I arrived in Tasmania trying to stop singing the theme song to the Looney Tunes cartoon under my breath, and almost succeeded. Tasmania is known as being more like Scotland or New Zealand than the rest of Australia, and indeed it is very green and hilly. I was treated to some drizzle on the first night, which made a nice change to the abrupt tropical downpoars of Darwin.
Hobart airport is, of course, nowhere near Hobart itself. After nearly half an hour on a shuttle bus, I was deposited outside the Pickled Frog backpackers – easily identified because the whole building has been painted green. It also has its own cheap bar, and cheap wi-fi (when it works).
After looking into options for travelling around, I decided pretty quickly that the best way to do it is by car. There are tours, but they’re extortionate, and I’ve done quite enough tours already in the last couple of weeks. I got talking to Sylvia, a retired social worker from Durham, one of the other guests in the hostel. She had arranged to hire a car for a week, and I booked the passenger seat for a couple of days before I was due to fly back to the mainland.
I had a wander around Hobart for the rest of the day and planned the itinerary (up the east coast to Freycinet National Park and the Bay of Fires, before dumping me in Launceston on Thursday afternoon to get the bus back to Hobart). By the time I met Sylvia again in the evening, she had filled another seat in the car with Sang from Canada. We sampled a few of the local Cascade brewery’s finest, before retiring to get a good night’s sleep, and escape from the insane Italian woman who had clearly spent far more of her 40-odd years under a sunbed than was advisable, and dressed like a fashion-conscious twenty-something slapper.
When the morning arrived, Sang trailed her bags to the Pickled Frog from the hostel she was staying in, and Sylvia and I got a taxi to the car hire place. The first problem was that her booking had been lost in the ether – she had the receipt from the tourist information centre where she booked it, but Peter at the car hire company had apparently neglected to make a note of it. And there were no more cars available. So off we trailed to another street full of rental places, and secured a two-door Toyota something. I’m not big on car types, but it was red.
The car stereo had an input for a headphone connecter to an mp3 player, but none of us had the relevant cable. So it was radio all the way, which made for a fun journey. We got the important business of naming the car out of the way early on – it had the letters B, B and Q in the registration, so we named her Shrimpie in honour of the old “throw another shrimp on the barbie” cliche and the Australian habit of shortening words to one syllable and adding “ie” or “o” on the end.
Roads in Tasmania are rarely straight, and frequently uphill. Dear little Shrimpie did her best, but her engine can’t have been much bigger than 1L and I found myself offering her encouragement and patting the dashboard as she struggled to get to the top in second or third gear.
Sylvia was doing all the driving, since I was abandoning the journey the next day and Sang doesn’t drive. It seems that hire cars always have the opposite gearbox to what you want – Sylvia favours automatics, and Shrimpie was a manual. Any time I’ve hired a car, I’ve been landed with an automatic when I’d much rather be in control of what gear I’m in. The roads reminded me of New Zealand a few years ago, when I owned the Mitsubishi Galant for six weeks – nice car, but you really don’t want an automatic on those kind of roads. You go down a short incline, the car panics and shifts you into a low gear and the engine suddenly starts screaming.
We stopped for lunch in a small town, the name of which escapes me, and had some local fish and chips from a van before visiting the landscaped gardens and driving on to Freycinet National Park. It was an overcast day, so the view of Wineglass Bay probably wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been, but it was still a wonderful sight after climbing the hill for 45-odd minutes to look at it.
Late in the afternoon, the in-car entertainment was Star FM, a local radio station based in St Helens. Listening to it gave me the feeling that I was in The Shining, and we were driving up to the Overlook Hotel. None of the songs played were recorded after 1946, and they were interspersed by the DJ reading out promotional messages from the station’s sponsors – local businesses who were plugging their current bargains. Unfortunately the DJ couldn’t read and speak at the same time, and stumbled over the adverts in a jaw-dropping manner. My favourite advert, though, was pre-recorded by the business owner. It was for a local optician, and finished with the immortal words “your eyes are precious – after all, the movie of your life story is shot through your eyes.”
Our stop for the night was St Helens, in a backpacker place run by a slightly odd bloke. It was St Patrick’s Day, and there were three Irish girls in the dorm as well, so we all decamped to what passed for the local pub for drinks. One of the girls had persuaded them to bedeck the place with green decorations and a couple of leprechauns, and the music had a bit of an Irish bent – well, they played a couple of U2 songs, anyway. Later on a local woman started singing Johnny Cash songs accompanied by a bloke on guitar. When I say “singing”, I mean “howling like a stricken wombat”. The closest comparison that came to mind was Margherita Pracatan, who was featured on Clive James’ TV show in the early 1990s, and nobody else knew who I was talking about.
Our table was joined by a staring-eyed local drunk, who periodically tried to join in the conversation only to be hampered by being approximately five seconds late with his comments and being so pissed that nobody understood a word he said. Shortly after he sat down (opposite me), he vomited all over his crotch, then got up to get another drink. The staff continued to serve him all night, and when the girls commented that it must be illegal to serve someone so drunk, he made one of his few coherent interjections with “this is Tasmania”. (His other coherent interjection was when the subject of conspiracy theories was raised, and he informed all present that the CIA was behind the 9/11 attacks.)
With some hangovers bigger than others, the next day Shrimpie took us to the Bay of Fires. It was very nice, but to be honest I don’t remember too much about it because I’d stayed up drinking with the Irish sisters. The rocks had a lot of red bits on them, I think.That’s not why it’s called the Bay of Fires, though, it was because the first explorers saw lots of fires lit by Aboriginals when they sailed past.
There was much more driving during the day, since the windy roads take so long to travel along. We went up and down hills, and through primordial-looking forests with massive ferns lining the road. I wouldn’t have been shocked to see a brontosaurus wandering into the road in front of us. An unexpected highlight was the small town of Derby’s Tin Mine Museum, which had a surprisingly high-tech widescreen show telling the story of the disaster when the dam burst and flooded the town (and the mine).
Upon arriving in Launceston, it was time for me to bid farewell to Shrimpie, Sylvia and Sang. I wished them luck and got the coach back to the Pickled Frog before heading to the airport for my plane back to Canberra the next day.
I was picked up at the airport by Katherine, one of the staff at Campbell Pharmacy. This particular pharmacy belongs to Andrew, my housemate in Bournemouth sometime in the last century. I spent the afternoon visiting the Anzac memorial and museum. I arrived late and couldn’t see much of the museum, but it closed with a lament played by a piper in full Scottish regalia. I did speak to him beforehand and asked what tartan his kilt was, but he didn’t understand my accent.
Saturday afternoon’s fun was a visit to Cockington Village, a hilariously tacky miniature town which is right off the “so bad it’s good” scale. Half of it is British-themed, and the models are commendably well made – even if the plaques beside it trumpet information along the lines of thatched cottages being commonplace throughout Britain. The other half is international, and has replicas of buildings from around the world.
On Sunday, Andrew drove us to Jervis Bay to go dolphin watching. The town of Amity – sorry, I mean Huskisson – was our base, and we arrived in good time despite at least 30km of the main road consisting of gravel. Just like New Zealand again. Other people on the boat told us that it was a great day for seeing dolphins, we saw a lot of them swimming up to the boat and playing alongside us. I mentioned to Andrew that it would be impossible to get a shot of one of them jumping out of the water because you would need to be pointing the camera in the right place and happen to press the button at exactly the right time. Shortly after that, I got a total fluke picture of one jumping out of the water.
We also paid a quick visit to a few other attractions further south, culminating in a visit to Wreck Bay to see the wrecked lighthouse (hmm, wonder why there are so many wrecks there?). The visit was delayed by the snake slithering across the path in front of us, we decided to give it right of way.
Having planned to make my way back to Melbourne next weekend, all I had to do was work out how. I had a half-hearted look at Greyhound bus prices, although I’d rather slit my own wrists than sit in one of those again. The best way seemed to be to hire a car, and then I could do the Great Ocean Road as well. So I hired another Toyota something for the next four days (registration ends in LZE, so she has to be Lizzie).
It’s a manual, thank God.
