Tasmanian Devils (and chocolate...and convicts)

So, I have spent the morning trying to work and realizing, hey, wait a second, I am not actually getting anything done towards this exegesis paper that is going to be due in two more days. Now there is only a half hour before we are going to leave for another one of our lovely excursions, so I figured I might as well give in and at least attempt to catch up my blog again. This past weekend was our wondrous trip to Tasmania. I was somewhat surprised by the amazing natural beauty of this little island, it is like a cross between Western NY, only with higher hills and mountains, and the Caribbean with wide, shallow bays fully of crystal clear turquoise water. So, in answer to my assigned journal questiony thing, I think that Tasmania has much more natural beauty than the mainland, or, as they like to refer to it, the North Island. We spent our first afternoon there in Freycinet National Park, hiking around and visiting Wineglass Bay, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I have not seen enough of the places on this planet to be able to make an accurate evaluation as far as that is concerned, but I was not disappointed. There was a long, white beach with the funniest sand you have ever seen, almost like tiny pebbles, but hardly small enough even to be called grains of sand, and they squeaked when you walked on them. The beach was all in a long arc, backed by a steep dune all covered with green vegetation. On each side of the beach were big tall mountains, so tall that you could see little wispy puffs of cloud drifting by far below the peak. They were covered with deep green trees all laid our like a carpet around their flanks. Out towards the ocean, the bay narrowed so that only a little neck of water could get through, which is probably where it got its name. It was a long, steep hike down to the beach, but I think it was definitely worth it to be able to walk on that beautiful sand, look at the shells, and laugh at Matt as he tried to swim in the icy water, fresh off the Antarctic icebergs, which is the next closest land mass off the shores of Tassie. So that was a really fun day, in spite of the fact that we had to wake up at 5 in the morning in order to catch our plane.

Oh! That was the other funny thing. We all had to wake up ultra-early that day in order to be on time for our plane, and then as we all stumbled out of the house in our groggy, half-conscious state, we realized that only one of the taxis we ordered had come. So we all stood around in the parking lot, watching the sun come up and the sky redden, much like Dr. King’s face as he grew more and more perturbed at this unprofessional behavior from the taxi company. Then, we all breathed a sigh of relief as we at last saw the second taxi speeding down towards Kingsley, only to turn that sigh into a gasp of disbelief as the driver sped right past the college, missing us entirely. We waited some more while the one driver we did have radioed the tardy driver, I imagine with a message something along the lines of, “Hey moron, you missed your stop!” and we waited a few more minutes as he came speeding back, then waited a bit longer as he overshot the entrance to the parking lot just enough to need to back up in the middle of the street before he finally pulled in and we all rolled out. It all turned out fine, we still got to our plane on time anyway, but gosh it was awfully funny in the delirium that I was in at the time. Anywho.

The second day in Tassie was fun too. We stayed in Hobart and that morning just happened to be the one when they had their Christmas Parade! It was so much fun, I haven’t seen a parade in forever and I enjoy them so much. They had a bunch of different floats trying to show the multi-cultural nature of Tassie and so there was great Japanese drummers and Greek music and a whole float full of Africans (though I must say, that was definitely more Africans than I’ve seen in the rest of my time in Australia put together) and like three different troops of bagpipers. The weirdest things were the float carrying the giant gold statue of Buddha, sitting in his locust flower and shaded by a big umbrella, and also to see Santa Claus come rolling by in his sleigh and reindeer over a snow covered roof, all things which they definitely do not have in Australia, especially at Christmas time. Also in Hobart they have this big market that you can go to that has the coolest stuff which is where I spent the afternoon. I had been saving up my food money for the last few weeks and so I got to do a good bit of actual shopping that morning, rather than just browsing longingly. The other thing about Tassie is that the whole place has much more of a small town feel, so I found the people to be really exceptionally friendly there, even more so than most other Australians. A story to illustrate…

I had shopped all morning and it was getting to be like 2:00 and I still hadn’t eaten the peanut butter and nutella sandwich that I had brought for my lunch, so I picked the courtyard of a quiet café that was just closing and sat down. The only other people who were still there were these three older guys who, I noted from their conversation were all in a band together and had just finished playing the coffeehouse. So, as I sat there quietly eating my sandwich, one of them came over to say hi and we got to talking and he was asking me (my accent giving me away as an obvious American) why I was over here and what kind of studying I was doing and he stops suddenly and says, “How old are you?” and I think for a second before remembering, “20.” He starts digging in his pocket and pulls out this antique coin and gives it to me and says, “Here, I like the way you talk to me, you’re not afraid. You look me straight in the eye” and we continue talking. It was a crazy coincidence that the other guy in the band’s family all lives in Houston too, and not just in the same city, but like the office where his brother works is like two blocks away from my house. He is an ex-pat American who’s lived in Australia for the last few years. He really seemed like he just couldn’t stand living in America any more, the noise and the pollution and the traffic and the consumeristic way of life all just finally drove him out. I can identify with that to some degree, but I also feel like it’s better to stay with a place and work to make changes than just give up on it. But anyway it was a really cool conversation.

The next day in Tassie was quite silly, we staying in Hobart, but it was Sunday and basically everything was closed down. So basically Thryn and I read all day, which was fairly productive, but not much fun. Then that night we went to a service at this church that Thryn found. It was pretty strange, fairly small (actually really small, maybe only like 40 people) but still trying to follow this mega-church Hillsong kind of model. And rather charismatic, but not so much on the scriptural foundation. But hey, at least we can still all get together and having exciting and emotionally charged experiences of God. The end was also rather interesting, people getting slain in the Spirit all over the place, they were dropping like flies! I don’t know, I’m not really in town long enough to have an impact on any of this negative or potentially negative stuff, I thought about talking to somebody after the service but I was too upset to be able to articulate myself well. So I just ended up leaving. Bleh.

Our last day there started off with a tour of the Cadbury Factory…yum. Just like visiting Willy Wonka, only more purple. It was really funny because we had this tour guide with this razor sharp wit and she kept the tour pretty interesting and fun and also managed to make fun of Ben King without getting in trouble for it. The tour itself was also pretty cool, but I mean c’mon, it’s chocolate, what’s not to get excited about???

The rest of the day we spent touring around Port Arthur, which was kind of dismal. It is a sobering thing to be in a place of so much heartache, a place where so much pain was endured and so many lives were played out in listless despair. I went into the old penitentiary building and looked out the windows, trying to imagine what it would do to me to have to spend years looking at the world from behind bars. I don’t think I even came close to the sentiment, but the place made my stomach turn. Speaking of which, it’s supposed to be majorly haunted, especially the old parsonage. Our tour guide spoke about that place with so much conviction and as much matter of fact common sense as if she was simply warning us about loose floorboards. Don’t go in by yourself, she said, and she especially warned us girls not to go in, even together. Send a guy in first, she told us. I don’t know what exactly to think about such things, but I have heard enough stories to heed such advice when it is given. Although interestingly we had just been up to said parsonage before the tour, and not knowing anything about it, we experienced nothing out of the ordinary. But, regardless of any ghosts stories, I think it really does something to the feel of a place when so many people live such unhappy lives there. I was not sorry to leave Port Arthur behind. It has a pretty and historic veneer, like many other old sites, but there is something rotten at the core, methinks.

So, that was our trip to Tasmania. Sorry this was such a long post, but it was a four day trip. Fairly succinct for me, actually.