This morning Kat, one of my very best friends here, got on a plane for home. She only had one final, and it happened to be on the very first day of the exam period, so she's headed back to the States way earlier than most people. But still... it's hitting home that this is all going to end soon! All of us feel like Flood Week only just happened and we haven't been here that long.
But in the meantime, there are a few more adventures at hand! Last week we headed off to Tasmania, which has been high on my list of places I've wanted to visit in Australia. It's one of the very wettest parts of the country, and has the reputation for being cold and grey most of the time. We got some of that, but we sure got lucky with the weather in general. Matt was in northern Tasmania the same time we were in the state, and it never stopped raining the whole time he was there.
But we were in the south of Tasmania and got lucky. I flew into Hobart with Bianca, Ryan, and Katie Friday evening. Nina, Bailey, Tricia, and Jenny flew out at the same time, but were staying in a different hostel than us. Richard, Sheila, Lauren, and Peter were already there when we arrived, and Noah flew out the next morning. So that adds up to thirteen of us in a loosely-associated group - a very appropriate Colgate number, I suppose!
It was dark by the time we arrived, but nobody felt like just sitting around the hostel, so we decided to walk around town. Hobart is dead on Friday nights, except for the meteorologically labeled "Isobar" down by the harbor. Actually, the town is apparently dead every night. We got down to the harbor and there were two tall ships in port, which I immediately bee-lined to. Small ones, but wooden and real square-riggers, which made me very happy to see. Then we had nothing better to do so we had a backwards somersault race in the park. Lauren won. Then we spent a while with nine of us in a fairly small hostel room communally playing either Scrabble (on two different iPhones) or hearts. 
The next morning we headed down to the markets. Hobart is really a beautiful city, and they had some of the best open-air markets I've ever been to. Meanwhile, Noah arrived. Noah is a sailor, and he and I have spent many happy moments during long GIS lectures drawing sailboat sketches for each other (I draw the best catamarans, but he's better at drawing pretty much everything else). The night before, when I detoured to the ships at the wharf, I had noticed signs out saying "come sail with us!" which were not to be denied. Noah and I got aboard the Lady Nelson, a replica of an early nineteenth-century 60-foot brig that was involved in the establishment of Hobart, Launceston, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and ended her career when she was burned in Indonesian waters. She's operated by an all-volunteer crew who were very welcoming and interesting to talk to. We went for a 90-minute sail out into the estuary of the Derwent River. It was chilly and grey but didn't rain while we were out. It was fun to see Hobart from the bay, and to watch a large regatta of Lasers and the like, with a brave windsurfer out in the middle of it. Noah and I hadn't exhausted our nautical fix, so we headed to the Hobart Maritime Museum. It was a great small museum with an abundance of model ships and a very nice man at the desk who seemed incredibly excited to see people our age interested in a museum. We even found the stuffed rat planted for children to find on an underwater suit, and he gave us temporary tattoos as a prize.
We headed back to the hostel, did a bit more walking around town, and then grabbed some dinner. We were sitting in the hostel common room when Lauren, Sheila, and Katie returned from a bike-riding day. Lauren walked in first and said "don't worry... but Katie has crutches." Apparently they biked for a good five minutes or so, hit some gravel, and Katie flipped over the handlebars, cutting her knee to the bone. They proceeded to spend the rest of the day at the emergency room. Fortunately Katie's a trooper, and they got their money back for the bicycle rentals. But as I had mentioned, very little goes on in Hobart after five, so we once again hit up the Scrabble and the hearts and watched a movie with a bunch of other people in the hostel, which had the dual purpose of occupying us and not requiring Katie to walk.
Sunday morning started a more adventurous section of the trip. We all packed up our stuff, and Bianca and I walked about fifteen or twenty minutes to a little family-owned car rental place that was willing to rent to people under 21. I ended up being the driver - my first time driving a rental car, and my first time driving on the left-hand side of the road. Bianca and I quickly realized that Hobart is even worse than Boston in terms of random one-way streets everywhere, so it took a long time to get back to the hostel. But we made it, and she and I and Ryan, Richard, and Peter piled in and headed out to Woolworth's to buy food for our next five meals. By the time we left Woolie's it was pouring rain - perfect conditions to learn to drive on the left. Fortunately Richard and I bought a large dark chocolate bar to split, so I had something to keep me going. I had a tendency to drift to the edge of the road and could not for the life of me remember which side the turn signal was on, but otherwise it wasn't too bad. Later in the trip I let Bianca and Ryan drive for a few minutes each just to try it, and they had the same problems I did, so it must be fairly common.
At any rate, we were headed to Port Arthur, about an hour and a half south of Hobart, on the Tasman Peninsula with the highest sea cliffs in the world. We stayed at the Possum Beach Cottage - and here is a shameless promotion for this place. Leave what you're doing, buy a plane ticket to Hobart, drive down to Port Arthur, and stay at Possum Beach Cottage. Bring a couple good books and your hiking shoes, and a rain jacket, and stay for as long as you can. Completely seriously - I don't think I've ever enjoyed staying somewhere more than this cottage. Perhaps it's because I'm used to dorm life or staying in hostels on trips, but even so, I can't imagine anything better. The house is a three-bedroom cottage that can sleep up to eight, and we paid a flat rate of $100 for the one night we got to stay there, which means we each spent $20 on it - that's cheaper than the hostel in Hobart. We parked in the garage and walked through the garden to get in through the back door, put our stuff down in the laundry room, and walked into a very large kitchen with everything you need for cooking, right down to milk and cooking oil. A living room with leather couches has a large picture window overlooking the bay, which was just a few steps across the little road we'd driven down. The guys stayed in a room with three single beds, and Bianca and I got our own rooms with queen beds. Mine had another huge window overlooking the bay. Enough about the house... but seriously, go stay there!
This was actually Halloween night, and it seemed wrong not to do something, so the Lauren-Sheila-Noah-Katie cottage had a party after the tour. We made a pass at dressing up (I wore Richard's clothes and an eye-patch and was a pirate, Bianca wore Ryan's clothes and was a boy, and Ryan wrapped himself in plastic wrap), but we were all tired and didn't stay long. So we went back, and I enjoyed the best night's sleep I've had since I got to Australia. In the morning we cooked eggs for breakfast, and sadly packed up and left the cottage.
Then we drove to Fortescue Bay in Tasman National Park, down a long and windy dirt road to the middle of beautiful nowhere. Cue a hike that goes near the top of my favorite hikes ever. We packed lunches and hiked the Cape Hauy trail, which is about a four-hour loop out along the sea cliffs, through the woods, across some boardwalks, up and down a ton, and ending on this rocky cape jutting out into the ocean perched on enormously high, straight sandstone cliffs. It's spring in Tasmania, and the whole forest was in bloom. In places the ground was covered with low white flowers in every direction, and in other spots we were surrounded in a forest of tall yellow flowers as far as we could see. The steep bits were hard in places, but the cliffs themselves were well worth the climbs. We ate lunch out on the cape with water on three sides 300m straight - straight - down. We were lucky and the weather was perfect, though it got cloudy by the end of our lunch. But better yet, we saw two echidnas! These indeed are a truly Australian animal - they join the platypus as the only two species in the monotreme family of egg-laying mammals (actually, there might be a couple species of echidna - but still, the family just has platypuses and echidnas). We saw one on the way out, who curled up into a ball when we got near him and didn't move. On the way back we found another echidna who didn't care in the least that we were there. Every once in a while he seemed to curl into a ball, but pretty much he just nosed around in the dirt looking for bugs to eat and wandered past us - just a few feet away - without taking any notice of us. 
After the hike we stopped at very small, family-owned chocolate factory, and then it was time to head back to Hobart. We made ourselves dinner, had another quiet evening, and headed for Wollongong early the next morning. I could very happily have stayed several weeks in Tasmania!
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