Australia Entry #12 - October 31st, 2024 - November 5th, 2024

Hiking in Tasmania

It took a while for me to get down to writing this post and part of it was me being inconsistent with writing my blog, but another part of me wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to say about the trip. I think the pictures speak for themselves to show that I really did enjoy my time. This trip to Tasmania was my first day off from work that I took off since moving out to Australia, and I am looking forward to doing more trips like this, but I do think it was partially a good trip because of the people and planning that took part it in beyond me. The more and more time I spend in Australia, the more I get complacent and back into my normal routine, finding myself falling back to using my computer and phone more than I want to and staying at home like I tended to do in my past. It makes me more thankful that when I did move I spent the extra effort to find a group of locals that were into hiking, as without it I don’t know if I would be able to do as many things as I have as I enjoyed so far in Australia.

There’s a real beauty to being a passenger princess when it comes to trips and not having to do much planning, but just reaping from the benefits of it. I think as far back as I could remember, I have always been the one in my family to overplan trips to try to get them across the finish line. My mom had always had an idea of seeing the Grand Canyon, but if it wasn’t for a lot of the things I looked into, I don’t know if we would have done it back in March-April 2023. This trip to Tasmania, however, was the first time in a very long time that I was able to take the reigns off and really entrust a more expensive trip completely to others. Would I have done some things differently, sure. Could I have saved some additional money and found extra activities that I would have likely to do, most likely. But I’m very happy and content with the trip that occurred and I would without a doubt do it again the same way.

The trip didn’t start in the greatest way, though. I left work pretty close to 5 PM in order to take an Uber over to the airport. I don’t think I’ll ever really get comfortable with getting to an airport anything other than absurdly early. To add to the extra waiting, the flight that was suppose to leave at 7 was delayed for over an hour and a half. On the other side, once we landed we were cutting it very close to closing time for many of the stores near us and we realized that there weren’t many places to get food once we started the drive over to our cabin near Cradle Mountain, so after we landed Arun quickly went to get our rental car and we rushed to get to Woolworths and had to pick out some food in under 10 minutes before the store closed.

After, we drove back to the airport to pick up Anne who was on the last flight in and we started driving slightly past midnight. We ended up arriving at our cabin somewhere around 2-3 AM. Afterwards, though, the trip was a lot smoother. On one of the days I decided to split off from the rest of the group to do some additional hiking as I wanted to see as many routes as possible in the area and the group was planning to do a route that I ended up doing already the previous day as an addition beyond what we did together. That day was ended up being really windy and while I wasn’t comfortable getting on some of the peaks on my route, I was still happy doing the detours and pushing through my initial fears. I think I still get into my head around my skill level and heights whether or not something is truly as safe as it feels. Looking back, I probably exaggerated how I felt, but I don’t regret not pushing myself through the wind I experienced either.

On the day of the summit, the weather wasn’t the greatest, and we ended up walking through a bunch of fog and rain for the first half of the day. Going up to the summit felt more dangerous and precarious than it probably was with the addition of fog and not being able to fully get a scope of what you were doing. However, on the way back, undoing our steps, as the fog lifted, the track felt a lot more manageble. It’s weird how so much throughout this trip weather dictated how I felt when doing the trails and how a slight shift in wind speed or fog completely altered the gut feeling of safety in me. I would understand it impacting my enjoyment and the views, but I didn’t realize how much it plays against you when you find yourself alone and staring into fog both ahead and behind you.

I think I’ll let the pictures speak for the rest of the trip. If anything, a month after this trip, most of what I’m feeling is a pain of realization of how limiting it is to not be able to rent my own car and take these trips myself. I’ll have a pretty busy start to the next year with my mom coming by in early February, and then me taking a weekend to Sydney to see friends, possibly another trip to Singapore, and finally a trip back to the States for Epic’s XGM conference all before May. That being said, I do think I’m just going to find a weekend that’s extended due to a holiday and commit to doing the Three Capes in 2025. No point in not doing so. There’s also some trips that the rest of the hiking group is planning as well that I’m keen on joining in on.