tasmaniacal laughter?

yeah, it's a bit of a stretch, the title, but it works. chillin in the Pickled Frog in Hobart while Shabs is off at the Cascade Brewery tour. Been a kickass week, and I really hope to get back here at some point - with a motorbike. Fantastic motorcycle roads pretty much everywhere here - and some seriously gnarly offroad. Tune in later for a photo dump, right now its yet another underappreciated word dump. i blame the picture preference on today's bite-size consumer oriented world and everyone's lack of imagination. and not my shitty to-do list style of writing. you jerks.

ten days in tasmania:
one: get in, go to sleep, nararra backpackers. thin mattresses. meet galen, american dude doing the overland track. has done the AT, and is thus pimp.

two: wander hobart. line up car rental. talk to dudes on honda TransAlps. decide i need one. wander talks, ogle pimp huge catamaran, leave 'looking for crew' ad in the royal hobart yachtatorium.

three: pick up rental car - scratched up old mitsubishi magna. car is provisionally dubbed Edna. drive to strathgordon. met cool dog german shepherd Clancy and unnamed owners. Hike in Mt Field national park. gets dark. wander into National Park Hotel, meet Americans Cal, Pat, Doug, and... the fourth one. They're old (probably 60+), and a former police pilot, current trauma center admin, and... something else. They're travelling, enjoying themselves, and it makes me feel slightly optimistic about being old someday. They also say Adam and I are 'doing it right' - I don't feel like i live up to their image of me, but hey, still good to hear.

four: soldier on to lake saint clair, hike huge lichen covered rocks up little hugel in suboptimal traction conditions (light rain), plow on to Queenstown, crash at the Royal Hotel.

five: hit strahan ('stron'), meet more old americans, quick waterfall hike, and plow up the western explorer - 100km+ of gnarly dirt road up a few dozen k in from the coast. not actually dirt - made out of silicon mine tailings - could have been made into camera lenses. have to take a super cool two-car ferry called the Fatman. Adam almost kills us with a quintuple fishtail, but doesn't. All in all a super fun road, and nice change from highway. Sneak out to the coast in the NW, which like much of tassie feels like maine - or new england - in a vague way, which is weird. sleep in a good random hotel in Wynyard, after the super sketchy hotel fortunately had no one at desk.

six: do cradle mountain. highlight of the tassie, perhaps as cool as half dome. met a ton of people on the trail/summit - dianne(american) and ed(canuck), on a weekend trip away from the melbourne mckinsey office; bec and del, aussies park guide-in-training and guide, respectively; a trio of OT hikers, one with a robot knee; a cranky old aussie named chris who we eventually win over with our cheeky american antics ('american coming though! please step aside'. trust me, it was apropos) think i'm the first american whose hand he has shaken. oddly enough, catch up to bec and del on the way back, and get a ride back to the car and make rough plans for the night. see a wombat. then run into dianne and ed, and give them a ride back to their car. i swear tasmania isn't this small. get lost on the way up to penguin, get to burnie the same time bec and del do, roll down to devanport at mach 2 (bec is a maniac), and hit up a bar that wants to be texas. play some of the worst pool (snooker?) that i ever have, but still have a grand old time. crash in john q. randomhostel in devanport.

seven: roll through launceston and on to bicheno. cool little down with a great name. bitchin', no? don't see any penguins. great backpacker's though.

eight: get a great meat pie in bicheno. mmmm. meat pie. hit the freycinet peninsula, wineglass bay, hazard's beach. meet even more motorcyclists. plow on to triabunna and crash at the udda backpacker's. super laid back place in the satisfyingly quiet-but-not-empty town. meet afna (aif-na) - a 60+ woman farming in Queensland. At first she seemed a very quiet, soft-spoken and reserved, but it turns out she's an eco-warrior of sorts ('i'm just a harmless old lady on vacation, what could i possibly do') she was part of the blockade of the gordon and franklin rivers, got boarded and popped by a cop, and spend four and a half months in prison. The previous day was her 25th anniversary of getting out of the clink. She shows us pictures of her farm, talks about her youth, sailing, her activism, and what she does now. The part that i remember most clearly is what got her down to the blockade - one of her schoolchildren, when told about the injustices of the world, said 'well, what are you going to do about it, miss?'. So she joined the blockade, and ended up with a criminal record and couldn't go back to teaching. She also sewed Adam's shorts with a sailing stitch she had learned years earlier, and showed us the children's book she had written, 'My Grandfather Said', about how the sea got salty. We talked for a long time about oral tradition and apprenticeship style learning - it seems like every older (>40) person i talk to feels that things were better the way they were, and afna was certainly no exception. like cal and company, afna thought we were doing things right, and it made her happy to find youth that 'got it' - and similarly i didn't feel like i was living up to her image, but it made her happy, which was nice.

nine: bail on triabunna, hit pirate's bay, the tesselated pavement, tasman's arch, hell's kitchen, and the blowhole. On the other side of the blowhole was a jetty and small fishing village that could have been ripped out of Maine, if it weren't for the 72 kilo tuna some guy hauled out of his boat. Watched the fisherman gut the tuna (mmm... looks exactly like sushi) which was surprisingly not disgusting. First time i've ever seen an animal cleaned. Do a quick hike to waterfall bay along some real nice cliffs ('nice'? mental thesaurus, empty). Hit a tasmanian devil park (awesome. Looney Tunes Taz is actually a pretty accurate rendition, minus the spinning. They're total scavengers, horrible hunters with crap eyesight, and cranky to boot. They are seriously garbage disposals on legs. Their population is currently getting decimated by a 100% fatal non-viral tranmissible cancer, which is absolutely terrifying. There's hope in isolation though, and the cute (toothy) little bastards are well suited for re-release after the storm hopefully blows over. also hit the historic prison site at port arthur, and nail a wallaby on the way back to hobart, which was seriously sad. sleep at the pickled frog.

ten: putz around hobart. errands. return crappy wool thing. do cadbury factory. mm, chocolate. check out sunset on mt wellington. crash at the pickle again.

eleven: check out sunrise on mt wellingston. drop adam at the cascade brewery. return our trusty steed edna. write blog post. mention writing blog post in blog post. mention mentioning said post in said post. ignore the fact eleven is not ten. end post.