18 Mar 2011
13 Km on Foot
Two pairs of socks. Two pairs of pants. Two shirts. Two jackets. A woolie hat and a hoodie. This is what I’m wearing while tucked inside my sleeping bag. The only incentive I have to slide myself out of this down cocoon and into the bitter cold air of Charlie is that today we can move to a powered site. In six days of road tripping Tasmania, I have become One with the Pull-In-And-Plug-In set. I’d be their mascot if they’d ask me, start hard-selling campervans to every tourist touching down, anything for that orange umbilical that I mocked back in my New Zealand tenting days and that I now can’t seem to stop talking about. It’s a potion, potent and poisonous, my own heroin addiction – bring me that 240 volt cord with its three-pronged receiver, hook me up to that intravenous drip of electrical current, I need it, I want it, I live for its sing-song hum as it flows freely through my refrigerator, my microwave, my overhead lights, and dear god, the one thing I could use most of all this second, my wee baby heater. I exist in a haze as to who I love more these days – my morning cup of coffee or my electrical supply. Thank goodness the first can be served up in Charlie without the second (hello, my next-best-friend Propane).
To thaw ourselves out, we opted to hike up and down and all around Cradle Mountain today. We didn’t hike over it, mostly because I was the voice of reason and said “Are you crazy?” when, after our last hour of near vertical climbing (chains as handrails on open-face rocks always give me pause), Gina thought that another 2.5 hours to summit and return, followed by another 2.5 hours back to the car park, would be just fine, even though it was already 1’o’clock in the afternoon. Instead, we enjoyed our picnic lunch looking down (way down) over Dove Lake and then picked our way around a few other lakes (Twisted and Harmon) under a cloudless sky, making for some spectacular views of the surrounding rocks and bushes. (I was going to type “mountains” there but really, these aren’t exactly mountains, at least not of the type we’re accustomed to, which doesn’t, however, take away from the fact that they are quite lovely in their own right, and if I only wanted to see what I would call mountains, then I wouldn’t be traveling in Tasmania, but here I am and it’s nice.)
Perhaps the highlight of the day, however, goes to the Wombat. Yes, we had a wombat sighting today that I would like to personally dedicate to Shelly of Bellevue. You see, Shelly of Bellevue once traveled Tasmania and longed to see a wombat. Sadly, though, for our Shelly of Bellevue, the only wombat she sighted was flat on the road. So Shelly of Bellevue, I am happy to report that this wombat was alive and well and grazing in the buttongrass. He looked kinda cuddly from where we sat, prompting one of our fellow shuttle riders to disembark at the nearest stop so he could “get a better look at that wombat, mate” … a statement I think you might hear only once in this lifetime.