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TASMANIA SAGA
< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >BRUNY ISLAND, WINEGLASS BAY AND CRADLE MOUNTAIN
There were no tears leaving Cygnet. Without any work available in the area, all the backpackers had left. Rhino was still there and so was Manish. Yoshie and Naoko were planning on leaving a few days after us. Jane, the manager gave all three of us an unwanted hug and we waved goodbye, got in the car and tried to start it. Jane got some jumper cables, gave us a boost and THEN, we were on our way to our first destination. This just happened to be Bruny Island. We took the same route as my Hitchhiking journey on my request. The view was just as inspiring as the last time through.
We did a few walks, had lunch in restaurant that had a great view of the North end of the Island and settled in a caravan park in the main tourist part of the island. The day had been better than we expected. The trails that the three of us went on were nearly vacant of hikers. We weren�t expecting much with Caravan park though. The caretaker of the park surprised us however. He started up a fire for us, gave us a couple of beers ech without charge. While we were sitting around the fire in the dark having a good time he showed up and said �Have you seen the white kangaroos around here? Most of them live close to the caravan Park here. I can show them to you if you like.� This was a surprise Neither Tom Jutta nor I had ever heard of the white kangaroos in the month we had spent in Cygnet. Nevertheless we followed this guy down to the end of park as he told us why Bruny had so many. �There is an older gentlemen who lives down the road who was responsible. About 50 years ago he caught two albino Kangaroos and kept them in his backyard. Whenever they�d have a joey, he�d just pop it over the side of the fence. They�ve just been hanging around since then. The gentlemen is in his nineties now and he still feeds them toast from the back of his veranda, hold on a minute, there�s one now�
Sure enough, standing about ten feet in front of us was small white kangaroo standing out clearly in the moonlight. It was just sort of staring at us for a bit. It made a decision and hopped away while we were still stunned by the sight of it. We took a stroll a bit further to see several more. Many of them were at least partially tame and allowed us to get quite close before running away. It was amazing we recommended the park to the rest of the travelers we ran into. In the morning we did a couple of more walks and drove on to our next destination.
It took us to nights before we were doing what we wanted to again. We spent night after Bruny in a destination about halfway to our next destination. The next day we made it to the park we wanted to. The only problem was that the weather was so bad that that you wouldn�t want to walk out to the mailbox, let alone go on a hike. We spent the day watching children cartoons in a nice warm hostel and praying that the weather would turn around the next day.
Wine glass bay was beautiful but the walks didn�t take me by surprise like Bruny did. We went we saw and moved on to the city of Lancestion. We spent two nights in Launcestion or Launie as the Tasmanians called it. It wasn�t the greatest city but it wasn�t bad. We showed up just in time to catch the premiere of �The Matrix Reloaded�. The day we left, it was still wet and cold. The car had some problems again but we got it started. After a brief pit stop at a gorge outside the city, we went onward to Cradle Mountain and the West coast of Tasmania.
We arrived in the national park late and spent the night in a hostel inside of a caravan park. Cradle mountain is in a part of Tasmania known as the World Heritage area. It is a huge area of untamed wilderness that takes up most of the Western Half of the state. Most parts of this huge expanse of wilderness are almost never visited. Walking into it is like stepping back in time. Australia is a very old isolated continent and many of the flora and fauna date back further than the rest of the world. Tasmania drifted away from the rest of the continent and is even more isolated. It contains many plants and animals that still haven�t been catalogued by the scientific community. The most famous animal that was confined only to Tasmania was the Tasmanian tiger or Thycyline(not sure on spelling) It looked like a dog with a stripes and a pouch. It was theorized that it disappeared on the mainland when the aborigines arrived with the dingo. Unfortunately, it was driven to extinction in Tasmania as well when the English arrived with the gun. It was blamed for sheep killings and had a bounty on it�s skin. So the Tasmanians went out into the hills and killed every last one of them. A similar thing happened with the aborigines of Tasmania. The only difference being that they didn�t bother to blame them for killing sheep. Tasmania and Australia�s history is littered with such massacres. I have a picture of some beautiful tall cliffs on Bruny Island. The beauty was lessened a bit when a local told me about the time when about two hundred aborigines were driven from the top of them. Back on topic, It was raining the day we went to Cradle mountain. Clouds covered it most of the time we were there and we really didn�t see any of it. The ranger advised us not to try the five hour hike to the top in the bad weather by reminding us how long it would take to get medical attention from the top. Glumly, we did an hour walk near the base of it and got in the Car and left for Lake Sinclair
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