During the rest of May and June 2011, twelve of my landscapes from Scotland and Australia will be on display as part of an exhibition at Touched by Scotland, Oyne, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. All mounted images are for sale from the gallery during the exhibition period.
Here’s a peak at the images that make up my first exhibition appearance:
Scotland
Black & Gold
The Cuillins dominate the view from the shore of Loch Slapin, Skye.
Elgol
A distinctly ominous day at the iconic viewpoint to the Cuillins.
The edge of the Garioch
The Tap O’ Noth marks the western edge of the ripening Garioch while Ben Rinnes dominates the distant Moray landscape.
Beinn na Caillich
Broadford warms in the low winter sun, watched over by snow-capped Beinn na Caillich.
Welcome to Moray
The landscape surrounding Dufftown glows invitingly while Ben Rinnes marks the heart of Scottish Whiskey country for miles around.
Barley & Bennachie
Ripe barley stirs in a late evening breeze through Ardoyne as the last of the autumn light catches the cloud-scape above Bennachie.
Australia
Dawn breaks over the Ovens Valley, North-East Victoria, Australia.
Dove Lake, Cradle Mountain – Tasmania
A panorama of the iconic Tasmanian landscape and the northern end of the Overland Hiking Trail.
Other-worldly
The Lookout at The Horn, Mount Buffalo National Park, Victoria.
Tomorrow, I Climb That Mountain
Rising over the south end of Dove Lake, Cradle Mountain looks sure to make for a good hike tomorrow..
Sometimes Burbury Looks Good
Twenty Minutes spent taking in the starry half-light over Lake Burbury, Tasmania.
Above it all
A pilot glides over smoke-shrouded Bright in the eerie calm created by the forest burn-offs.
Australia: Take 2
As usual, it’s been ages since I posted anything on here, but I’ve been pretty busy over the past few months. I do still plan to fill in the gaps in my last year of blogging about travelling round Australia – i.e. finishing off Tasmania, Cairns and Perth – and maybe writing about my time in Singapore and Hong Kong too, but for now I want to make a fresh start and hopefully keep the updates a bit more current.
If I pretend my last blog entry was about the end of my last year of travelling in August, then I can start by saying that a lot’s been going on since then. I’ve had two great months back at home in Scotland, taking the chance to live the life of relative luxury, travelling round Britain to catch up with family and friends after my year out. I did as much travelling in Britain in August and September as I did in the 2 months in Australia before, covering Glasgow, Edinburgh, the Isle of Arran, Manchester, Dublin, Moray, Perthshire and the Scottish Highlands, going as far as Sandwood Bay. It wasn’t all travelling away from home that took up my time though: I tried in vain to catch up with all my friends at home, as well as still trying to fit in some time at home, and all the while I was making new plans that would take me far away from Scotland again.
Having done the obligatory 3 months farm work in Australia on my last year out, it didn’t take me long to find myself cashing in on my eligibility for a second year visa, and before August was finished I was the proud owner of the chance to spend a second year working and travelling in Australia. None of this was really very surprising though: as soon as I’d learned to paraglide in Bright back in February, I was already weighing up the viability of coming back to the South-East Australian high country against trying to get a serious career-based job back in Scotland, or at least Britain, or maybe even Europe. The allure of another Australian summer, as well as the overwhelming envy of everyone who heard I could be going back down under, won over, so within a month of arriving home I’d booked my planes, trains and buses from Oyne, Scotland to Bright, Australia.
I’ve had a lot quiet time to mull over my choice to come back to Australia, and inevitably, in my indecisive manner, let doubts creep in. The nature of the trip probably didn’t help either: 3 flights gave me plenty time to think, and 33 hours travelling between Aberdeen and Melbourne didn’t induce much optimism in me. While I’m talking about flying I’d like to say I was fairly underwhelmed by Singapore Airlines. Many folks told me that they were by far the best airline to fly with, especially for the quality of the food in-flight. Well, the food was no better than any of the BA or Qantas flights I flew on last time I went to Australia and, although the service was good, the staff felt a bit rushed and just weren’t as attentive to us (at least in economy) as I’d seen on flights with the other big carriers.
Arriving in Melbourne initially didn’t give me any reason to be optimistic, as the half-hour queue to get through border security gave way to another half-hour waiting in vain for my luggage to appear. A quick chat at the service desk confirmed that there was no record of my rucksack having been processed at any of the airports it should have passed through en-route to Australia, so my possessions for my first few days in the country were limited to the clothes I was wearing, a camera and laptop. I’m still surprised at my ability to coast through a crappy situation with almost complete indifference to the effect it may have on me: I’d just lost all my clothes and a fair amount of camera gear, but as I stepped out into the mild Melbourne morning it was nice to think I didn’t have to lug a 20 kilo rucksack around as I searched for a hostel.
Only now that I’m sitting on the verandah of the Bright Hikers hostel, looking over a typically docile morning in the town, can I finally say I feel settled, fairly content and happy to be starting another summer in Australia…
16 Days of Brisbane
I’ve had a pretty good couple of weeks in Brisbane, although most of that is owed to a couple of people, the city probably only kept me amused for about a day before I ran out of things to do on a budget. Vicky and Darryl came through the city the day after I arrived and it was great to be catching up with the first people I’d seen from home for over 10 months. We were going to check out the XXXX Brewery (yeah, that’s four ‘x’s) but it was booked out, and I was feeling crap since I’d got off the smelly Greyhound the day before, so a chilled out arvo was had before checking out Fortitude Valley for my first beer in 7 weeks. There’s a wee Italian place near the top of the street, on the right as you walk up, that did really good gnocchi arrabbiata, not that I can really comment seeing as it was my first taste of the stuff.
Being a YHA member, I usually book into one of their hostels when I’m going to a new town, partly cause they’re never dumps, and they’ve got a good mobile website so I can book everything on the bus or train en-route if I’m feeling particularly disorganised. They’re hardly ever the cheapest hostel in town though – ‘course, sometimes they’re the only one – so after a couple of days I checked out the bunch of hostels literally next door. The direct neighbour – a wee house with a friendly but very old owner – looked like it might just have as much atmosphere as a funeral so I skipped on to the City Backpackers and got a pretty decent weekly rate for being in a city. That was for a 30-bed dorm though, which promised to be a new and interesting experience, especially for my nose, but that was balanced out by the hostel having a way better atmosphere than the YHA, as well as a really decent TV/movie room plushed out with surround-sound and leather sofas, and free internet in the dining area.
Eventually I got round to having a clear day to check out the city and headed for the City Hall, mainly so I could climb the Bell Tower and get a decent view of the city for free. That plan fell apart as I spied the gate across the entrance then saw the sign that declared the place was closed, since last November, for renovation, until 2012. The city hall apparently housed a museum and I coincidentally walked past the building it had relocated to and checked it out. It had an interesting interactive exhibition of a set of glass photographic slides presumed to be taken by Alfred Elliot between 1890 and 1921. That kept me visually entertained for a while but the jackhammer, ripping through the office next door, detracted from the ambiance somewhat. After that I pretty much walked around aimlessly, hitting the north bank of the river and checking out the botanic gardens before heading back through the city. I think it was the day after that I discovered the south bank and the idyllic Streets Beach.
So after 4 days I was pretty much done and bored of Brisbane but luckily was due for my second Scottish rendezvous, this time with an extremely jet-lagged Claire, who’d came over to do a year of her primary teaching degree in Brissy. I was going to leave at the end of the week but ended up staying for an extra one now that I had an excuse to go see films like Toy Story 3 (really funny, don’t believe it’s still not out in the UK) and Shrek Forever (really disappointing, especially after seeing Toy Story) and do some pretty epic walks round the city. We checked out a fair bit of the town south of the river one day before realising we were miles from anywhere, it was freezing and starting to rain, and did a wide circle round the north to check out Claire’s QUT campus – highlight was definitely Nandos, think that’s where most of my student loan would end up – and the Story Bridge. We didn’t bother walking over it cause we couldn’t be bothered with an even longer walk back home, but then felt bad watching the news that night to find out it was the 70th anniversary of the bridge opening.
We met some of Claire’s flatmates and then I learned that sometimes looking older than I am doesn’t guarantee I’ll get into pubs, and missed out on a great night watching Germany playing with Argentina, settling for a chilly midnight walk through the city to the hostel. I did a day-trip to North Stradbroke Island, realising it definitely would be better to have stayed on the island for a couple of nights to see it properly, although not in the climate of this time of year. There are lots of interesting things to do at the Culture centre, just across the river from the CBD, so I had a look round the art gallery, and we both checked out the history of swimwear exhibition in the museum. I actually got bored of that surprisingly quickly but at least Claire got to see that shot of Daniel Craig from Bond that she’d been hoping for. It took me a while to notice the posters for the Ron Mueck exhibition but it was a must-see, and the $12 was well worth it to get up close to the amazingly realistic and often evocative works in the modern art gallery.
It was great to be catching up with Claire and taking a few weeks out from the usual ‘hey where are you from? how long have you been here? Where have you been?’ conversations that dominate back-packing life to spend time getting to know someone a bit better. Once I found we both were into photography, that was it: we were straight out to the south bank that night trying to do long exposures of the skyline reflected in Streets Beach. Only then, talking to a security guard for the corporation-owned land, did I realise that Streets was the Australian version of Walls ice cream, and it was they who sponsored the beach and gave it its name. Eventually I had to go and opted for the train to Cairns, as I still hadn’t got into the back-packing mood after 7 weeks on the farm, and wasn’t feeling like hopping between hostels all the way up the coast, or spending much more of my money. On the last day that decision came back to bite me a little as one of Claire’s flatmates was doing a road-trip to Darwin could have given me a lift at least to Cairns. Travelling the west-coast taught me not to plan my travel past a few days, but on the east coast the best opportunities happen on even shorter notice.
Tasmania Day 15: Cradle Mountain
Today David was going to start his 5-day hike along the Overland Track, and we were were going to follow him as far as Cradle Mountain, although a ‘probably’ was quickly added to that plan as soon as opened the tent to find everything dripping in the pea-soup that had engulfed us through the night. As usual our plans to start early fell foul of me being the only one who was capable of getting up before 8, but in the dreich weather even I wasn’t in much of a hurry to get going, and neither was the car. It wasn’t as bad as our Lake Burbury experience though and we were eventually heading back into the national park after our night of exile.
We decided on a circuit starting from Ronny Creek, past Crater Lake, Marions lookout, and kitchen hut, where we’d branch off up the Mountain, returning via Lake Wilks and the west shore of Dove Lake. By the time we’d cooked a load of 2-minute noodles in the hut-with-a-view at Waldheim, it was pretty much midday, but at least we could see some blue sky. The board-walk over the relatively flat moor away from Ronny Creek felt almost too easy but we slowed down soon enough when we left the comfort of that. The day stayed a bit dull as we passed some falls and hiked up around Crater Lake but by the time reached Marion’s Lookout patches of sunlight were tracking across Dove Lake and illuminating the ever-looming Cradle Mountain. From there on till Kitchen Hut it was pretty easy going with bits of board-walk over the relatively flat Cradle Plateau.
I obliterated my noodles at Kitchen Hut, leaving only a tin of spaghetti to sustain me for the other ¾ of the hike, and thought it would be a pretty cool place to be stuck at if we’d been here in winter. The ascent up Cradle Mountain was pretty well straight to the point, aiming dead middle and heading straight up the slightly shallower lower slope before giving in to a gentler climb along the side of the steep boulder field of the higher slope. Hopping up and scrambling over each boulder was pretty fun we could see the view of the valley opening up with every step, justifying photo-stops every couple of minutes. As the track neared the peak we crested a sort of saddle, dropping down the back of the hill before tackling an even steeper climb, steep enough that having the weight of my camera bag on my back worried me a bit, especially when I thought about how I’d manage to climb back down some of rocks.
At the summit the day was perfect. Calm, sunny, fluffy clouds and a view that just went on forever in all directions, and a drop off the edge of the epic rock formations that seemed almost as immeasurable. I got my usual jumping shots out of the way while Kevin and David had a few celebratory games of shit-head. I can’t remember how hard going the walk down was, apart from finding the bit I almost couldn’t climb up as difficult to climb down with my camera bag as I expected, but I’m pretty sure our knees were shot by the time we got back to Kitchen Hut.
And then it was time to leave David to continue his first day on the Overland Track. At this point I didn’t think I’d see him again so it was sad to see him go, while we started to race against the sun, our hunger, tiredness to get back to the car. Through breaks in the cloud the mountain was glowing brilliantly in the later afternoon sun so my incessant snapping slowed us down a bit, and once we reached the fork in the track, overlooking Dove Lake, we both had a stop for a few minutes to soak up the view. Down at the lake side, we ended up running on the board-walk to shave a few minutes off our return, stopping at a little beach in the now fading light to dip our roasting feet in ice cold waters. The reason for our urgency was now more apparent, we were at the Dove Lake carpark, but still possibly had to walk along the road to the car at Ronny Creek, but our luck was in, and 5 minutes after we got to the carpark the last bus came.
Back at Waldheim we found the showers, and then found they were hot – if I could only have one hot shower in Tassie, this would have been it. After all that I was pretty well knackered, but not too tired to drive so decided I’d try to find one of the rest areas on the way to the north coast instead of trying to camp at the side of the road again. Going by the map we just had to stick to the road we were on and there would be two rest areas, but, in another example of Australian road-moronity, without ever turning off the road we were on, I found myself driving through a village on a different road, with no rest areas. So, a great day was finished with yet another night sleeping with the road-trains howling past..
Mount Buffalo
For over a month I’d been soaring over Mystic, using the looming lump of Mount Buffalo to the west to gauge how high I was, but I’d yet to make the mere 25km trip to the mountain. Leanne and Greg thought we could go up there and camp out for a night around their day off – being the owners of the hostel and the jewellery shop, and living in Bright, means they can get away with closing the shop and letting the hostel run its self every Tuesday. As the Tuesday came around, they couldn’t make it, but in their usual super-kind fashion they chucked enough gear in their 4×4 for Crystal and I to start a Polar expedition, and let us drive up to Buffalo ourselves. Seriously, I can’t go on enough about just how lucky I was to stay at their hostel and have them help me in so many ways.
Tuesday came, and Crystal – a Canadian who’d came to pick grapes at Boynton’s winery – and I headed out past Porepunkah, up the Mt Buffalo Road. As with most of Australia’s national parks there are fees for entering and I think it was about $18 for us to take the car in, which made it really surprising that to reserve a camping spot beside Lake Catani only pushed that up to about $25. The drive up is steep and winding: great since I was driving, but the trees blocked out most of the views of the lowlands that fell away around us as we headed to the plateau.
I’d only had my laptop for a week or so and was itching to try some time-lapse photography, now that I had a way of automatically triggering the camera. Lake Catani, surrounded by reeds, and with a few ducks and a canoe floating around in the ever-changing light, was too good an opportunity to miss so I perched the laptop on a rock at the lake’s edge and left the kit doing its thing for about half an hour, while I blitzed through the crisps I’d bought in the name of ‘emergency supplies’. The campsite was set a few hundred metres from the lake, and when we found our site we realised the park ranger had given us one of the best spots, sheltered under trees at the edge of the site, with an unrestricted view of the lake. The tent Greg had packed turned out to be a small mansion, possibly visible from space, well, at least the other side of the lake.
Next we headed to The Horn – I didn’t know anything about where the best sights on the massif were so was trusting Crystal’s experience – first reaching the lookout, perched on the edge of a cliff with mist washing up the face. Thoughts of the Himalayas came to me as parts of the rocky landscape revealed themselves but for moments through the waves of mist. Up at the peak, the view was impressive, albeit over a landscape that felt anonymous to me as a new-comer to the area. The cloud-base not far above my head was breaking up the light across the plateau in a fairly interesting way so I tried another time-lapse, looking back across the Giant’s Playground to our next stop: The Cathedral.
We decided to climb the hill across the road from the Cathedral, as Crystal hadn’t been up it, but got distracted by a huge and precariously-perched rock and the prehistoric-looking landscape behind it, and ended up chilling in the calm sunny afternoon there for a while. We followed a track downhill a little bit and ended at a base of a hill made up entirely of massive boulders, so big I had to leave my camera at the bottom before trying out my pretty non-existent bouldering skills, but I managed to get up far enough to get a nice view over where we’d came from.
We ended up at the Chalet to watch the sunset from the top of monumental drop into the gorge. We were really on the wrong side of Buffalo as the sun was setting over by the Horn lookout, but at least at this side the landscape of the Ovens Valley was much more recognisable, stretching from the Eurobin – where I’d worked on a berry farm – back to Bright and the Mystic Launch. Back at the lake I thought I’d be warm enough with my roll-mat and a few blankets, but about an hour in I had to go back on that plan and get the sleeping bag out before I went hypothermic.
Deciding the view from the Chalet at sunrise would definitely be worth getting up for, we did exactly that and I set up a time-lapse at the hang-gliding launch ramp. The launch ramp is just a 5-meter timber ramp rolling off to the sheer +500m drop to the bottom of the gorge in a ridiculously scary fashion. I tried to stand on it but dared only put one foot on the sloped part of it. While the laptop and old camera were doing their thing, the sun broke through the clouds casting some amazingly strong and focussed rays across the valley, keeping me fixated with the other camera for the next hour. It was good to be sitting in one spot, focussing on one scene, instead of running around from place to place trying to capture as many sights as possible while not really giving any one them the attention it deserved to create a truly decent shot.
I was pretty sure I was rostered on at the brewery for 1pm that day, giving us time to pack up and check out one or two sights on the way back to Bright. I’ve found some brilliant spots, both in Australia and back home, just by taking the more obscure roads, and that thinking led us down a dirt track with the perfect mix of corners and crests to make haring along it really fun. Luckily Crystal seemed to trust my driving along the road that branched off near the snow-clearing station and led to a few walking tracks that led back in the direction of the Cathedral. We didn’t make it as far as we wanted as I was worried about not making it back to Bright in time and it’d definitely be worth a revisit. The worrying was well-justified: getting back to Bright at 11.30 I phoned in to check when I was starting, ’15 minutes’, oops..
Day-Tripping North Stradbroke Island
On Monday I thought I’d knock off my first Lonely Planet ‘highlight’ of Queensland and check out Stradbroke Island, just off the coast in Moreton Bay, not far from Brisbane. In a nutshell, staying a couple of nights would have been way better. I left my camera at Claire’s place for all of Sunday so recovering that meant I didn’t leave Roma St station till 10.30. The train to Cleveland took most of an hour and by the time I got to the harbour I’d realised that I’d not be on the island till well after 1 as there was a break in the hourly-service over lunch, a feed I’d half-hoped to have in some nice cafe overlooking the pacific ocean. The Stradbroke Island View cafe filled a hole, and a half-hour, though, and gave me time to work out what the deal with all the ferry options was. There seem to be at least two companies that run a regular passenger service but the lady at the cafe told me the one that didn’t do the vehicle ferries ran to the island a bit quicker, which sounded like just what I needed.
So 3 hours after I’d left Brissy I was on the island, but of course now I had to get a bus to the other side to see the interesting stuff. Talking to Asaf – an Israeli who was day-tripping from Brisbane as well – about how I’d been travelling with an Israeli in Australia, it was funny to hear him ask for my friend’s name on the grounds that ‘it’s a small country, sometimes you know people’. Usually I’m explaining to people from outside the UK that Scotland is actually big enough that I don’t know everyone in it. The bus from from Dunwich to Point Lookout took about 20 minutes without much stopping so even if I’d been on the island overnight and had, say, a bike to explore the place on, I’d still have needed all my time to get round the island.
I didn’t really have much of a plan for the island, but luckily had been told at the info centre that the Gorge Walk was worth doing, and it was. The views down the beaches, the gorge and of the blowhole were pretty nice, and the blowhole really sounded like what I’d expect a whale to sound like. I checked out a bit of the village on the way back to the bus stop, there wasn’t a lot going on but then it is winter. With the sun now heading down I could either get the bus back to the ferry and be back in Brissy before dark, or check out Amity Point and be cruising back to the mainland at sunset, but I wasn’t really feeling like exploring what could just be another couple of beaches, in winter, so back to Brissy it was.
48 Days Later…
I’ve made it. It’s done, over, complete and signed off. 7 weeks of living and working in almost complete isolation, bar the company of a boss who I only ever looked forward to separation from, has paid off, and now I’m hopefully in with a pretty good chance of getting a second year in Australia. I didn’t exactly leave the blog on an optimistic note when I last wrote about my new job, and looking back and remembering that even in the first week I’d realised I was going to hate working for my boss, I’m surprised that I was still working for him a week ago. Luckily most of the time I’ve spent on the farm has been tractor driving, and now that I’ve planted probably 5000 of the 7000 acres of fields on the farm I have a much better appreciation for just how big 7000 acres is.
Although I spent most of the last 7 weeks wishing time would go at least twice as fast, or really wishing that as a working-holiday-maker I didn’t have to work for the worst boss ever to gain eligibility for a second year’s visa, I like to think I can leave the disrespect and demoralisation in the past and take a few positives with me. For a start, right up till the last week, I constantly doubted whether I’d make it to the end or just give in, leaving me desperately scrambling for yet more farm work in the last month of my ‘holiday’. I’d realised just how good all my other jobs have been, whether stuck behind a computer screen, out in a field wrapping vines, or in a brewery sipping (and serving) the finely crafted ales, I’ve never been treated like an idiot who’s incapable of learning or at least following simple orders. So I’ve resolved to consider very carefully whether a job is worth doing if the working conditions are anything like those of my last job, and hopefully I’ll be able to either question the attitudes of the boss, or tell him where to stick his attitude in future. Hopefully I’ll never again be so desperate to hold on to a job that I feel it too risky to call into question the boss’s attitude. Luckily I had the dream of coming back to Australia to live a fairly idealistic lifestyle, mainly based around paragliding, to keep me going – if I’d been doing the job purely for the money I’m sure I’d have been out by the end of the first week.
Anyway, now I’m in Brisbane, easing myself back into being a backpacker, although arriving in the 3rd largest city in Australia after living in basically complete social isolation for 7 weeks does feel like a bit of social-slap-in-the-face. Apart from being my first stop in my 7th state – Queensland – it’s the first time I’ve slept in a dorm of more than 10 people, currently I’m holed out in a monster 30-bed dorm. It’s not all that bad, and I think having lucked out on getting a bed in the corner of the room has helped make it feel like I have some amount of personal space left. It’s taken 10 months for me to meet some friends from back home, finally catching up with Vicky a few days ago, it was pretty cool to be walking through a city on the far side of the world but with the banter of back home.
Brisbane’s quite a neat little city, even if it does apparently have a really good public transport network, the CBD is so compact it’s easy to walk around and it only takes me 10 minutes to get from the hostel to the city centre. I’m not sure whether to label it as ‘just another city’ though – when I arrived, everyone I spoke to was totally underwhelmed by the place, and I can sort of see where they’re coming from: there isn’t a huge amount to do. There’s plenty of stuff around the city though, national parks, the Gold and Sunshine coasts, and the islands around Moreton Bay – the closest bit of coastline to the city. I was going to check out Stradbroke Island today, to get my first fix of idyllic sandy beaches, but this morning the Aussie winter had just enough bite to sway me away from that plan, so here I am back in the hostel milking the free internet for another afternoon. Talking of that, the Brisbane City Backpackers is the first hostel I’ve been to in Australia that has free internet access, both PCs and wifi, so it’s not surprising the lounge is constantly looks like a geek-convention. Anyway, hopefully I’ll have something more exciting to say about being a backpacker again next update, and maybe I’ll be a bit closer to Cairns too..
Yesterday was Australia day. Obviously we did our bit as temporary residents of the red island continent and had a few drinks in one of Strahan’s pubs and so next morning I woke up crumpled up under a duvet in the driver’s seat of the car with David beside me. We weren’t feeling too bad, Strahan wasn’t exactly an exciting night out and the burgers we’d cooked at the beach before the pub had been a master-stroke of planning and damage-avoidance. Still, I was a bit confused, seeing as it had been Kevin who’d been in the front of the car with me when I’d fallen into a slightly drunken sleep. Wiping the dripping wet windows cleared that one up though: he’d had the raw deal last night with David sleeping in the back seat behind him and had bailed out half-way through the night to sleep on a bench overlooking the beach. Even with the view of the calm waters of Macquarie Harbour to wake up to, I still can’t say I was envious of that move.. To the humble, grubby backpacker, Strahan is a jewel though, as it’s the only place we found on the island that had free, hot showers so we basked in the glorious steamy goodness one more time before heading north towards Zeehan.
On the road up the coast we hit a viewpoint overlooking the expanse of Henty Dunes, but they were quite far away so it wasn’t all that interesting, letting us crack on to the free bbqs in Zeehan and where we tried to boil pasta for lunch. Overall it was a bit of a failure with at least one of the pans looking more like a pot of starch than spaghetti, oh well. Zeehan felt, like most of the towns in the west, very sleepy with nothing catching our attention and in little time we’d got through it, Rosebery and Tulla, leaving not much between us and Cradle Mountain.
This was more like it, heading back into the highlands of the island, with the promise of seeing some of the most stunning scenery it had to offer. Tomorrow David planned to do the Overland Track – a 6-day, 80km walking trail from Cradle Valley to Lake St Clair – and that was why we were giving him and his bike a lift to the starting point. The information centre was still open when we got to Cradle Valley so David got his bike locked up (he’d have to find a way back up here by road after doing the track). While we had some light I really wanted to get a first glimpse of Dove Lake and The Mountain and, as far as first glimpses go, rolling up to the lake side, catching the last of the low sun breaking through the dramatic and now colourful clouds was just what I needed to get me raring to climb the ominous collection of rocks that loomed in the distance.
Scoping out the place for possible camping spots for the night we realised the place was far too popular and completely devoid of secluded spots suitable for a bit of rock-bottom-budget sleeping, forcing us to drive back out of the park boundary, heading north along the main road in search of side tracks and the likes. Seemingly land-owners were on to our kind long before we arrived, as every possible track off the road had a little ‘private – no entry’ sign nailed to a tree, so we ended up finding a patch of relatively soft ground at the side of the road and made it our home for the night.
Getting Stuck into Bright
With the 9-day licence course completed, I was at a bit of a loose end. Having spent almost every day last week flying, I’d now to make do with the more typical forecast of intermittent days of flying, giving me, initially, time to rest and reflect on what I’d accomplished in the last week, as well as time to think about how long I wanted to stay in Bright. Now half-way through my year in Australia, but having clocked up less than a third of the days of work I needed to do to be eligible for a second year visa, I had to start thinking about doing farm work again, so I took a cycle up the Wandiligong Valley one morning in search of the Nightingale Brothers’ farm.
Nightingales’ is the biggest farm in the area, with an expanse of apples (I think it’s the biggest orchard in – as is the usual kicker with Australian records – the southern hemisphere) and chestnuts, luring in hundreds of backpackers – in particular, curiously, Koreans – months ahead of season. It seems that, with such high demand for their employment, the Nightingale brothers could do this really annoying thing where every time I turned up at the farm asking for work, they would tell me to come back in two weeks. Leanne and Greg, owners of Bright Hikers, are some of the kindest people I’ve met, so nice that they let me borrow their 4×4 for a day to have a better stab at job hunting so, after enjoying a week spent mostly in the hammock on the verandah, and occasionally flying, I drove to Nightingales for one last time then tried some farms on the Great Alpine Road towards Eurobin. After the usual dismissive, devoid of all interest, response from the apple farm, I was happy to be finally at least being asked for my name and number by Boynton’s Winery and the Bright Berry Farm, amongst others. None of them seemed optimistic about the opportunity of work, but at least they were more sincere about it, and they had my number. In fact by the time I’d got back to Bright I had a message from the berry farm saying they had a position for me, starting next morning.
Back at the hostel, Leanne told me she’d heard the Bright Brewery might be looking for bar staff so I had a look down. Having never worked in a bar, I didn’t fancy my chances for the job – it couldn’t be that hard, surely – but it looked like an OK place and I’d met two of the guys who worked there last week so knew I’d be working with cool folks. It turned out they were interested enough, so I was back an hour later after hunting down a pad of paper from the supermarket and scrawling down what vaguely resembled a C.V. in my typically poor attempt at neat handwriting. C.V. handed in, I was asked to hang around for a couple of hours as they were training Danny who hadn’t yet done a shift, so it made sense to get me done at the same time, and at that point, I guess I’d secured my second job in a day.
What followed were a few seriously busy weeks, where I’d do at least two of the three: vine maintenance, working at the brewery, and flying, each day, typically up at 6, cycling 13km to the berry farm for start at sunrise, getting home about 3, then either floating around in the smooth late afternoon air á la paraglider, or putting in a few hours at the brewery. It was a good time, even though it made every second of sleep count, being up to see the sun rise and set, cycling 15 miles a day, doing at least one job I really liked (brewery) and one that was OK, still getting time to fly, and all in Bright. I didn’t care that I was slowly wasting away the time I had left to explore the rest of Australia, I was earning money, getting to know people – better than you get to the know them when you’re touring round the coast – and generally settling into life in the alpine region.
As the weeks went by, things only got busier, with me adding two unofficial jobs to my workload so I was – aside from a bartender and vine maintainer – supplying photography to the paragliding school, and tending to the IT needs of the hostel, which doubled up as an internet café. Life couldn’t get much better, I was using just about all my skills to tie down paying jobs, as well as work that paid the kind of perks that made living, and playing, in Bright very affordable for me, and soon jokes were being made – cautiously – about when I would really leave the sleepy little town…
Cross-Country Flying
A month on from when I was first able to gleefully say I was a ‘pilot’, I’d clocked up over 40 flights and 17 hours air-time, and I definitely felt a lot more experienced for it. I needn’t worry about being overly-cocky as the past week had seen my confidence in the air take a big hit after having a fairly scary collapse not far above launch. I knew tensing up every time I hit the slightest ripple in the air wasn’t going to help my skills progress and hoped that, with a few more flights in lightly active air, I’d be able to show myself that I could control the wing in conditions that had previously got the better of me.
Soon enough, things started feeling a bit more natural, and I finally felt comfortable enough to try something that had been nagging me for weeks: a reverse-launch off Mystic. It surprised me just how easy it was, leaving me wishing – as I was whisked into the air before completing my first step forward – that I’d tried it sooner. Now well into April, having missed some of the best flying of the year because I was working every hour I could at the Brewery, I was definitely ready for some soaring again and couldn’t wait for the start of the cross-country course Ted invited me on. Frustratingly, the first few days weren’t quite good enough to make a stab at a cross-country flight, but that probably worked out for the better, as they were unstable enough to help me re-build my confidence in active air, and I still got a few flights that tipped over the hour mark. I had fun trying to do some semi-formation-flying with Bill – an instructor who’s taken some great photos from the air – giving me more practice with my camera in the air as well as finally getting some decent shots of me flying.
Each morning Bill would talk Ben, Charles and I through a plan for the most likely cross-country option for the day ahead, whizzing round Google Earth pointing out routes, thermal trigger points, landing sites, no-landing sites, as well as showing us how to interpret various weather forecasts. Today our likely target was Harrietville – a town 15km along the Great Alpine Road from Bright – and, as we caught a strong climb above Mystic, it was looking like it was going to be the day we’d finally break away from the comfort of our training ground. First, led by Bill, we checked out an alternative route, heading north along the ridge from Mystic, but doubled back in the unrelenting sink and topped up our height over Mystic again. This time Bill headed east across the Wandiligong Valley to the Reliance Ridge, with Ben and I soon following at almost identical altitudes, side-by-side but for a hundred metres or so to maximise our chances of finding lift. Charles followed shortly after, having eeked out a few extra metres height from the thermal we’d all been in.
One of the great experiences in paragliding is the hands-off gliding time: now out of the reliable lift that Mystic offered, all I could do was sit back, tuck my hands in my jacket to warm them up again, and think about just how awesome it was to be floating effortlessly above the stunning valley below. Over Reliance Ridge we got our first climb quite quickly, recovering most of the height we’d lost crossing the valley, continuing south along it. I didn’t envy Charles, who just missed out on the lift that we’d used and had to scratch along the ridge below us, a position that wasn’t nearly as comfortable as where we were. In what must have been a pretty good effort, he kept ‘up’ with us as we soared along the ridge, now reaching the tree-carpeted-bowl that stood, dauntingly, between us and our target. Somehow, all of us struggled to maintain height, never-mind find the lift that we desperately needed to make a crossing of the bowl possible. This was bad enough for Ben, Bill and I, who were high, but for Charles it was the end of the flight and he had to bail out on the road near Smoko.
With so many places where there could be lift, it was frustrating to be almost aimlessly floating around, but finally, after flying over a spot I’d covered a minute earlier, my wing banked and I hooked round into a strong thermal. Bill and Ben headed for the lift, but Ben couldn’t make it with his height and had to follow Charles to the road, while Bill soared past me and we both headed across the bowl. This was a bit daunting, nothing but trees all around me, a ridge that presented its self like a wall in my path, and Bill calling over the radio, slightly concerned at my apparent height. We’d talked about the bowl in the morning, discussing what would be a safe minimum height to start crossing at, and I’d started at almost exactly that, so all I could do was sit back, use some speed-bar to cut through the steady sink and keep an eye on the limited bail-out options I had.
Approaching the ridge only a few hundred metres above it, Bill, who’d lost some height to join me and make sure I was flying safely, guided me round the edge of the ridge, avoiding the highest part, giving the most impressive opening view of a village I’d never even been to before. Gliding round the ridge, so low that we were almost in shade from the late-afternoon sun, the ridge fell away and opened up a stunning view of Harrietville, basking in the last of the day’s light. Now safely on glide to the landing site, I grabbed my camera, not wanting to miss the chance to capture the beauty of discovering a new place from the air.
The tension of the last 10 minutes gave way to relief, and the realisation that I’d made it: my first cross-country flight. There was a moment, as I followed Bill down to land, where I was a wee bit nervous again as the field had a small burn on one side, cows on the other, and power lines running along another edge, but following Bill’s lead and doing some S-turns to lose some height, I made it. Two hours ago, I’d jumped off and floated away from the comfort of my training hill: now I was over 10 miles away in a village I’d never seen before, watching the setting sun cast its last golden rays over the mountains that surrounded me. If ever there was a way to explore the world, this was it.
Waking up to the quietly moody atmosphere hanging over Lake Burbury, I had two surprises awaiting me. Last night, I’d left my camera running the black-frame noise-reduction for the 23-minute long exposure I did of the Milky Way over the lake, and it was great to dig the cold camera out of its bag to find that the battery hadn’t died before the noise-reduction finished, and the resulting shot looked like a winner. It was just a shame that without a computer of my own, I’d possibly have to wait almost 8 months until I returned home to have a chance at post-processing it.
Next, Kevin’s dead car awaited the attention of my somewhat-amateur mechanical skills, after we killed the battery by leaving the headlights on to help with tent-pitching last night. Handily, we were parked at the top of a slope that ran – not-so-handily – into the lake, so we pushed the car round to line it up and then I tried a rolling start. Half-way down the hill, thinking I had enough speed, and wanting to be able to stop the car one way or another before I ended up in the lake, I let the clutch out, but nothing. So it was do or die, clutch in, off I rolled until, just before I hit the boulders marking the shore, I let the clutch out again, but the engine was lifeless. Now we were buggered, down an anonymous road, with a dead car, and nowhere to push it. In a last-minute-save, two guys who were camping beside us, probably quite amused by two foreigners trying to resuscitate their dead car, helped us push the car back up the hill, and back down, giving me the momentum I needed to tempt the reluctant engine back to life.
Hardly daring to let the engine rev down to idle, we were back on the road west. Cresting a hill we stopped at the lookout to take in the view of what looked like an open-cut mine, then realised it was Queenstown. The combination of it being the Australia Day public holiday and the west of Tasmania drew all but the smallest bit of life out of the town, so we cracked on through the rain to Strahan (pronounced ‘Stawn’). It was great to hear from David, who we’d left in Hobart with his bike, saying he was in Strahan too so we caught up with him and sheltered from the rain in a café across from the police station, soon stuffing our faces with as much chips, wedges and burgers as we could summon from the ever-beckoning food counter. I can’t remember the name of the place but the food was really good despite being pretty decently priced.
Afternoon saw the weather clear up enough to let us get the body boards out and head – against the warnings of rip and undertow in the Lonely Planet book – to Ocean Beach. As usual I found myself freezing and desperately paddling, almost in vain, towards the shore within 15 minutes of jumping in, so I left Kevin – now master of looking like he was caught in every possible rip and undertow – to it. Reunited with David on Australia Day was just the excuse we needed to check out the pub, which kept us going till we had to stagger back to the other end of the village to find the car and try to squeeze the three of us in to sleep. Like that was ever going to work…
Now that I’m writing about Tasmania 4 months after it happened, and I’ve left what notes I wrote about it back in Bright, some of these days’ posts might be a bit vague. It’s funny how much I can forget about what I’ve done on my travels, so quickly after the event – thankfully looking back over my photos helps fill in some of the gaps and dig some almost-forgotten events back up into consciousness.
Waking up to a beautiful morning at the idyllic and dead-silent Ted’s Beach, I wished it was warm enough to risk a dip in the dark tanin-tainted waters of Lake Peddy, since we were back to living without showers again. If it took us little time to get in to the wilderness, it took us even less time to get out again, breaking north across the Derwent River, stopping momentarily at the quaint Ellendale, dominated by a bright white-wash church overlooking a well-manicured graveyard. After another meal featuring the ever-popular indomie noodles and a side of nachos we stopped at Tarraleah – another part of Tasmania dominated by hydro-electric schemes – to witness the rows of pipeline quietly channelling the potential energy stored in nearby lakes to the generating stations tucked into the bottom of the valley.
Next stop was the end of one of the greatest walking tracks in Tasmania – the 80km Overland Track – at Lake St Clair. We walked a little bit of track as part of a much smaller circuit that took us round part of the south-west edge of the lake. On the return leg we branched off along an Aboriginal Culture walk, seeing some beautiful grass-land but not really feeling the information signs that were dotted around. Maybe that’s a testament to the lack of knowledge we have on Tasmanian Aboriginals due to wiping most of them out while trying to colonise the island.
Continuing west on the Queenstown road, we stopped at the Donaghy’s Hill carpark and did the 15 minute walk up the hill, being rewarded by a 360 degree panorama encompassing peaks from the south of Cradle Mountain National Park to the north of the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, made only better by the late afternoon light. As that recommendation of the ranger at Lake St Clair had held true, we checked out Nelson Falls, further along the road, to find them flowing much better than Russel Falls yesterday. Not being totally fenced off by the board-walk, I got right up to the falls and was way happier with the shots I got.
With the sun down and the light fading it was time to scope out our sleeping spot, and with a few camping areas dotted round the nearby Lake Burbury we thought it should be quite easy. The first sight, tucked into a corner east of the lake near the bridge just north of the road, charged a fee but had loads of flat grass as well as showers, not that we were tempted by either. Next we tried a site near a boat-ramp on the west side of the lake, south of the main road, but all pitch-able spots were taken. That left us with a site marked just north of the road so we hunted it down, first driving past the access road as there was no sign. There didn’t seem to be a proper camp area as such, but we passed a number of mobile-homes dotted tucked into every slightly wider part of the road, which didn’t fill us with hope. Where the road ended, and met the bank of the lake, it widened into a rough sloping area that was just about adequate for us so we settled there.
By now it was pretty dark so we left the car lights on while we pitched the tent, then realising, as we tried to start the car afterwards, that we’d killed the battery. I had a fairly good idea how to do a rolling start so we decided not to worry about the small matter of being stuck in semi-remote west-Tasmania with a dead car until the morning. The night sky was brilliant and the landscape quite visible in the short summer darkness, letting me try some of those night shots that almost look like day-light, finishing up with a long exposure that I didn’t wait to see the result of before going to sleep. So, in the morning, I’d find out if my night photography skills were up to much as well as, crucially, those that I had in the art of starting dead cars.
Tasmania Day 11: In to the Wilderness
Our short time as civilised back-packers was over this morning, as I, as usual, annoyed Kevin until he woke up so we could make the most of the day that promised to take us into some of the most pristine land in the world: the Tasman wilderness world heritage area. Driving the long and steep descent back into Hobart I wondered if I came back here to cycle round the island, much like David was doing, whether this hill and the cyclist-unfriendly nature of the highway would stop me making back down to this quaint corner of the state. Through Glenorchy, New Norfolk, and stopping in by some fish farm that really only interested me for the toilets, we hit our first scenic stop in Mt Field National Park.
Oddly enough when we got to what we were looking for all we saw was a sign for ‘National Park’ – seemingly a somewhat vague name for a place in a state, let alone a country, with dozens of national parks and reserves – but it was actually the turn-off for Russell Falls. We figured we had to see these falls as they were plastered over almost all the stamps we’d been sticking to postcards bound for back home, and naturally they looked quite stunning there. Our excitement to be walking along the trail to one of Australia’s iconic sites of natural beauty was all but culled when we got to the fenced off platform, peering through the menacing – at least from a photographer’s point of view – trees at the trickle of water running down the not-so-glamorous rocks. Clearly, at height of the Australian summer, we were a bit late in getting to these falls, although the Horse-shoe falls redeemed things, if only a little bit. Lunch in the quiet park across the road from the information centre, watching people in various forms of inflatable vessels bobbing down the river on what was another perfect day weather-wise, renewed our energy and optimism for carrying on into the World-Heritage-listed wilderness.
On the Gordon River road, I was almost completely in my element – it’s the closest thing to the Scottish Highlands I’ve yet seen, with almost as much drama and grandeur, but I think we missed a trick by blitzing through it quite quickly in the car. I thought there were quite a few walks to the various peaks that loomed over us as we twisted our way through the rugged landscape, but all I ever noticed were small signs at the side of the road, pointing in the general direction of peaks. But hey, maybe that’s why they call it a wilderness, and anyway, the walks would have probably just been long enough to be dismissed by our lazy sides. We hit Ted’s Beach, a little bit before Strathgordon and scoped out how good it would be for sleeping at that night: some space for pitching a tent and a well kitted out building with a sheltered kitchen area including free bbqs made it sound like the spot we were looking for.
Strathgordon was so small and devoid of any life we didn’t see any reason to stop so it wasn’t until we got to what looked like a lookout over a huge gorge that we got out of the car again. Looking out into the tree-covered wilderness, not even being able to see the bottom of the gorge we got distracted for ages shouting and waiting for the chorus of echoes to calm down, such was the size of the gorge and the number of little spurs that gave our voices something extra to bounce off before they returned to us sounding altogether more haunting. When we eventually turned and looked to the north we realised we only had to drive the car another 100m to be at the end of the Gordon River Road, for we were at the Gordon Dam.
Walking around the, now closed, visitor centre to get a view over the biggest dam I’d ever seen, seeing the ground falling away through the gaps in the steel-grate floor, I had to stop for a second to recompose my legs as I took stock of what was close to a 200m drop to bottom of the gorge and dam wall. Any nerves I had were overshadowed by Kevin’s almost palpable fear of the height, so I had fun coaxing him to the edge of the lookout. The dam is open to walk across, so I steamed ahead and did just that. I wouldn’t say it’s nearly as daunting being on the dam, as it’s wide enough to drive a car on and has a high wall on one side, so there isn’t that perspective of walking a tight-rope. Just as we were going we met a guy who’d rode in on a motorbike and, curiously, asked us where the last fuel stop was. We weren’t sure, knowing we had easily enough fuel for the return trip, so he probably had a bit of a nervous run back out of the wilderness after a bit of an overly-casual stroll in by the sounds of things.
Tasmania Day 10: Hastings Caves
Waking up on a very comfy sofa for the third morning, I was definitely starting to feel as though we should be moving on and seeing the rest of Tasmania before it was time to get back on the ferry, but it wasn’t even half-way through the trip and Roy and Liz really were very nice people to be staying with so we headed off on our second day-trip down south, this time heading to Hastings. Just as I don’t tend to watch films more than once – unless they’re really good – I don’t tend to do something again unless it’s amazing, so I wasn’t overly fussed to be heading to see something I’d already ticked off my list a month earlier – caves – but, the Jenolan Caves had been quite spectacular, so maybe Hastings Caves would be similarly awe-inspiring.
Hastings Caves were certainly impressive, both in scale and beauty, but the tour didn’t stand up against that of the Jenolan Caves, where well-considered music and lighting sequences had taken the show to another level. The thermal springs were a bit dissapointing too, as the water had been channelled into a swimming pool, which was packed with people and noisy kids, so wouldn’t have been very relaxing even if it was warm enough to tempt me to jump in.
Back in Huonville, we’d decided we were definitely going to head off soon, but it was a bit late in the day for making a break so we settled for an evening of gluttonous amounts of fish and chips followed by Watchmen on Blu-Ray: a decent film well worth seeing in Blu-Ray and hearing through Roy’s very capable speakers, that left me missing my sound system back home.
After 2 nights sleeping in a proper house we were probably getting a little bit too comfortable with our new-found high-quality living, and it was already getting harder to wake up at a decent time to do anything with our day. Liz worked remotely for her employer in Perth so even she could enjoy a long lie every day before the west-coast working hours caught up with her. Today, she was having some problems connecting to the company through her VPN, so giving me a chance to get some much-needed practice at my profession. Luckily, as I don’t know a huge amount about VPNs, the problem was fairly trivial for me to fix and soon I had another happy customer.
Deciding we should explore some of the coast to the south, Roy drove us down through Geevestown, where we stopped off at the information centre to find out about the Tahune Forest Air-walk, and got lured into a really tasty pie-shop, that I can’t remember the name of, but it’s on the same side of the street as, and very close to, the information centre. I’d already been to the tree-top walk at Walpole, which is basically an aerial walkway through some dense and ancient forest, which gives a great view of the trees, but isn’t something that I’d really bother to do again, so I wasn’t overly excited by the prospect of another walk. Anyway, it turned out to be better than the one at Walpole, partly as it was a much nicer day but also there were more views out of the forest over the Huon River, and there was a really fun part of the walk where the walkway was suspended out towards the river in a dead-end bridge-construction-in-progress fashion, giving a great view and endless possibilities for scaring people with a lot more sense than myself but recruiting people with about as little sense as myself to jump up and down on the edge of the swing-bridge in time and watch fear creep over the faces of the other people as the whole contraption – suspended 20m above the forest floor – bounced and rippled wildly with various creaks and groans to finish off the horror-ride experience.
I think Kevin and Roy were feeling more energetic than me so I tagged along as we did one of the ground-level forest walks, which had a scattering of shaking-bridges that we naturally put as much energy into shaking till we were almost thrown off them. The bridges were so well made that once given a good shaking, it was quite hard to not get to get hit in the face by the all the ripples running along the bridge when you stood still and waited for it to subside.
On the way back out of the park we checked in by a few of the lookouts, including the Big Tree, a name which pretty well sums up the site, save for a few ‘very’s before the name. Hartz Mountains National Park is also accessed from the Tahune Road and I was keen to get a landscape vista fix so we did the fairly winding drive up to Waratah Lookout and did a walk to some quite scenic falls a little further along the road.
Back in Huonville, we gladly accepted yet another night’s board, set going with yet more Baileys and card-games.
I was a bit surprised to wake up slightly hungover from the meal and pints from last night, so it was yet another slow start to a day for me. My GPS logger had been playing up ever since we got to Tassie and had got to the point where it just wouldn’t stay on unless it was on charge – I’d been relying on it for the past 5 months to help me figure out where all those random out-the-window shots and the likes had been taken when I look back on them later so it was quite annoying to be faced with having to try to make some conscious effort to remember where I take all my photos.
It was a bit of a short visit to Huonville for David, our Israeli cycling friend, as he had to resume his cycle tour today, so we drove back to Hobart with him then took a more scenic drive back down the coast courtesy of Roy. Roy and Liz had been looking for somewhere to build their own home near Huonville so we took a detour up a farm track into a small and secluded valley to check out a site that Roy was keen on getting. Without my GPS working I can even remember exactly where it was..
That was about all we did in what turned into a very cruise-y day, finished up with Kevin and I cooking our hosts a curry for tea, as way of thanks for having us staying with them. Seeing as we hadn’t done much, and there was still plenty to explore south of Huonville, we gladly accepted their offer to stay another night and continue our streak of hot-morning-showers, and settled into a night filled with Baileys, whiskey and yet more shit-head.
Breaking out of the rich atmosphere of the tent – rich from the three of us having nachos, cheese and dip, with about half a bottle of tabasco added, before going to sleep – we took stock of our surroundings that we’d stumbled into the night before. We really had just driven down some side forest track and happened upon a part wide enough to get away with pitching a tent on. Still as intent on seeing Fortescue Bay as we were on not paying to get in, we drove back up to the park boundary and walked in the half-kilometre to the camp-ground and beach. The bay is well sheltered and quite idyllic, nothing to rave about at least from our viewpoint, but definitely worth chilling out on for an hour while we woke up.
On to Port Arthur, we were a bit disappointed to find that, although being clearly marked on the map as a town, it was completely fenced off and the only thing we could do for free was look over part of the site from a lookout round the side of the visitor centre. It was something like $17 for basic entry, which I’d probably pay if I went back, but the group consensus – after taking in the view for a while and wondering if we could get away with jumping the fence at the lookout – was there were better things to do with our day.
Following the main road round the peninsula, we’d heard that Roaring Beach had some good surf, so we turned off west at Nubeena to check it out. Not deterred by the suitably roaring, and nippy, wind Kevin and I jumped in while David exercised better judgement and took photos from a distance. The rip was way too much for me, so after spending a few minutes almost hopelessly trying to get back to shore – even though I was only waist deep in the water – I bailed out, while Kevin, typically, swam so far out I couldn’t see him and assumed we’d be called the SES in.
That pretty much summed up our time on the historic Tasman Peninsula before we headed back through Hobart, once again not really bothering to explore the place, only stopping so David could get his glasses fixed, while we made ourselves look like bums playing shit-head on the street. Kevin made friends with a couple how now live in Tassie, when he worked in a restaurant back in Perth, and after a week of uncivilised camping it was the perfect time to call in on them and crash in a proper house again, so that evening, we arrived in Huonville, an hour or so south of Hobart, and met Roy and Liz. For a temporary home while they find their dream spot on the island, their pad was pretty idyllic, set up the valley just outside town, looking over a sweeping bend in the Huon River, not that we really cared though, we were meeting up with some very welcoming people, not sleeping in a tent or a car for the night, and, most importantly, would have a hot shower for the first time in a week!
This Month, I’m a Farmer
It’s a week since I got to Moree and started my ‘ideal’ job – at least as far as jobs go that I can do to fulfil my working holiday visa requirements. I’m staying on a 7000 acre farm 50km north of Moree, mainly doing gps tractor driving by day and very little by night as, being the sole employee of the farmer, I’ve got the workers’ quarters all to myself. Now as much as I quite like my own company from time to time and would happily go off for a hike into the hills or the likes and lose myself for a few days, what I’m faced with here is possibly over a month of living in solitude apart from seeing the farmer, who’s leadership skills haven’t left me exactly warming to him.
I’ll take a step back for a moment, as it’s a bit of leap for an I.T. guy to be saying he’s now taken on the role of hermit-come-farmer, and recap how I got here. Back in August I arrived in Australia on a working holiday visa, giving me a year in the country with basically no restrictions: great. The government also offers the visa for a second year to those who’ve used their first year visa, but on the condition that they’ve done 3 months (or 88 days if not all done with one employer) of farm, fishing, mining or construction work, in a regional postcode area. Now, I like to keep my options open and when I got to Australia, although I had no idea if I even would want to stay for one year, I was sure that if I did any work I’d make it count towards the second year, as hey, maybe I’d really want it after all. So, heading up the west coast, I applied for a tractor driving job – possibly the easiest type of farm work I could think of, and I have the advantage of actually having driven tractors on the farm beside my house back home – but with no luck and ended up picking mangoes in the Northern Territory through November. Down in Victoria, a few months later, I picked up some work at a berry farm, taking me up to a total of 31 days knocked off for the visa. Great, but after struggling to drag myself out of Bright for almost 3 months, I was left with a little over 3 months to find 47 days work in a country where I’d heard plenty stories about backpackers finding it hard to get work. Not one to be rushed, I dossed about in Sydney for a couple of days then checked on the government’s harvest work website, with an eye to applying for the job with the longest life expectancy and low-and-behold, posted that day, is a tractor-driving job in Moree.
So, here I am. Meeting the farmer off the train at Moree, I was getting quite excited by the figures I was hearing: a 400hp tractor – sounds fun – and a 7000 acre farm – well I know roughly how big a 20 acre field is but my imagination doesn’t really extend over a few hundred acres, so wow. Turns out it’s about 12 square miles, so if I climb the hill behind my house, most of the land I see would be part of this farm. Anyway, the first few days were pretty mundane, fixing up bits of the 18m wide sowing machine, tightening bolts, greasing bearings, cleaning up grain from the silos, that sort of thing. Mundane as it was, I could deal with that, but with by far the worst boss I’ve ever served under, I was already wondering whether I’d last much more than a week before I cracked under his constant questioning of why I didn’t do this, hadn’t done that, didn’t know how to do that, hadn’t done that quicker etc. Luckily, the forth day saw us taking the tractor and sowing machine out to the field and making a start at sowing wheat.
The reason I really wanted this job was, quite frankly, because I’m lazy. I’ve done a month of mango picking, going home with aching muscles and sore feet every day and having no time for anything between finishing eating and going to bed, so sitting on my arse in a tractor all day, and being paid a little more than I was for both the mangoes and the berry farm sounds great. And it gets better: the tractor has a gps unit that controls the steering of the tractor as it sows lengths of the field, so all I have to do is turn it at end of each row and take over briefly whenever there are trees on a row. My job is vaguely comparable to when I worked in I.T.: I sit on a chair, occasionally put my feet up when the boss isn’t looking, can listen to music, stare at a couple of computer screens occasionally, stare out the window, and every 10 minutes or do some work!
Of course the difference with my I.T. jobs is, if I was sitting on the chair doing nothing it was procrastination, whereas in the tractor, it’s because there’s nothing to do apart from look out the window to make sure the 10 tons of machinery and grain I’m towing is still there. It is a boring job, but so long as it’s boring I’m not going to whinge as I’m sure I’m earning more than a lot of people who are working a lot harder than me, and it’s bad enough being in that situation without being ungrateful for it. But, the field that I’ve been sowing for the past 4 days (yup, it’s over half a mile wide and well over a mile long) will be done tomorrow and if that means I’m back to being in the firing line of more abuse from the boss, then maybe my time as a tractor-driver will once again start to look short-lived, and maybe this month I’ll have the chance to be something other than this, maybe a fruit-picker again, or maybe just a backpacker for a while.
Feeling pretty crap from what was the worst night’s sleep ever, we got to the information centre at the head of the Freycinet Peninsula to find the weather wasn’t looking that great. We’d planned on doing the overnight hike round the peninsula, which meant camping somewhere near the south end, so possible rain and strong winds didn’t combine to make an attractive forecast. Ditching that plan, but at least much better informed about what we could do on the peninsula thanks to the information centre, we steamed on to Hobart to meet our Israeli friend David, who also was circumnavigating the island, but on two wheels, with no engine.
Almost completely ignoring the capital, we caught up with David, got some supplies and tried to leave Hobart. That was easier said than done as, once over the bridge, I assumed what seemed like a fairly sensible position in the left lane of the highway, only to find that after a corner there were signs saying this lane slipped off the main route and, with no time to change lane, then no sign of a slip road back on, I ended up driving back across the bridge, then back across again, just to leave the city. Once again, Australian roads: I despair.
Heading towards the famous and, by white Australian standards, historical penal colony of Port Arthur, we took a detour just before entering the domain of convicts at Eaglehawk Neck to see the Tessellated Pavement and check out a lookout over Pirates Bay and Eaglehawk Neck the spit of land that we’d cross to enter the peninsula. After reading the information on how the cracked formation of the ‘pavement’ – a flat area of rock on a beach – formed, I understand how the cracks formed but still don’t really know why they make a uniform grid. Anyway, passing Eaglehawk Neck didn’t have quite the feel of a no-man’s land marking the entry to what was once the worst prison you could end up at in the British Empire, as we couldn’t see the sea that was so close to us on both sides for the thick bush.
Just inside the peninsula, we checked out the Tasman Arch, Devil’s Kitchen, and Tasman Blowhole: all fairly impressive rock formations carved out by the sea. Definitely in need of a shower again, Fortescue Bay looked promising, although quite far down some unsealed roads, with a camp site and showers. Determined not to pay anything for washing or sleeping though, we sneaked into the campground, had a hypothermia-inducing shower (hot water is available, at a price) then drove back out beyond the limit of the national park and camped by the side of some obscure forest track for the night.
Sleeping in the car overnight disposed of our usual morning routine: me putting off getting up for an hour, spending the next couple of hours trying to get Kevin up before the morning was over, then spending the next half hour packing the tent and stuff back in the car. Even if our sleep hadn’t been comfortable, it felt quite novel to wake up and then be ready to drive off 5 minutes later.
Heading south towards the Freycinet Peninsula, we stopped in by Douglas-Apsley National Park and did a 2.7km trail that we thought led to some amazing falls. After walking what felt like at least 2.7km we came back upon the river we’d crossed earlier, except this part was faster, deeper and looked a lot less fun to cross. If there was anything of interest on the other side, maybe I’ll never know, but when we got back to the carpark and re-interrogated the map, we realised the falls were on a different track that would take days to hike. The best view we got was from a lookout that was closed because of landslip, overlooking the bend in river where the shallow river-crossing is.
Bicheno, a small town with a beautiful bay and beach, was annoying as it seemed devoid of free bbqs – something we’d come to rely on to save us using all our camping gas in a couple of days – leaving us hopelessly trying to fry all the stuff we’d bought for a bbq on a useless frying pan, perched aloft a pitiful stove. We eventually ate and retired to the beach for the rest of the afternoon, although the water wasn’t really warm enough for my liking for a swim. It wasn’t far off Coral Bay for beauty though, with clear water and fish swimming right up to shore.
Intending on hitting the Freycinet Peninsula next morning, we took the Coles Bay road and parked up at the River and Rocks campground, not far from the town. I had a seemingly brilliant idea that I would try sleeping across the back seat of the car as I really didn’t like trying to sleep on the almost-but-not-quite-flat front-seats of the car. Doing this, though, meant Kevin couldn’t get his seat quite as flat as normal, and sleeping in the back seat wasn’t nearly as comfortable as hoped, so both had a shocking night’s sleep.