the one younger guy on the bus was bob, from china. bob, of course, is his english name. someone asked him to say his chinese name and it reminded me of when darryl hannah tells tom hanks her name in that mermaid movie. impossible for any of us to make those sounds.
along the way the road was covered in dead wallabies. i haven't been sad about roadkill in a long time. chickens, who cares. but these were like tiny kangaroos. well, not tiny, like hitting dogs with really long tails. the speed limit at nite is half that of the daytime because all of the animals are on the move but that doesn't really help, especially with the road trains they have here. the one rule they have is that if you hit a wallaby you have to stop and check its pouch to see if there's a joey inside, and bring it to a vet.
i didn't see any dead tasmanian devils, they're getting pretty scarce. there's a cancer that's spreading here and there is no cure or preventative. the government is collecting healthy devils and making parks for them to breed, hoping that the cancer will wipe out the rest and then they can repopulate the island. they believe the wild devils will be extinct in 2-3 years.
and speaking of extinction, i asked about invasion day and the mostly white scene at the protest. there are no native tasmanians alive anywhere, so anyone i thought might be aboriginal was not from here. when the english were settling they were having trouble with the aboriginals so they formed a giant line of men, the 'black line', that spent weeks walking the island killing the natives. some got away to a smaller island but eventually they all died out.
we arrived at the trail head to wineglass bay lookout and beach, and had a choice. the hike to the lookout is 40 minutes uphill, the hike to the beach is an hour and a half. the italians are old and could only tour in the van so they are going to be driven around to accessible lookouts while the rest of us hike. 2 australian women only wanted to go to the lookout, and bob wanted to go to the beach. i couldn't decide. the four of us started off together and the trail was beautiful, all carved rock between 2 'mountain' peaks. one of the women had chronic fatigue so bob and i took off and made a plan to meet them at the lookout.
we hiked up for about half an hour until the trail started sloping downwards. i had decided to only go to the lookout then back to the van with the rest to see more overlooks in the park, i had gone running the day before and my legs were pretty sore. but bob and i walked and walked and there was no lookout and pretty soon i stopped and could hear ocean. i saw an old lady making her way down the rocks slowly and figured that she couldn't be going all the way to the beach so bob and i kept going.
part of the bush around us had wildfire damage and the smell was incredible, burnt eucalyptus, very dreamy.
but pretty soon it was apparent that we missed the lookout. the sound of the waves was loud and we were far too low for any sort of viewing vantage point. guess i'm going to the beach.
wineglass beach was definitely beautiful. miles of white sand and clear blue water. the wind was up and there was a gnarly beach break, probably close to 10 feet, which gave me molokai flashbacks. we were told to bring our 'swimmers' but of the 8 people that were on the beach no one dared try to go out. and the water was freezing cold.
i've seen alot of beaches on this trip, many of them called the most beautiful, but so far nothing has been prettier than hanalei. wineglass wasn't even close, although it was definitely nice. it wasn't even shaped like a wineglass, the closest anyone could figure about the name was that it used to be a big area for whaling so the water was always reddish.
bob and i hiked the beach, climbed rocks, took pictures. we did find the lookout on the way back and it was pretty obvious, not sure how we missed it. especially since there were dozens of people there and we could hear them talking from a half mile away.
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| finally found the lookout |
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| bob and a wallaby |
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