Breakfast in Tokyo, Lunch in Cape Town & Dinner in Medellín

Well I’m back in my hostel in Melbourne now, it practically feels like home.  I’ve spent the last 4 days in Hobart, not finding much to do except belatedly celebrating St Patricks day Saturday night with my 2 Irish travel partners, drinking exclusively Guinness for the night.

After that I didn’t get up to much of anything, I saw pretty much what there was to see in Hobart on my first couple days there when I flew in.  So I’ve basically been sitting around the hostel the last couple days, avoiding spending money unnecessarily.  The hostels in Tasmania we had been staying in have largely been good, but the one in Hobart was the exception.  I had to move rooms because the staff didn’t know what’s going on, the kitchen sucked and the whole place was full of the strangest sorts of people…  Today when I got to my hostel in Melbourne I was welcomed back by the owner and given a free beer, that’s more like it!

I’m back here for a week, F1 grand prix on Sunday followed by the Who in concert, and then I’m flying to Perth next week.  As of today I have exactly 7 weeks left in Australia and after Melbourne it is split 50/50 between West and East coasts with a couple days in Adelaide in between.  I really can’t wait to see the coasts after hearing people talk about them for the last 3 months here, but I’m not really looking forward to the travel scene to come, especially on the East coast.  The stuff to see sounds amazing but it seems like such an over backpacked route that I’m not looking forward to the madness of just traveling up the coast there.  I’m sure everything is still great to see up in Queensland though, it’s over traveled for a reason.

That’s enough for now, I have one week here to chill out in Melbourne and party it up at the grand prix on Sunday before hitting the road again.  This will pretty much be the last week I’m not ‘traveling’ for the rest of this trip (except a week back in the UK in June).  The 6 months I have left will be the longest stretch of continually being ‘on the road’ of the trip and I keep on anticipating the places I have left to see more and more.

We were going to hike up to one of the peaks around lake st clair but there was low cloud covering the area, even more annoying to me since I had gotten up to see the sunrise. Instead of hiking, we drove to Mt Field nat’l park home of the spectacular russell falls.

The valley at the base of the falls is dense rainforest and the hilltops nearby are home to the second tallest trees on earth (behind the californian redwoods). The clouds had lifted by this point and it was a lovely day for walking around the park. We also stopped at a nearby wildlife park to see Platypus (strangest animal I’ve seen) and the ever popular Tasmanian devil…

After this stop it was back to Hobart for the night, we still had the car for another full day, but there’s nothing really between Mt Field and Hobart except some small, quaint, villages and farms. We drove by quite a few hop fields ready for harvesting.

Last day we had the car for we headed South of Hobart through another wine & farming region down towards the South coast, a very nice drive. We got as far as the paved road can take you and stopped at a great beach in Southport. It was too nice of a day and setting not to swim, despite the cold temperature of the water.

After that we stopped at Hastings for a so-called thermal pool where you can swim. All it ended up being (of course you don’t know this until you have already paid to get in) was a small, shallow very typical looking swimming pool with barely warm water in it. Not remotely hot like all the signs saying hot springs would lead you to believe. Pathetic! We soon left there and found another beach to chill on, more tough life…

So we completed our loop of Tassie in 10 days. I could’ve stayed longer in the Western regions and found parts of the East over rated. Much like anywhere, some stuff exceeds expectations and other stuff falls short. All in all it’s been a great road trip, 1900km in total, seeing the sites on this small island that is definitely very unique from mainland Australia. I also can’t believe how great the weather has been, in the 12 days I’ve been here I’ve only had 1 1/2 days of rain and the rest has mostly been sunny and warm!

Leaving Cradle mountain, we drove West to the coast through some mountains, lovely viewing most of the way. What few towns (if you can call them that) there are in this area are mostly small mining settlements with nothing much in them. Strahan, on the West coast is the exception to this since it’s the base of West coast tourism apparently. Holiday parks, motels, hotels and restaurants here but no accommodation available for our budget, after looking all over for somewhere affordable we gave up on Strahan and found something in the not so far away town of Queenstown. Much less touristed, and still a mining town but they had a cheap backpackers place there and let us never speak again of the greedy bastards in the tourist trap of Strahan.

Good weather again, 3rd day in a row in the west country is amazing, we drove to the South end of Cradle Mtn/Lake St Clair national park to Lake St Clair. This is the other end of the 80km overland trek that starts at Cradle Mtn and the deepest glacial lake in Australia. The Tasmanian glaciers are long gone but the mountains they carved up are still around.

I like the Western half of Tassie better than the East, which was still nice and worth seeing but over rated in my opinion. The West is remote, and in the areas that aren’t scared by the logging or mining industries, beautiful. Of all the comparisons to New Zealand, there are similarities but New Zealand’s geography is more dramatic and has more diversity in it too. All that said it is nice down here, as you can hopefully see from my pictures…

After stocking up on food, we left Burnie, and headed South to Cradle mountain national park. The majority of the 2 1/2 hours driving was by farm fields reminding me of England or, unfortunately, tree farms and clear cut logging. This changes dramatically once you get near the park, far fewer trees, lots of scrubby growths and it looks like something out of middle earth. Apparently you can only see Cradle mountain 60 days a year due to the weather here, we seem to have timed it very well, arriving to bright sunshine and clear skies.

Hiked to a lookout in the afternoon, nice panoramic views over the glacial lakes of the area. This is the nicest part of Australia I’ve seen yet as far as natural beauty goes.

That night, being St Patrick’s day we went to the park lodge and had some Guinness to celebrate that fact, I’m still amazed that we found Guinness in such a remote location. Next morning we got up early and hiked up to the summit of Cradle mountain, 6 1/2 hours round trip. Beautiful weather for this hike, 2nd day of good weather in a row for this area, lucky me. The hike is always pretty exposed so there’s great views the whole way.

The last hour of the hike is climbing over large boulders to reach the top, loads of fun for me, not so sure the other people doing it thought so though. I’m not going to try and describe the whole thing so here’s photos from it.

Launceston is not a city. Enough said.
There’s a really scenic gorge through town and it is the gateway to the Tamar valley however. We stayed here for a couple nights basically because it was rainy, we found a nice hostel and there wasn’t much else to do.

Leaving Launceston, we drove through the Tamar valley and up to the North coast. This area is home to vineyards as well as cheese and chocolate factories. The day was one of the harder ones on the trip so far, spent sampling wine, cheese and chocolate with good success on all fronts. Backpacking is really tough sometimes, the Pinot Noir and pepper cheese I bought were a killer combination later on…

We ended up in the town of Burnie for the night on the North coast, the 4th largest town in Tasmania and found a choice of 4 dinner options in the whole place, arriving after 6pm the town centre was practically deserted. It reminds me of towns in New Zealand a lot. It’s going to get even more remote after this as we’re heading back to Hobart down the West country, mountains, wilderness and not much else there.

The next few posts are going to be what I’ve done the last week and a half with no access to internet…

What started as me meeting up with one guy looking to share a car ended up with 5 of us in total setting out from Hobart in a car we got a great rate on for 10 days. None of us had met any of the others before Wednesday… Thursday morning we got the car and since it was a gorgeous day we drove up to Mt Wellington, overlooking Hobart for some fantastic views.

The Destination for day one was the tasman peninsula and Port Arthur, one of the original infamous prisons here from the transportation era (convicts sent here from the Britain). What’s left now is about 1/3 of buildings that were part of the complex in ruin. The ghost tour is apparently the thing to do and we got there in time for it (at dusk). Good tour, walking around the buildings under the stars and a full moon with the guide telling stories of the prison creates a nice aura, didn’t see any ghosts though…

Next morning we went back to see the place in daylight. Apparently this site is a major cash cow for the Tasmanian tourist industry, the admission fees were ridiculous especially since we had paid to go on the tour the night before. An alternate/side way in away from the ticket booth was discovered, utilized and we wandered around for a good couple hours.

From Port Arthur we drove North, along the East coast. The Southern section of this coast has cliffs and rock formations and once you get farther North there’s lots of nice beaches. The weather was another beautiful sunny day and despite the fact that it wasn’t that warm out (and the ocean definitely wasn’t warm) this beach looked too good not to swim in..

It rained that night, but the next morning had cleared off quite a bit in time for visiting Wineglass bay in the Freycinet national park.

The hike into the bay is nice, through some cool rock formations, the bay and beach are stunning. More swimming was done here, despite the water being even colder than the day before. A lot of the rocks in this area have a very vivid orange lichen growing on them making for some great colour contrasts with the water.

After we left wineglass bay the weather changed, ala New Zealand and pissed down rain for the rest of the day. We didn’t bother trying to continue North along the coast to see more beaches in that weather so we just headed for Launceston, Tasmanias 2nd “city”. Overall I can’t complain about the weather down here at all, it’s supposed to suck but my first 5 days were sunny and warm (ish). Good enough weather to go swimming the last 2 days!

I had my whole day all planned out leaving Melbourne, got to the airport really early in case reissuing my ticket took a while… Turns out, Qantas wouldn’t reissue it there at all, they only deal with current day or emergency ticketing there and apparently I had to go to one of their city offices to have the changes made. The exact opposite of what the American airlines representative told me on the phone the other day. Net result, hours of time spent doing nothing at Melbourne airport. Thanks for that American airlines!

My flight to Hobart was fine, saw the end of a great sunset once we took-off. Fantastic colours as far as I could see in either direction…

Upon arrival in Hobart we left the plane via steps onto the tarmac. Haven’t done that in a few years. I arrived at my hostel in Hobart just before 10pm, checked in and then looked for somewhere to get some food. Apparently this is not possible at this time of night. At least I found nothing open in a good half hour of walking around. It’s a good thing Qantas served (albeit small) sandwiches on the flight!

I spent my first day in Hobart walking all over the place. First order of the day was food since I hadn’t had any in a while. Next was the Qantas office in town, where they can reissue my ticket but it will take them a day (hopefully no more). I really don’t understand why after they have already gathered all the information from me and have my current ticket in front of them I have to leave it with them and go back tomorrow for my new one. I don’t think any airline employees actually fully understand round the world tickets.

Once that was taken care of I explored the city centre and harbour front (in the daylight this time), had some great fish and chips for lunch on the wharf served from a boat. The city centre is full of old stone buildings and there’s pockets of them all over town it seems. Great ambience here. Hobart despite being the capital of Tasmania (population is 200k+) doesn’t feel like a city at all, just like a moderately sized town. The weather was clearing off and warming up throughout the day here too, very nice afternoon and more of the same is forecast. I’ll take all of that I can get down here!

After this exploring I started to walk back to my hostel, almost getting there until I see the block of the road my hostel is on is blocked off by police and there’s 4 fire engines parked in the middle of the road. I paid attention long enough to figure out that it was not my hostel that had any problem but the bldg 2 doors down. Never saw any smoke either but they had all the water hoses and smoke gear out. Pubs are a good way to kill time, but when after I’d visited a couple of those and my hostel was still blocked off to me I headed to the Tasmanian museum across the road. Pretty small place but good information on the deportation of convicts here from England back in the day and a fantastic Antarctic exhibit. Apparently, Tasmania was the last piece of land to break apart from the Antarctic continent, long after Australia etc. So the geological elements here are closer related to parts of Antarctica than they are to the nearby mainland Australia.

After feeding my brain something to go with the beer from earlier on, I headed back to the hostel which was finally accessible again. The idea was to fix dinner, but the kitchen here is woefully inadequate for the number of guests so I gave up on that idea and went back out again. The sun was just setting, so I tried to find some good views of different areas of town with a little success.

Today will be spent putting together a car rental share with some other backpackers here. Making the next week of two affordable for all concerned. I should also let some of you who check this blog a lot know, Tasmanian internet access is not cheap nor is it readily available outside of the major towns (of which I think there’s 3) so once I leave Hobart I will probably not be updating this until I get back here in a couple weeks. If it’s more than a couple weeks without a post, a tasmanian devil got me.

After the fantastic weather upon arrival here, day 2 deteriorated quite a bit. First off it was just very windy and overcast which was ok, I joined a morning bus tour to see the main sights in the park, basically the only way I could get to them not having a car. It was part of a 3 day great ocean road/grampian tour that people staying here can join just for the grampians morning tour if it’s not booked out. It only cost me $15 for the 3 hours, unbelievable value!

I took one of the free bikes from the hostel to explore a bit in the afternoon, got caught in a downpour of rain, returned to the hostel and gave up on doing anything outdoors the rest of the day as it rained and rained. Hard to really get annoyed though since there is a severe drought and extreme fire danger here and the rain is desperately needed. I just spent the rest of the day trip planning. The skies cleared off after dark to reveal a stunning nightscape of the milky way and a lot more stars than I’m used to seeing.

Day 3 I had a hike planned, and despite the weather looking not so great I still set off. Very windy, but ok other than that to start off with. I hiked up to one of the lookouts nearby, the pinnacle. Through the “grand canyon” on the way.

Very cool hike, the rock formations here are very unique and the way they were formed by the plates colliding has caused all sorts of strange angles in almost all the rocks.

When I was nearly at the top, going through the last narrow passageway in the rocks…

It started raining, I quickly found a nice overhanging rock and took shelter, ate lunch and waited for the deluge to pass, which thankfully only took about 20 minutes. The skies cleared briefly afterwords, but long enough for me to get to the lookout see everything in the clear.

On the way back down I had to shelter 3 more times to avoid getting soaked, fortunately none of these showers lasted very long. I saw a few kangaroos along the trail, then when I got back down I saw a group of 20+ including several mothers with joeys, which I hadn’t seen before. Stayed there and watched them/took pictures for a while, then had to run back to the hostel to barely avoid the latest downpour. In total I hiked around 10km, a good day out and with the high winds, rain and cooler temperatures it should be a good warm up for Tasmania.

Right now I’m waiting for my bus back to Melbourne, it’s not for a couple hours, it’s raining outside again and I don’t think I’ve posted my plans for the rest of Australia on here yet, so I will do that now. I’m going to Tasmania on Monday for 2 1/2 weeks. Then back to Melbourne for Grand Prix weekend. After that I’m flying to Perth, going to be out West for 3 weeks before flying to the gold coast, via a stop in Adelaide, and spending my last few weeks traveling from Byron bay up to Cairns. I’ll be departing Australia for South Africa in mid May. I’m really looking forward to all of it, and very glad tiger airways fare sales enabled me to be able to fly around so much. Some of their prices are unbelievable! The only thing I’m not looking forward to is having to get everything into my backpack on Monday for my flight to Hobart…

I left Melbourne at 9 this morning and via a combination of train and buses arrived at my hostel in halls gap at 1:30.  The scenery along the trip was basically flat, boring nothing to see.  iPod zone out time…

Once in Halls Gap though, you are in the Grampians mountains and the view is much better.  The weather was perfect so I went straight out hiking to one of the surrounding lookout points.

I played around with my camera quite a bit and it seems to be taking good images, so I’m happy about that.  This place really is isolated, no real cities anywhere near, meaning food etc is expensive so I brought enough food (and wine) for my 3 days here with me. My bags will way about half as much on the way back to Melbourne I reckon.

A backpackers diet.

A lot of the time people associate backpacking with eating instant noodles every night and going mcdonalds when they feel like splurging. This is not the case for all backpackers, though here at this hostel I seem to be in the vast minority cooking real meals.

I spent today mainly in the kitchen or shopping for food. I’m going to the Grampians for 3 days tomorrow, and there’s not much in the way of affordable food that apparently so I am taking enough food for my time there with me.

A lot of the time when I have been traveling, staying in hostels, particularly here in Australia, many other backpackers come over when I am preparing or eating my dinner and comment on how fancy it looks. It seems like any meal I make, whether it’s steak, pasta or even stir fry everyone is in awe of how amazing it looks. With the exception of a few people here who are always cooking up interesting dishes, apparently if the meal is more complicated than boiling water or operating the toaster/microwave it is a gormet meal. The kangaroo steak (cheapest meat you can buy here) and fried potatoes I made the other were included in this backpacker gormet category, I keep hearing, ‘that looks fancy’ or ‘you’re quite a chef there’ from people here.

Not all backpackers eat the cheapest ‘edible’ substance they can get their hands on. There’s a few of us at this hostel who are actually cooking with fresh ingredients and making real meals for ourselves, also not drinking goon, how anyone can drink that stuff is beyond me, especially since real wine is cheap and good here.

Today I bought a whole fresh barramundi (local fish, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while), and barbecued it in olive oil and garlic for dinner with some sweet potato, accompanied by a bottle of french white wine, sauvignon blanc, called the arrogant frog which was all damn good.

Earlier today I made some guacamole and tuna salad for my stay in the Grampians, both tasting quite good. Backpacking around the world does not necessarily mean eating the cheapest crap food you can get, and in a way it’s sort of annoying, people being astounded at what I cook every day.

Ok, that’s enough talk of food, I also bought a new camera yesterday after reading many reviews and getting over that fact that my old one was history. I now have a canon SX110IS,(the above picture was taken with it) and I think I’m happy with it. It’ll get it’s first real test in the grampians this week which I am greatly looking forward to.