layers we’d been wearing most every day previously.
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| Echidnas ahead. |
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| Visit to the body shop ahead.... |
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| I just love that they describe Wombat's movement as 'trundling', pretty accurate when you see them move.. |
The wildlife we saw was all so cool - wallabies (small kangaroo like creatures), actual kangaroos, wombats, possums (very different than North American possums), what we think was a Tasmanian Devil in the distance, and my favorite of all, the echidna. Echidna are hedgehog/porcupiney marsupial anteaters, slow and rather ungainly as they move, they have two main defensive plans it seems: One is to roll up in a ball and rely upon their spines for protection,
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| An Echidna ball.... |
the second, probably less effective, but highly comical plan is to simply hide their face (perhaps on the human infant theory of “if I can’t see you, you, of course, cannot see me”)
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| An Echidna, perfectly safe since he can't see us any longer ... |
We saw a lot of them along the road, and this second defensive posture was nothing but a riot to see. We learned from an Aussie that they were completely docile and quite safe to poke, so we realized that that was probably a great band name and in turn, created, with Gavin’s daughter’s help, the design for tour t-shirt:
Wombats are startlingly cute and surprisingly big, while they can be nasty and ‘bitey’ and scratchy (well, probably more accurately ‘slashy’, they’ve got big claws), I feel like they’re sort of behind the curve for Australian wildlife, most all of which has at least one, if not several ways to kill you. So I’m considering a Kickstarter campaign to design and outfit the wombats with helmets mounted with lasers or something. I’ll work it out and let you know, but the ones we saw looked a bit bummed that they had nothing really frightening to work with.
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| I had to put both of these on here just so you get a sense of scale with the (adult) humans in background. |
Talking with Aussies about the local wildlife was fascinating - we had pretty much the identical experience as Bill Bryson describes so well in this quote:
“Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.”
The thing that got added regularly to discussions we had similar to Bryson’s spot on observations, were questions about bears…as in “yeah, we got a lot of deadly animals here, but you guys have bears up there”… sure North Americans need to be cautious about bears occasionally, but this pales in comparison to how much more frequently Aussies can encounter the aforementioned deadly things in Australia.
After we completed the bicycle portion of the trip, we had the chance to spend a day or so in Hobart, visiting an amazing art museum and getting out for a great hike out along some spectacular cliffs above the ocean.
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| Our wonderful host and guide, Gavin way, way above the ocean below. We hiked all the way out to the end of the point visible in the center background. |
We closed out the trip with a few days visiting some friends in Melbourne which was much warmer than Tasmania and great for some time at the beach, and some wandering in the city proper through the botanic gardens and a great museum. Then back home to Taiwan after an amazing trip!
