The Island

Our next flight was again with Virgin Blue, as we thought it would be a good idea to not fly with one airline continuously, back in October when we booked the tickets. As expected, our flight was delayed, but only by half an hour, so that wasn’t too bad. The flight itself was fine and even changing planes in Melbourne didn’t cause any problems. We arrived at Launceston Airport right on schedule and while we were getting ready to leave the plane, something happened, or rather, didn’t happen. The doors didn’t open. Nobody in the cabin knew what was going on and the pilots was probably busy doing ‘things’, because we didn’t hear anything from the cockpit. At least the air conditioning kept running. Forty minutes later the doors suddenly opened and we were on our way, happy to breath some fresh Tasmanian air.

It took us about 4 minutes to sort out the paperwork for our rental car at the Avis desk and we were happy to learn that we were going to drive a Toyota Rav4! As we walked over the parking lot, we both realized that we had no clue as to what a Rav4 would look like, but luckily there were only 6 black cars on the Avis lot. We matched the license plates and before long we drove away on the right side of the road, which is of course the left side because Australia used to belong to the United Kingdom. The drive to the hotel took no time at all and before long we were enjoying a nice dinner at the hotel’s restaurant.

The next morning we left Launceston early and set course to Bicheno. We travelled over some cool dust roads and made some small nature walks (some of them through rainforest) during the day. We had a light lunch at St. Helen and arrived at the Best Western in Bicheno at five in the afternoon. The weather deteriorated over the evening and when we stepped outside the following morning, it rained. After we obtained some ponchos from the local supermarket, we walked up the Whalers Lookout in Bicheno for some magnificent views over the ocean. Next up was the Bicheno blowhole and after that we drove to Freycinet National Park, to see the world famous Wineglass Bay with our own eyes. As we pulled into the parking lot, we had some difficulties avoiding all the (soaked, because it was still raining) wallabies, who seemingly couldn’t care less about passing cars and tourists taking photos of them.

We parked the car and made our way to the lookout point for Wineglass Bay. Despite the weather, the views from the lookout were gorgeous and made the hour-long uphill trip really worth the effort. On the way back we took a scenic route and had a relaxing drive back to Bicheno.

Back at Bicheno, we realized it was only 2pm, so we decided to visit the East Coast Natureworld. This animal sanctuary just north of Bicheno is, as we discovered, well worth a visit. The park has a large variety of Australian animals, amongst whom the famous Tasmanian Devil. The Tasmanian Devil is an endangered species and this park does its part in protecting and rehabilitating animals that are hurt due to human activity. We visited some devils, we were almost run over by a large group of kangaroos when we walked towards the snake exhibit, we saw some wombats and Yvo was attacked cuddled by birds in the aviary (we have a video of this, for those of you interested). While we waited for the animal feeding to start, we noticed two devil joeys that were drinking their mother’s milk. During the animal feeding, we had the opportunity to pet a devil’s back and a wombat’s belly. All in all we really had an excellent day.