My travelling experience continued from Sydney to Tasmania, where I met up with Mateo, Amandine, Anne-Samia, and Southampton’s very own, Pete Rhodes.
I travelled to Tasmania with an open mind; it’s barely mentioned amongst international students, and hadn’t been recommended once by any of the Australians that i’ve met so far. I also knew very little about the Aussie island, apart from the fact that its home to the Tasmanian Devil, and also home to Australian cricket legend, Ricky Ponting.
We all met up in Hobart (the capital of the state) where we picked up our hire car and promptly set off for our first destination, Wine Glass Bay. Although Hobart inherits an interesting import history, there was very little to do in the town. We were surrounded by an incredible landscape during our journey to WGB (and later to the Cradle Mountains), which immediately gave us an idea of the scenery to come. The weather was considerably cooler, and on our main trek to Mount Graham it poured with rain. The sunset at the bay, however, was breath-taking, and definitely worth being rained on earlier in the day! We camped no more than 100m from the beach, and used our trip to WGB as a warm-up ahead of the Cradle Mountains.
After a stopover in Launceston, we continued our trip to the Cradle Mountains. Again on our first day we did a short walk, this time around Dove Lake, which, with hindsight, was set appropriately in the shadow of the Cradle Mountain. We set off early the next morning determined to make it to the summit of the Cradle Mountain. Fortunately the weather was on our side so we had clear views all day. The w
alk was far from easy; in order to reach the summit we had to climb and scramble up and over fallen rocks, which was a lot more challenging than it sounds!
Over 3 hours later, we finally reached the top, where the view was absolutely incredible. We could see for miles. It’s difficult to put the view into words, but the
view alone was enough to make our trek in the Cradle Mountains the highlight of our trip.
I rounded off what had been a fantastic month with a trip back to Melbourne to the Australian Open. I’ve always wanted to go to the AO and the opportunity was too good to miss whilst I was in Aus, so I got tickets as soon as I could. I got a ticket for Round 4 of the tournament, and also the Quarter-Finals. Not knowing who I was going to see until the day of the event, I was lucky enough to the see match bet
ween Kyrgios of Australia and Murray of GB, which brought the stadium to life. We were completely outnumbered when it came to supporting Murray, but it was a fantastic match. Finally, the British had something to cheer about in Aus.
