Jenelle&John's Excellent Adventures: 2010

When we arrived in Tasmania our intention was to do a 80+km (50miles) hike called the Overland Track. We had a good friend from Jackson recommend it, and had met a lot of other travelers who had done it and loved it. We had wanted to spend a lot more time in "Tassie," but because we had to book a ticket to New Zealand before the prices skyrocketed, we only had a week. We figured it would be just enough time to fly in, do the hike in 6 days, and fly out. When we arrived, however, we found out that the trek had changed a great deal in recent years (everyone we talked to about it had done it several years earlier). We found out that you now have to "book" far in advance and pay $290 per person to do the hike!!! We wouldn't have been able to (or wanted to) pay that much money regardless, but the trek was booked anyway so we would have been out of luck even if we could have afforded it. We decided to rent a car for the week and planned to go to a different national park to do some free hiking. I told this story briefly to a lady I had met in the bathroom of the hostel where we were staying, and then we left to rent our car. When we stopped back by the hostel to pick up our packs, the son of the lady from the bathroom ran out to our car and told us that two people in their group had cancelled on them. He told us that they wanted to GIVE US the tickets so that they wouldn't go to waste! We couldn't believe our good luck! Our only problem was that we had just paid for a rental car for a week.

We returned to the rental place and, as luck would have it, the guy at the car rental place was super nice and allowed us to just rent the car for one day instead of seven. He even gave us a discounted rate! Having the car for the day was perfect anyway because we weren't leaving for the trek until the next day and I was excited to check out some of the great vineyards and wineries surrounding Launceston. I wanted to visit one winery in particular because the man who runs it is a friend of one of the wine reps I worked with in Jackson. I didn't think we would have time to visit that winery (called Tamar Ridge) or have a car to get there, but now we did. We went to that winery and a couple of others and had a great time sampling the wine. We also met another group of really cool people (Humphey, Alice, and Rachael) doing the same "circuit" and they ended up inviting us to come with them to the beach for some fish and chips. We were planning on camping that night, but weren't looking forward to it because it was freezing and looked like it was going to rain. We lucked out again, though, because before we knew it, our new friends had invited us to spend the night with them. Humprey had a really nice house in Launceston and an extra bedroom for us :-) He had also done the Overland before so he helped us work out which huts to stay in, how far to hike each day, etc.

The next day, we woke up early and met our lovely new friends back at the hostel, where the bus picked us up to take us to the beginning of the trek. We spent the next 5 days hiking through amazing wilderness, swimming in freezing cold mountain lakes, and climbing to the top of two mountains--Cradle Mountain and Mt. Osso (Tasmania's tallest mountain). We spent some of our nights in mountain huts and some camped out in our tent--our friends left food in their tent one night and an enormous possum tried to get inside! We saw lots of wallabies and even one with a baby in it's pouch :-) After hiking 93km in 5 days, we got back on the bus to return to Launceston via Hobart. We were already going to be cutting it close for making our flight and then the bus got stuck in traffic! We realized that if we took the bus all the way into the town of Launceston and then tried to get a taxi out to the airport, we would definitely miss our flight. We knew that we would be driving almost right by the airport on the way into town, so we explained the situation to the bus driver and asked him if he could just drop us off on the road at the closest point to the airport. He argreed and we got off the bus a little over a mile from the airport. I had made a sign that said AIRPORT and we tried to hitchhike, but no one picked us up. Fortunately, we were extremely used to walking with our packs by this point so we ran practically the whole way to the airport and made it just in time!!! Whew, what a lucky week!