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TASMANIA SAGA
< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >ALMOST OUT OF CYGNET
The work with Jack was finished. It would be a two days before the possibility of working again. Yoshi and Yukari had rented a car and were heading off to see more of Tasmania and Tom and Jutta were getting a lift with them to see Port Arthur. Tom and Jutta would be back for more work afterwards. I had my own plan to kill the time. I was going off visit an island close to the coast about 50k from Cygnet. I packed up enough to last me a few days and stepped out onto the road.
Hitchhiking had become one of my favorite ways to get around. I t wasn�t that it was faster than walking, or the fact that it was free. I met so many people in the area that I would never have met otherwise. It was the only real way to get into Huonville without begging a ride off of Jane, the hostel manager. I have a lot of stories about the trip back and forth to Huonville. Buying food was a bit of an adventure every time. I had lifts from everyone in Tasmania. There didn�t seem to be one demographic that picked up Hitchhikers. I had rides from single mothers with there kids in the car, old men handing out bible tracks, crazy drunks, German tourists, families in nice and shit cars. It was loads of fun.
On the day that I went to Bruny Island, I got a ride as far as Cygnet from the guy who worked as maintenance in th Hostel. I walked down to the turnoff to Bruny and I held out my thumb and waited. I had to wait a bit more than usual before a beautiful red car with a leather interior pulled up. A woman in her late thirties stuck her head out the window and asked were I was going. While she was driving she told me that she couldn�t take me as far as Bruny. She�d be going back to the hotel that she owned in the other direction further down. I was dropped off at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. The road in the direction of Bruny was about the size of a driveway. It was your typical country road headed up into the mountains.
I didn�t have to wait long. I was sitting on my bag a bit up the road for a bout ten minutes when the first car came by. It was a blue car with bits of rust hanging off the side. There were little characters painted on the bumper and a sticker with the words �SAVE THE REEF STOP THE RESORT� on it. A smiling gray haired lady in her fifties stuck her head out the window and asked where I was going. She wasn�t going all the way to Bruny, but she could get me four kilometers away from the ferry to the island. �I hope you don�t mind if I go slowly� she said to me �I�m a bit of a pokey driver, my children are always telling me that I drive to slow. My name is Patsy, by the way.� The car had a pleasant aroma of fresh food on the inside of it. The kind of smell you would associate with baking bread. �I like to drive this way because of the view and there isn�t much traffic. I can just relax and drive the speed I want without some guy honking his horn behind me� She asked the usual questions: What was I doing in Australia, where have I been, Did I like Tasmania? She told me that she was headed to the town at the end of the road to look up a guy who made custom doors. She had just purchased an old apple shed that she was going to transform into a studio and the door was an odd size.
The small road had a different view than others I had been on. It was small, winding and the surrounding mountains hadn�t been transformed by the passage of it. Patsy drove slow enough to take it all in. We were just starting to come down the hill we had been driving up when she started to slow down a bit more �and here it is� she said as we came into site of the most spectacular view in all of Tasmania. The coast was in view again and Bruny island was also there. We were high enough to be watching clouds from above as they drifted over the taller peaks on Bruny Island. Bruny was almost two islands connected by a narrow isthmus and the water on both sides of the island were a deep blue that occasionally appeared a bit lighter because of the mist that was rolling off the waves. Past Bruny, you could see far up the coast. Cliffs and beaches were fading in and out of view with the wind clouds and waves. The shock of the view completely silenced me until we got to a point were the trees blocked the sight of it. I was dropped off at the turnoff to the ferry. I started walking with my thumb out.
The rest of the trip was a bust. There was no real public transport on Bruny. And hitch-hiking was near impossible because of the lack of traffic. When I was planning the trip. It never really sank in that Bruny was over fifty kilometers long. I managed to see a little but it raining all the time. I didn�t do a single hike there other than walking along the road after grapesring for someone to stop. I needed to get back to work. Disappointed, I hitched back to the hostel so I could pick grapes. Two days later, Tom, Jutta and I pooled our funds, rented a car, and said goodbye to Cygnet.
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