Okay I'm going to try and blast through the last two months .... k sooooo from St. Helens we then headed to The Garden's which is where the famous Bay of Fires is. It is apparently the 2nd most beautiful beach in the world ... how they determine what the most beautiful beaches are in the world I don't know .... but in all honesty I much preferred Wineglass Bay in Freycinet National Park. Anyway, so we drove over to The Gardens and Bay of Fires where we planned to hike the Bay and camp on the beach. We had a bit of a later start so we only hiked a couple hours and then found this amazing spot to camp, which we later found out wasn't as great as we had thought. It was right at this one part of the beach where a little lagoon/stream thing emptied out into the ocean and there was a tree that was covering this really flat bit of ground. It really looked like it had been put there on purpose. We set up camp and then plopped down and started into some lunch. Partway through lunch I felt something on my bum and I thought oh maybe it's just a stick poking into me and so I just dusted off my bum and then sat back down only then I felt this really sharp pain and definitely felt like something was biting me! .... and sure enough I had a few really really painful ant bites! Aaaaagh, so painful. It definitely put a damper on my day :(. It even continued to hurt for another few hours, and then became exceedingly ichy for several days.
Aaaanyway, my Dad and I hiked along the long long beach and admired the beautiful scenery, turquois water, and the funny scamper of numerous Oyster Catchers (birds). It was quite windy, so at night it got very cold and we packed it in pretty early after having some of the famous O'Donnell Ihara Gloop (basically a mixture of various pasta packages/rice packages, tuna, and vegetables). I thankfully had my iPod which has a few movies on it, so my dad and I watched Monsters Inc. in our tent before we went to sleep. haha. Soooo good.
The next day we hiked out of Bay of Fires and drove tio Bridpoint where there are supposed to be some amazing wildflowers, espescially known for wild orchids .... we didn't see any .... haha so we then drove on towards Launceston and stopped along the way to see the St. Columba falls which were quite beautiful. It was surrounded by this amazing rainforest, which the biggest Ferntrees I've ever seen! We also stopped at this random farmhouse type place that the Lonely Planet had mentioned and got their famous milkshakes ... but we weren't impressed.
Launceston was alright, not a whole lot going on, as far as we could tell. We just relaxed a little bit then headed to Burger Got Soul for some dinner, we got really delicious burgers and then attempted to walk to the Cataract Gorge ... only my Dad took us in the wrong direction so we ended up just walking back to the hotel and watching part of Sherlock Holmes and Law-Abiding Citizen.
The next day we went to the Cataract Gorge and took a walk around, it was quite pretty and seemed like it was a good spot for swimming .... if it was warm. We even saw a young guy in his swimming trunks and holding a towel. It was pretty cold,definitely didn't seem warm enough for swimming.
After the Gorge we headed to the famous Cradle Mountain! It was a longish drive but I slept for most of it I think and so we arrived in Cradle Mountian National Park and decided (I was a little hesitant) to hike to the Scott Kilvert Hut, we were told it would take us about 6 hours ... it took us 3 haha. We were even warned that it had snowed quite a bit in the last few days But it was quite a beautiful hike. Unfortunately it was a bit rainy and VERY foggy/misty so we couldn't get a great view of the Cradle Mountain .. and unfortunately my camera ran out of battery and I foolishly forgot the charger in Melbourne, so I didn't even get any pictures of it! :( I promise we did infact go there even if there is no photographic proof.
Some of the trail on the way to the hut was completely overrun by water, we would have to climb up on the sides of the trail and even then were still getting a bit wet. I was very thankful I had Gortex walking shoes on! The hut was really great. When we arrived there were already two groups there cooking dinner. One group was a group of 4 young guys in there early twenties from around the area and the other group was a group of 7 people that had all travelled together, and man had they brought quite the load. They had brough two bags of Port, some wine, chicken and potatoes, aaaaaaand most importantly they brough two huge bags of fire beads!!! So they made the hut nice and toasty.
The following morning we hiked back to the car and started our long journey back to Hobart. We stopped in Strahan on the way and got some lunch and then stopped in Mt Field National Park and tried to spot some platypus ... no luck, and then we had dinner at a Vietnamese place in Salamanca Square in Hobart, did some laundry at the hotel and packed for our early morning flight.
On the morning of Monday October 11th we flew back to Melbourne and had our last hours together in the airport. We had breakfast in the airport and then we parted ways, my dad staying at the airport waiting for his flight to California to visit my Grandma and me heading to Melbourne to start my solo journey.
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