Devil the Planning

Next up comes Tasmania. Mel and Damien played kind host to us the evening we returned to Melbourne from the Grampians, and the next evening we hopped onto a last-minute flight for Hobart, Tasmania.

Oddly enough, not a single part of our entire trip – from getting passports and visas and vaccinations to deciding where and when to go – was as big of a pain in the ass as figuring out the Tasmania leg of our voyage. It started off in trying to figure out how we were going to get down there. We wanted to take the Spirit of Tasmania ferry from Melbourne to Devonport, as it is an all-night sailing and would make for a more interesting trip than just flying (plus, we would have sleeping quarters, namely ocean view recliners, and our accommodation for the evening would thus be taken care of). The regular priced tickets for the ferry are quite pricey, but they had a spring sale on which reduced the cost by 40%, placing the tickets into approximately the same price range as a flight, with the added bonus of including our place-of-sleep. Unfortunately the seat sale only applied to a certain number of seats on the boat. Once the sale seats had all been bought out, the other remaining seats could only be purchased at full price. The only sale seats yet unpurchased weren’t available until a sail date of a week and a half later. We decided to investigate how long we wanted to stay in Tasmania, and would call the ferry back to reserve seats when we decided on a return date.

After getting frustrated with the ferry seats, it came time to be frustrated with methods of transportation around Tasmania in general. Our original plan was to focus entirely on the more rural northern parts of the state, as we liked the look and price of the hostels there. Needing to fly in instead of taking the ferry, we now had to include the state capital Hobart into our plans. Hobart is one of the most southerly cities in the state, so we would need to figure out how to get up to the northern port town of Devonport if we wanted to take the ferry back to Melbourne.

We looked into renting a car, but that would have completely blown our budget for the following two weeks and then some. Besides, we still aren’t too terribly accustomed to the whole left-hand-driving thing to want to spend our time white-knuckling a steering wheel on the tiny, winding rural roads of Tasmania. Of course, we immediately thought that we would leave it up to public transport, as we had done in Victoria. After being thoroughly spoiled by the Victoria state public transportation system, we figured that most placed in Australia would have good, expedient, reliable, and reasonably priced train/bus systems. Such is not the case; Tasmania’s busses are nearly all privately owned and operate on strange schedules, incomprehensible routes, and pricey tickets. Plus, we would still need to figure out where we would be sleeping during the evening.

With much hemming and hawing, we took the advice of a YHA hostel travel agent and booked ourselves in for a multi-day bus tour. We wanted a tour that would take us in one direction from Hobart to Devonport. YHA recommended the Under Down Under tour company, and we found a four day tour that would take us to various highlights along Tassie’s east coast. It sounded good and the price, while more than we had intended to spend while in Tasmania, was as reasonable as we could expect. We asked the YHA agent to book it for us. He called back and stated that the first day of the tour was, for some indefinable reason, ‘unavailable’. So we could either do the two day tour or the five day tour. We felt that the two day tour was entirely too short to make it worth our while, and the five day tour was on a loop circuit that would bring us right back to Hobart, and therefore was no good. The YHA agent called the tour company back and managed to dicker them into giving us a three day tour, wherein the first day’s trip would simply be wiped off the agenda. Good enough. The tour would end in Launceston, which is about 100 km south of Devonport. The tour circuit, however, indicated that we would pass through Devonport on our way back to Launceston, so we hoped that we would be able to ask the driver to simply drop us off in Devonport, and therefore avoid the hassle and expense of yet another bus ticket.

All that rot being settled, we needed to book our passage from Devonport back to Melbourne. A quick call to the ferry company and we secured our sale seats on the first available date. Tasmania was rapidly becoming the most expensive leg of our trip, so we decided to stay just the 10 days we needed to in order to see what we wanted instead of the two-plus weeks we had originally intended on spending there. We would need to bum around Launceston or Devonport for four additional days between the end of our bus tour and the departure of our ferry, but we figure we can keep ourselves amused for that length of time.

It took us about four or straight hours of calling, investigating, and bartering to get all this figured out. Thanks to our new friends’ kindness of letting us stay at their house and use their telephone and internet, it actually got done. Otherwise, I doubt we would have been able to figure out Tasmania at all. But we have our flight, we have our tour and transportation, we have places to stay, and we have our boat ride back to Melbourne (which seems to have become our launching pad for Australian adventuring). It all got done in the end.