I’m a huge fan of road trips – the idea of the open road, bad food and loud music to sing along to always sounds like the best idea to me. As I’ve come to learn, every place I go to road trip seems to be different – different rules, different places to see, different ways to improve your experience.
I just spent 6 days travelling around Tassie with a friend, and below are a couple tips for those taking the spectacular opportunity to do it for themselves!
It had been a crappy week when it came to weather.
Cold winds, lots of rain, clouds covering the skies without the chance of any blue in the near future. Vicky and I had made due – kayaking and enjoying our time in Corinna nonetheless. But as we pulled out of Rosebery and drive the hundred or so kilometres to Cradle Mountain, we prayed for something better.
And oh my God it worked!
By the time we drove along the dusty dirt road and parked next to the visitor centre, the sun was ablaze in the sky and there wasn’t as cloud for miles! What a perfect day!
What a perfect day to hike around Cradle Mountain.
My plane landed in Hobart airport at 8:40am.
I was here!
I was finally in the lesser known, even less travelled Australian island state of Tasmania. And although I was in Tasmania (affectionately known as Tassie) to do farm work, (second year visa crap) I had hoped to travel a little around the island during my short 3 month stay. But I was on my way to the farm the next morning, so I had 24 hours to check out Hobart and what it had to offer me. 24 hours in the most beautiful, friendly, historic Australian city is by far not enough time, but I made due.
I’m just going to start by saying that seven days is not enough time to even scratch the surface of Tasmania.
This little island state just off the coast of Australia, this hardly visited, rarely talked about little island is hustling and bustling with things to do and beautiful places to see. And it’s really not as little as everyone thinks it is, and even for the size of Tassie there’s so much to see and do it would easily take you a couple of months to really experience the full island.
But I only had seven days.
As I write this post, rain is pouring down upon the roof of the caravan stay in, banging off of the tin roof in rapid fire. A mere half hour ago the sun was shining and it was the warmest I had ever felt it in my short stay so far in Tassie, I had even changed into shorts.
This past month has been more or less pretty tame compared to the rest of my time travelling here. That being said, I have done some pretty awesome things and between working and the blog I think I did pretty good! That being said, I am now caught up on Pretty Little Liars, the Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Supernatural. I’m sure you can guess what I do after work.
So on for what happened this month!
Caution: This is a huge post with lots of pictures. Read if you dare!
So Australia Day weekend was absolutely crazy, but so much fun! Australia Day is January 26th, which happened to land on a Monday this year, so I had a 4 day weekend to myself! Woo hoo!!
So like the caution above, I took a lot of photos… And I will put a quick blab with each section of what was going on, but a photo says a thousand words!
Last Saturday was the last day of the week long travel trip with work.
We had travelled down the southern coast, visiting and working in places like Bega, Eden, Bateman’s Bay, and Nowra. There were so many happy, sandy beaches, a couple beers and ciders, and many a sunburnt nose because of forgotten sunscreen. The people in the small towns we were fundraising in were lovely, and I met some amazing people and heard some fascinating stories. All in all it was a great week.
So Saturday was the last day on our wonderful road trip, and we finally had the entire day to do whatever we wanted with no work commitments. We had a local Aussie in our midst, so he led us (more or less) straight towards the beautiful beach of Watamolla.
What a beautiful, hot day… I need to go to the beach! I mean it’s at least 35 degrees celsius outside, I’m literally melting. But Bondi is too busy, Manly is a $14 trip away and also always packed on the weekends.. Honestly I just want to get away from people. So where should I go?
Easy. The Royal National Park.
I’m not even going to write anything. There were no words for how absolutely amazing the fireworks were this year, just long shouts and screams and “wows” from the entire crowd in Waverton watching the fireworks with us. The kids were excited, the adults were excited, and I was over the moon!
So now, without further a-do, the photos! (I took about 400, but I’ll only add the ones I deem worthy).
The Backpack Manifesto 