Tasmania is a dramatic and wild place full of natural wonders, vast unspoiled forests, rugged mountains, 10,000-year old Huon pine trees (oldest trees left on earth) and weird animals. A quarter of the island consists of 20 alpine and costal National Parks, and almost all of that is designated as World Heritage Sites. It is Australia’s smallest state (about the size of Ireland) and is an island located about 500 miles off the southeastern coast, below Melbourne.
It is an absolute paradise for someone like me who loves the outdoors and hiking. There are over 3000 kilometres of maintained hiking trails, through just about every type of forest and terrain you can imagine. One of the most famous being the Overland Track, which rivals some of the world’s best hikes.
Before heading to Tasmania I had been living in a hostel for a month in Melbourne while looking for work and was getting a bit bored and discouraged. I was also feeling a bit down because I had just been dumped by a girlfriend with whom I been travelling for a while. At that point I was giving serious consideration to putting my trip on hiatus and heading back to a ‘normal’ working life in Canada.
One night while sitting around the hostel and drinking with other travelers I met a German girl named Christine. Within an hour of meeting, we took to each other and developed a plan to head to Tasmania and hike every trail we could, live out of the car and camp in the most remote spots we could find.
The next day I booked my 13-hour ferry ride to Tasmania for my car and me. Christine was to meet up with me there a couple days later. About 2 hours into the ferry ride I started to have doubts about my spontaneous actions. I was thinking, “This is crazy man… You just met this girl yesterday and you should be in Melbourne looking for a job”. It was just at that moment the clouds broke and the sun warmed my face and weakened my doubt, I began to crack a big smile, just then a guy with a guitar behind me started playing and singing a folk song about leaving it all behind and doing what ever you want.
I gazed out the window at the vast ocean before me and all my doubt was gone, I became overwhelmed with an endless sensation of freedom and excitement. I resolved to the notion that there was some force bringing me here for some greater reason I could not comprehend and I was not to question it just live in the moment and enjoy the journey to its fullest.
Once I met up with Christine we bought a free camping guide for Tasmania. The book highlighted exactly the kind of camping locations we were looking for: remote, costal and most importantly, free. We ended up going to so many beautiful campsites almost all of them were on the ocean. We spent most of our nights by the fire drinking cheep boxed red wine under the bright stars and being lulled to sleep by the ocean.
There is a bird in Australia called a kookaburra whose call sounds like someone laughing, kind of like ‘ha ha ha haaaa’. Some nights while camping a there would be a kookaburra in the trees above, it felt like they were laughing at us. There was a couple of times where I tripped and fell or dropped a fire log on my foot and a kookaburra with impeccable timing would laugh at me.
I have always dreamed of seeing a platypus in the wild. The platypus is one of the most bizarre animals in the world. It looks like a gopher but has a large duckbill, webbed feet, a tail like a beaver and it is the only mammal that lays eggs. When the explorer who first discovered this odd animal brought it back to Europe the scientists that first examined it thought it was a hoax and that he had pieced it together from many different animals. It can only be found in Tasmania and a couple other spots in the south of Australia and it is an endangered species. Christine and I were camping behind a hostel by a river and the owner had told us that there were quite a few platypuses that could be seen in the river. Our first day there we spent about 3 hours just watching for them unsuccessfully. The next day we spent another 3 hours platypus watching and finally just as we were about to give up for good, we spotted 2 of them frolicking in the water. It only lasted about 30 seconds but I was more than satisfied having seen 2 of them so close up.
Christine was new to the English language so I did my English speaking duty and immediately tutored her on all of the important swear words and vulgar phrases that I could conjure up.
During a visit to some thermal springs at the southern tip of Tasmania, I was changing in to my swim shorts, I heard someone uttering non-stop profanities at the top of their lungs. When I came out to the pool I found Christine in the middle causing the disturbance, surrounded by kids and extremely irritated parents. I really should have told her before, some of the meanings of the words because what she was saying goes far beyond normal cursing and should never be said in the presence of kids. It turns out it was a thermal spring and not a hot thermal spring and Christine’s profane vocal outburst was because of her dissatisfaction in the cold water temperature. I guess thermal spring means is that, the water is a bit warmer than normal spring water, and we were expecting hot water.
The two long hikes that we were preparing for were the Overland Track (6-10 days) and the South Coast Track (10-14 days). After a couple day hikes to get our legs in shape we began 2 and 3 day hikes and eventually were ready for out first big one the Overland Track
We did the Overland in 6 days. It is 81 kilometers long and in an area with quick changing extreme weather. It rains there on average 250 days of the year and has been known to snow in the summer. It is said that you can experience weather of all 4 seasons in a day there. After a day of rain the track becomes a leech infested mud pit but luckily there are wooden boardwalks in the most of the areas, but even they become muddy. There are plenty of huts along the way with stoves and outhouses. The huts were great places to socialize, sleep, cook and dry off from the rain.
There are side trips along the track leading to various mountain summits, lakes and waterfalls. One mountain summit, which we climbed, is Mt. Ossa, Tasmania’s highest mountain. The day we climbed it we had hiked about 2 hours before we got to the base it then took us 3 hours to get to the top. The view up there was breathtaking; we could see Cradle Mountain, where we began hiking and Lake St. Claire, where we would finish. It took another 2 hours to climb down then another 2 hours to get to the next hut. It was a very long and tiring day.
We met two Scottish guys along the way. One guy wore a kilt the whole walk. They were both overweight and very out of shape. They spent the week prior on a non-stop drinking binge in Hobart. We had lightweight dehydrated food with a carefully planned menu for our energy needs. They brought tinned food, bottles of pop, chocolate bars, chips and candy. Their food must have weighed 10 times what ours did with about half of the energy. We had good Gortex hiking boots, gators to keep the leeches off our legs and lots of warm waterproof cloths. One had a kilt, a sweatshirt and running shoes, the other had shorts, a sweatshirt, really old running shoes and no socks. It was kind of funny how unprepared they were until I realized that if the weather turned bad they would be in serious trouble. They were lucky because it only rained on the first two days.
After finishing this trek I had a very strong feeling of accomplishment. Before doing it, it was something that I thought I would never be able to complete. Even along the way there were many times where my feet, legs and back felt like they could take no more pain and I would have loved to give up but there was no giving up because the only way out was walking or faking a broken leg and paying a lot of money for a helicopter to come and pick you up.
The next trek on the list was the South Coast Track. This is a serious hike and depending on which end you start at, you either have to be flown in or out. It is not safely possible to carry enough food for a walk this length so you have to get a plane to drop supplies along the way. Physically we were more then ready to attempt it but we were both getting rather sick of hiking and decided not to do it.
The novelty of bush camping, not showering for weeks at a time, eating very basic camping meals and hiking had worn itself thin for both of us and decided to make our way back to Melbourne. We had spent almost 2 months exploring Tasmania’s wilderness and left feeling exceedingly satisfied because we had seen, lived and hiked most of the natural wonders that Tasmania is blessed with.
