Sunday 2 May 2010

One door closes, another one opens...

I write this from Sydney, having just said goodbye to my travelling companion for the last year... But I get ahead of myself... How did I get here?

The last post finished with me working on the potato harvest in Tasmania. That continued for another week, with a little gap for the harvest machine to break down and be repaired...

On the downtime caused by the machine breaking we did a loop round the west of Tasmania. We headed overland to the great lakes, then on to the Lake St. Clair national park, west to Nelsons waterfall and then onwards to Strahan. The next day we went north to Cradle Valley National park (very nice). In Cradle Valley the weather got a bit chilly, there was even a bit of snow!

Just after this we noticed that our tyre was deflating, with us miles from civilisation, and our spare tyre being the one that we had had to remove only one week earlier! We decided to call off the rest of our trip and head towards Devonport to sort out our van. We managed to make it with the help of a friendly Australian whose door we knocked on...

Once we had fixed up our van it was time to go back to our last week of work...

After the work was over we gave ourselves another week to tour Tasmania and headed south towards Hobart, stopping off at Mount Fields national park... Then we climbed (or more accurately drove up) Mt. Washington, and visited some waterfalls...

Next we headed to the East coast. We passed a spiky bridge and Swansea then continued north to St Helens. We visited the Bay of fires up here and a lagoon.

Then we headed back inland and returned to Launceton and Devonport. On our last day of touring we headed up the North west coast past Burnie, Wynyard. We visited the Gunns Plains caves and the Stanley "Nut". We also visited the most westerly point on Tasmania!

Then we headed back to Devonport and caught the ferry back to the mainland...

We took an overnight ferry, arriving at 7am, and the original plan was to take two days to drive the 1000km back to Sydney... At the last minute i decided to change the plan and we drove the entire distance in one day!

We spent most of our time in Sydney with Nam packing during the day and meeting up with various people at night... I also got to meet up with an old friend, Allan (more on him later).

Yesterday was Nams last day. The night before I cooked her her last good stake (stakes in Thailand aren't worth eating), and she spend most of the day cooking a huge pile of sushi! Then I took her (and her many, many bags) to the airport, where we had our fond farewell... not too teary, after all, I am going to go over there to see her in 11 days!

In the meantime myself and Allan are going to go on a road trip. I'm going to push his comfort zones. I'm not sure if he is fully prepared for the time ahead... you'll hear all about that in the next post...

1 comment:

Josephine Yang said...

I have to admit this is my second time coming onto your blog from facebook to finish off your story. I have noticed you have changed a bit of the "about me", I like it, and also the content and the topic of this article.