Travel Blog #6

Adventure and Really Wild things

Launceston

After finishing up my highly enjoyable biking and brownie filled weekend, I went to Launceston for a few days to get some work done and have some city time. I stayed at the Pod Inn, which is one of those Japanese Capsule hotels. It was surprisingly enjoyable! The pods themselves were small, but not too small if you’re a less-than-tall guy such as myself. A short king, if you will. And once the chainsmokers stopped smoking in the alley where my pod vented, the air wasn’t too stuffy or stinky either! Launceston is a nice town - similar in size to Bozeman or Missoula. The hotel was downtown so I could easily walk to the library to work and to all the cool shops and museums. There is also a nice nature reserve called Cataract Gorge with trails starting a few minutes from my hotel. I had a really nice day walking the trails, entranced by the many suspension bridges and enjoying the summer sun. My plans were to leave from Launnie (Australians shorten every work possible - one to two syllables is preferable. Launceston has 3 syllables and it’s simply too many) and make my way Northwest, then back East and South to land in Hobart for Christmas. What follows is some of the highlights of my adventures. Suffice to say, I absolutely adore Tasmania; I have been surprised and enraptured every day by the mountains, beaches, animals, and, do I even need to say? The trees.

Narawntapu National Park, Platypus, and The Nut

Step one: Head to Narawntapu National Park for a campsite, then to the nearby Platypus House to see some platypus and echidnas. I wanted to be sure to see a platypus in person, wild or otherwise. And you can never see too many echidnas as they’re the best animal ever. Both animals are extremely strange and delightful to observe. The platypus were a bit shy but then tended to show off a bit once they knew they had a crowd. They're genuinely a confusing animal to watch and all the more enjoyable for it. The echidnas were surprising friendly! We couldn’t pet them, but they would walk between our feet as we watched them. So cute!

Narawntapu National Park was a nice place and seems to mostly be a preserve for wildlife. My campsite was 100 meters from the beach looking out on Bass Straight and I had my usual pademelon and possum visitors in the evening. I hiked Archers Knob in the morning which had just amazing views over the water to the North, the mountains to the West and South, and marshy wetlands to the East. Plus, no snakes! An auspicious start to a couple weeks on the road.

After that hike, I made my way West towards Stanley. I stopped at Penguin and Wynyard on the way for lunch and planning. Each day I was setting off without knowing where I would be sleeping so I would do reconnaissance at each town and their Visitor Information centers for tips. A trick that proved fruitful! Penguin is a really cute town, famous for no longer having any nesting penguins but for having a large statue of one. Same thing, right? I got a campsite near Stanley and hiked The Nut, which is a a really big rock, maybe a volcano? It’s hugely impressive and gives you an amazing vantage point of Bass Straight and the towns and farms nearby. It’s sort of strange because The Nut is big enough to forget that you’re on top of a huge rock and not on "normal" ground. There are forested sections and grassland sections and you wouldn’t know you were a few hundred feet off the water until you walk right up to the cliffs. Not to worry, they are well marked. My beloved eucalypts even found their way up there too! Wind is a pretty impressive force for blowing seeds around!

Rocky Cape National Park, Leven Canyon and Gunns Plains Caverns

The next day I stopped at Rocky Cape National Park for some quick walks and to gawk at more amazing scenery. The lighthouse had a great view of the, well, rocky cape. Not the most creative name, but sometimes you let the scenery do the heavy lifting. And I have to say, it’s hard to beat a seascape and jagged rocks first thing in the morning. Afterwards I made my way towards Leven Canyon where I’d be hiking and camping for the night. I stopped in Burnie at a Bunnings Warehouse to get pliers to fix a zipper on my tent (Bunnings Warehouse is like a Home Depot or Lowes). A zipper on my rainfly annoyingly malfunctioned a few days prior. But joy of joys, and to the surprise of probably everyone who has ever met me, I fixed it! Me! I fixed a thing! I actually haven’t used that side of the rainfly since just in case my fix doesn’t hold.. if it was broke but now is probably not broke, don’t fix it! Right?!

While at Bunnings, I had my most important culinary experience in Australia - a Bunnings sausage. On Sundays, people will put up a tent outside Bunnings and sell sausages. Usually cheap sausages on white bread, maybe with onions and drinks as options. I think they typically raise money for local groups or charities. They’re dirt cheap and delicious, especially when your diet largely consists of peanut butter sandwiches and beans. Side note: Aussies eat a lot of sausages, and they don’t usually have hotdog buns like we do in the US; they usually just use a piece of bread as a bun. Which I find amazing and hilarious as that is what I would do in college to save money (remember all the Costco hotdogs we ate In college Ben?).

Leven Canyon was really quite something. It felt way off the beaten path, driving country roads into the mountains to get there. The weather started turning for the worse, getting cold, windy, and rainy, as I drove to the campsite. Not the best for hiking and camping, but that’s life. I got pretty wet hiking the Leven Canyon, but the sun peaked her head out briefly to provide respite from the precipitation and beautiful color contrasts - does the sky get better when you have big clouds, blue sky, and mysterious fog at once? The hike also included 697 stairs, which provides a pretty good workout for the ol’ knee, as well as an American couple who give you tips on where to hike in Victoria and in North Carolina! (Watch out Wyatt, NC might be my next stop when I’m back in the States. Apparently they have some untouched old growth forest that is calling my name). I also met a couple girls from South Australia that shared their dinner and tea with me as we tried to stay warm amidst the typically Tassie “summer” weather - there was snow on the mountain tops in the morning. A second culinary milestone that night - wallaby meat! It’s game meat you can buy in the supermarket, which is strange. But also tasty!

The next morning, I went on a cave tour at Gunns Plains Caverns. Think Lewis and Clark Caverns, but a bit more quirky. Tragically, I didn’t get to see the freshwater lobster or platypus that occasionally make their way through the caverns. Maybe next time.

Blackmans Lagoon and Bay of Fires

After the caverns I made my way back to Launnie to do the important, inconvenient city things like showering and laundry. How long had it been since I showered? Do baby wipes baths count as showers? I sure hope so. I also got some screen time in and watched the one Christmas movie I got around to all season - Klaus. It’s on Netflix and it’s extremely good. Thanks for the recommendation Rachel!

After cleaning my body and clothes and resupplying my food and Christmas spirit, I made my way Northeast towards the Bay of Fires. Quick stop in George Town and Low Head to see a nice lighthouse and have a chat with the parents while I had service. I camped at Blackman’s Lagoon, which was the most remote I’ve felt yet. Not that it’s necessarily terribly remote, but there were a lot of gravel roads and almost no people, which is sometimes slightly concerning when you’re in a little sedan in a foreign land. But as they say here, no worries, mate. She’ll be right. And she was! I got a great campsite and trudged through 6Ks of sand to get a most glorious beach view. It was the sort of evening sky that brings tears to the eyes. Though that could also have been the sheer relief to stop walking through soft sand. Another theme of Tasmania is the abundance of beautiful beaches. It’s not that I don’t appreciate them or take them for granted, but there are simply so many that you can’t stop at every one and have a beach day. They’re everywhere! And most of them aren’t busy at all! They look like tropical beaches, but the water feels like the Atlantic in Maine, so maybe that’s why they aren’t full of people.

I got to Bay of Fires the next day and spent the day lounging by the water and climbing around the big rocks. The beach here is blindingly white and the rocks are covered in red lichen, which might lead one to think that’s where the name Bay of Fires comes from. But it actually is what some European “explorers” called it when they first sailed by because the Aboriginal people had fires all along the bay. Again, not a terribly creative name, but it is evocative.

Maria Island

After the Bay of Fires, I made my way further South to Triabunna to catch the ferry the following morning to go to Maria Island. To be honest, something I find difficult and occasionally annoying about my method of travel (read solo and cheap) is that it takes away some of the fun of stopping in cute little towns. I can’t really buy stuff as I live out of two backpacks, and looking at all the local shops alone isn’t all that fun to me after a few months of travel. Maybe I’m too bent towards consumerism, maybe there are too many cute little towns in Tasmania, maybe I’m just impatient, it’s hard to say. Maybe I’ll come back to these towns someday with traveling partners and find more joy in them.

I spent the night in Triabunna and got on the ferry in the morning to Maria Island. The weather was not ideal for hiking and camping adventures, unless you like wet tents and your views obscured by clouds and fog. As a practitioner and purveyor of Type 2 Fun, it sounds pretty good to me! I ended up running into a couple, Tom and Holly, who I met at Narawntapu National Park a week prior and we hiked the Bishop and Clark Track together, which was a really lovely hike and would’ve had mind blowing views had it not been so foggy. Lichen covered rocks and walls of white clouds are cool too. It was so nice to hike with Tom and Holly. They both adore nature and we spent a lot of the day chatting about how cool the trees and animals are in Tassie. They know SO much more than I do and I learned a ton. It was also just nice to have other people’s thoughts to fill my brain rather than my own on a hike! We had some meals together in the next day as well. I also met another solo traveler, Geoff from Seattle ("from Seattle" isn’t his surname, that's just how I think of him) and we also shared some meals and great conversion about life, travel, community, and the like. Yay for friends! Maria Island has some beautiful cliffs, fossils, and rock formations that are really quite spectacular. I also saw bandicoots and a Tasmanian Devil for the first time! How exciting!! What a place! My time on Maria Island was really special, largely because it was the most social experience I had on my adventures around Tassie. Talking to lots of travelers and campers, making friends, getting tips for Tassie, generally having a nice time, it made a significant impression on me. Another place I only saw a small portion of and must return to someday.

Bruny Island

After Maria Island, I made my way down to Bruny Island. I stopped in Hobart to have a shower, charge devices, and regroup. It’s hard to overstate how nice a hot shower is after several days camping and hiking. Traveling like I am (read cheap, slightly feral, and with the working assumption that if I can’t smell other people, they can’t smell me) really makes you appreciate things like hot showers, charged phones, and a proper bed.

Bruny Island. My final stop on my adventure before Christmas. And what a way to end. You have to take a ferry to Bruny, though you can take your car on this one. I’m becoming quite fond of ferries - maybe along with my future blog about trees I should write a blog about ferries. Anyway, I got to Bruny first thing to get a campsite and give myself time to explore before the rain arrived. I went to another lighthouse with probably the best view of all the lighthouses I have visited in Tassie. One of the first four lighthouses built in Australia, sometime in the 1830s, it overlooked a bay of rocky cliffs and mountains and endless waters. This is when I started to truly feel deep in my heart that I love Tasmania. Afterwards, I hiked the Labillardiere Track, a 17K hike that went through pristine beaches and gum forests, most of which burned a few months ago. It’s really something to walk through a recently burned section of nature. It's really sad, but some trees had new buds growing out of the burnt branches, ferns and other grasses were growing in the ashes. Given time, the land will refresh and regrow. Eucalypts generally need for new trees to grow, so hopefully in a few years that area will be full of thriving gums and ferns. After the hike, for a morale booster, I got myself a treat at the store: fridge cig (Diet Coke) and a cookie. As I've said before, it’s the little things :)

That night, I tried to watch some penguins come to shore to feed their young, but I later learned there probably aren’t any penguins on Bruny, or at least where the Parks Service had built a viewing platform. Dang tourists scaring all the penguins away! It was still pretty enjoyable standing quietly in the rain for an hour an a half, watching the evening turn to dusk then night. It’s rare that I am able to be around groups of people and remain quiet. I have a tendency to feel awkward and try to fill empty spaces with chatter. It’s even more rare for me to stand still, much less stand still for a long time and watch the ocean. So it was quite a relief to have about 20 people on the same page - remain quiet to avoid spooking the penguins, and just be. The result: no penguins. But, for me at least, a renewed appreciation for how big, how endless, how magnificent the ocean is. How gulls and shearwaters seemingly appear out of the nothingness of grey clouds above the water. How the colors of the day slowly turn from blues, greens, oranges, and whites, to gray. A spectrum of grays, but gray nonetheless. The horizon, with gray clouds stretching to eternity, slowly melding with the horizon until you don’t know what it is water and what is cloud. Or if there even is a distinction. Soon after, the sun had fully set and only the whites of the waves provided contrast to the dark grays and blacks of the night. Now obviously, this is just what day turning to night is like. But how often do we actually watch it happen? Maybe you do, but it’s rare for me. So I found the whole event quite profound. Cold, wishing I had more clothes, hoping the rain would stop so I wouldn’t get completely soaked sleeping in my tent, simultaneously impatient for the penguins to appear and wishing the night would never end. A really profound night for me.

The next morning, with all my stuff suitably soaked, I had brekkie and made my way to my next hike. The plan was to hike the Fluted Cape track, which I sort of did. At least as the start. It started out as all good hikes do, meandering through nice beaches and gum forests. I got to a quite spectacular cliff, took the obligatory photos, and turned right onto the next part of the track. Or what I thought was the track. It quickly turned out to not be a track and more of a path that maybe someone took once. Probably. There were pink ribbons on trees that surveyors put on trees to mark the “trail”, which I’m extremely grateful for because without them I would have been quite lost. My phone map indicated I was on a track, and I knew vaguely where I was going, but bushwhacking in snake country, following cliff faces several hundred meters above the ocean is not a great place to get lost without reliable service in a foreign land. It ended up being fine: exceptional views from the many monstrous cliffs, reminders to be present while hiking so you don’t trip over every stone and twig, one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen in my life, 3 distinct microclimates, and no snakes or injuries! It actually ended up being one of my favorites hikes in Tasmania yet (Type 2 Fun). To make it better, I ran into a lovely couple, Lee and Lorraine, right after I got off trail that asked me about where I’d been. I learned that I took the wrong route (this was obviously by now) but being locals, they had been there before and knew it well enough. They invited me to their home for tea and fruit cake, which I gratefully accepted. I walked 12Ks instead of 5 and was rather underdone for fuel by this stage. We chatted over tea for a time about travel, Tasmania, the US, etc. Lee is from the US but has been in Australia for 44 years, and Lorraine is born and raised in Tasmania. They then asked me what my dinner plans were, to which I responded with my usual response: “I don’t know, probably tuna and beans.” They took pity on me and invited me for dinner of salmon (way better than canned tuna), salad, fresh raspberries and ice cream. And, more importantly, a hot shower. As I said above, this is huge. One of the best gifts you can give to a traveler. And to top it all off, a tour to a special section of rainforest nearby that is not on the guide books! Lee and Lorraine are truly generous and thoughtful people and I’m so grateful to them. It was the perfect way to end my Bruny trip before heading back to Hobart. What a day. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it’s to 1) check your map better and 2) actually maybe don’t worry so much about checking your map so carefully if you’re not in danger because you might serendipitously meet some lovely strangers who improve your whole day with their kindness and generosity. That’s two contradictory lessons.. but as I’ve said before, two things can be true at once. Seriously though, we shouldn’t worry too much about out plans going “wrong,” because sometimes the best moments in life appear in a way we never could have planned. Be open and let serendipity in. That’s where magic lies.

Music for Hope, Sanity, and Peace

Lumen by Bill Laurence. Everything in a solo piano album I hope to create someday. Truly masterful.

Hvis ikke de er døde, lever de endnu by Stundom. This album has nice winter / holiday vibes. The song Til Sofie is particularly nice - thanks Caleb for the recommendation!

December by George Winston. The quintessential Christmas / Holiday piano album. The well from which I drink and am nourished, pianistically speaking.

The Great Sea by Dreamers' Circus. My most listened to song of 2025 by far.

Unraveling by Muse. My second most listened to song of 2025. It's nothing like the other music here but it's extremely good.

Also, I don't get paid by Dreamers' Circus to promote their music, their music just speaks to me in a way almost no other group does. If you saw my Apple Music 2025 Replay, you'd think I might be a tad obsessive ;)

Quote for Contemplation

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"

- Mary Anne Radmacher

Thank you Judy for sending this!

Courage,

Trevor

"Fill your life with meaning. Life is precious. Do not waste a single second."

 - Rog Bennett