A Brief Travel Update

We left Tassie yesterday. I was ready to go though. We had a wonderful time exploring the island. That's what you do there, not much of an option is given to visitors. We spent time in the bush looking for local wildlife, watching birds, trying to snap pictures of penguins, and enjoying time with the locals.

Our last morning I woke up early due to thirst, too many glasses of wine and bowls of curry will do that to you I guess. Anne had all of the locals over the night previous, she "Supplied the venue, and visitors provided the menu", as she put it. Upwards of twenty people arrived, many of them had hosted travelers like us. Most of them used another website called HelpX, which is much more popular than workaway over here. Since hearing that I think we are going to be switching to using that now.

The next host we are headed to is located in Marlo but we took a night to stay in Melbourne. We rented a room for 80 dollars in a hostel above a pub in Chinatown and spent yesterday wandering about the city. It is just that, a city, it of course has it's landmarks, but all in all we were ready to hop on the train this morning. A bit of an adventure getting there though, the tram would have cost us upwards of 30 dollars each because you need to buy a pass for at least a week so we decided to hoof it.

I threw Becca's duffle bag on my back and my backpack on my front and trudged in the rain for 30 minutes with about 60 pounds weighing down on my knees, shoulders, feet, of course it was uphill both ways. We arrived at the train station an hour early and met our host there. He has just come back from a vacation in Bali. He actually was there with a German couple he had hosted for three months. We are going to be working for 4 hours a day, finishing at 11:00 or so. That will be a relief since we had been working 6 - 8 hours with Anne.

We will miss our first stop no doubt. I wrote in the guestbook that it is easy to get lost in the homey mysteriousness of Tasmania, and we certainly had. Unlucky for us we were found by our second host, and I wished that whoever the next person was that read my entry would remain lost, never to be found again.