Tasmania

To all of you who have wondered where I was the last two weeks, and to all who have not, I have been to Tasmania. Land of endless green, tons of wallabies, tiny villages, vineyards and dairies.

I booked a flight on the Internet (so easy!) and arrived to Hobart, capital city. After contemplating a bit I have decided to rent a car and see Tasmania on the road. The bus service is quite limited in schedule, sometimes running only every other day and usually just once a day. Renting a car made me rush through things. I started each day with a walk and then drove to the next destination, sometimes arriving a minute or two before the hostel's reception closed (some of them leave you an envelope with a key and a map if you are late) or before a tour began. In ten days I've circled the whole island and still skipped a lot. So it's a must return to destination. Bottom line: I need a vacation!

I visited Tasmania at the end of the season. This meant that I had sometimes a whole dorm room for myself, cheaper prices and easy bookings. On the other hand, I had some awful weather.

My days were consisted of walking and driving. Almost every day I did one of the great short walks (ranging from 5 minutes to 8 hours, so I stuck to the average 3-4 hours) and then drove to get to my next destination. Sometimes I had a tour at evening, so it kept me quite busy. As there is no daylight saving at the moment, dawn is around 17:00, when the animals come out. Luckily I did not run over any of them, but it was not a pleasant experience, and I had to take that into account, basically trying to start my day as early as possible.

At evening I used to plan the following days, which is something I haven't done yet, but was necessary though to the style of this trip.

Driving in Tasmania is great, but can be quite a challenge or fun, depends on your mood. A highway can be a two lanes in each way road, but it can also be a twisting road, with no shoulders, where the maximum allowed speed is 100Km/h but your average speed is somewhere around 40Km/h. This fact has to be taken into account when planning drives.