Should've Took that Left at Albuquerque

Tasmania (or Tassie as the locals call it) is a beautiful little island off the bottom part of Australia. To reach it my sister and I took the Spirit of Tasmania, a ferry/small cruise liner on an 11 hour voyage across the Bass Strait. Before taking this adventure a lot of Aussies warned me that the strait was going to be very choppy, though I did not find that to be the case. Besides even if it did sink and only the top 5% of the passengers survived, I felt confident that we were going to be in that top percentile, as the average age of the other passengers traveling with us was 72. Apparently, no one travels the Spirit of Tasmania on a Wednesday night unless you are retired and looking to relive your navy days from the Second World War (and First World War for some of them).
The journey was smooth and we spent the majority of our waking time in one of the bars or eating the overpriced food. The live band (I use the term loosely) was not bad, though I do wonder if being the house band for a glorified ferry service would stand as the highlight or the low-point in one's musical career. We spent the majority of the time sleeping in our small cabin as the journey was at night and docked the next morning at 6:30 AM.

After awaking in the morning we were both sorely disappointed with the offering at the "continental" breakfast, and seeing as how you had to pay with your first-born child to get a plate of croissants and bad smelling coffee we went ashore looking for breakfast. What we found was the city of Devonport (again, I use the term lightly). What I thought was one of Tasmania's main cities was barely a town the rival any found in the middle of the Jersey Pine Barrens. At 6:30 there was not much options so we settled on a small bakery where I had a cheese, bacon, and egg pie. In Australia they make pies out of anything, but it wasn't bad. After breakfast we collected our rental car and headed out to see Tassie.

In hindsight my real mistake was not seeing the developing trend that would unfurl before us as we traveled across the island in search of centers of civilization... Mostly because there are none, or not at least as we know them. Every "town" we passed through was marked by a bar, a post office, and maybe a school. Even the major towns were barely more than a collection of buildings grouped around the highway. When we arrived at Coles Bay, (what I was assured was a lush modern vacationing town by the bay near Freycinet National Park,) I assumed we could stop for gas and lunch, but true to form there were no gas stations, and only two places to eat. One was a cafe that served only coffee and old muffins, the other was a fish and chips place that looked mysteriously abandoned.

However, every dark cloud has its silver-lining. It is true there was almost no sign of civilization to be found, but the natural beauty of the island more than made up for it. It was not tropical scenery I had come to expect when traveling around Victoria and Melbourne, instead it was lush and greener than any place I have yet to find in Australia. As we drove through the morning the sun began to rise and the dew and moisture of the night burned off in vapor and fog, giving the whole landscape an almost eerie mystical appearance. I felt like I was driving our small little rented Hyundai through Narnia, Middle Earth, or Colorado. The terrain was very mountainous and the cloud cover stayed low for most of the day. The peaks of great mountains and hills were often obscured in white vaporous mist. It was unreal.

I will end the telling of my tale here and pick this up in my next post. Stay Tuned.