Finally I give up and start to hike over to the other backpackers down the road. On the way I see a sign pointing to Strahan and simultaineously hear a car coming up behind me. On impulse I stick out my thumb and it stops! Can it be so easy to hitch around here?

Unfortunately I learn the hard way that this was a complete fluke. The ride I get here is only a short one to the crossroad leading to Strahan and from there I am very stuck. Traffic is not heavy and no one is offering rides. I realize that I'm going to need to hitch back to Queenstown but before I cross the road I give myself a time limit of ten more minutes. Well, fate is definitely playing with me here in Tasmania when I hitch for rides, as I will continue to see, because exactly at the deadline a woman gives me a ride to Strahan. Plus she takes me directly to the YHA where I am very fortunate to get the very last bed there. In fact, as I will later learn, it was almost certainly the very last bed in town as it is extra-ordinarily difficult to get a bed in Strahan this time of year. I spoke to scores of people who were turned away and it seemed like the only people staying there had booked months in advance.

I head into town and watch a cheesy, but fun play at the Visitor's Center. It is based on an historical event where a group of convicts on Sarah's Island steal a leaky boat and somehow manage to sail it all the way to South America. It's quite an amazing story but they play it for laughs, sometime in too juvenile a way. I learn the next day that you're actually supposed to buy tickets for this play, but it is only good to see if you don't.

After dinner at the Fish Cafe, really the only halfway decent place to eat in this rather disappointing town, I catch a ride out to Ocean Beach to see the mutton birds come in for the night. Ocean Beach, the longest in Tasmania, is an amazingly beautiful place. With plenty of time before the birds are due in, I take a long walk down this broad, endless beach, and then head inland a bit along sandy paths winding through flower decorated bush. Everything is stunningly beautiful and practically deserted.

Not quite deserted enough though! A yahoo on a noisy motorbike races up and down the beach, followed by a jeep. He even climbs up the tall dunes directly under the mutton bird's nests! I later tell a ranger about this but he can only look properly shocked. You see Tassie is quite the antithesis of Singapore. Signs only recommend that you don't do things, which means that anything goes. People drive, camp, sleep, and toss trash on the beach and nothing is done about it. It is only the very low population density that prevents the ignorance of the locals from completely spoiling the place.

Mutton birds (shearwaters) are amazing creatures that fly all the way from the Aleutian Islands to nest down here in the far south. They spend the bulk of their lives on the wing over the ocean. During the breeding season they return to their nests at night, swarming in after dusk and burrowing down into their little holes. Every night except this night that is! For the first time in the memory of the local experts, only a few birds come back this night. I'm ot disappointed though as I got a good look at them (and will later see them elsewhere) and enjoyed my evening at Ocean Beach.

What a long and surprising day this was!