Round The World and other travels

A frequent flyer's collection of trip diaries

This is: Tasmanian Devils (2010)

Background

Regular readers may have noticed a pattern emerging over the last few years: towards the end of May, I tend to take part in a joint-venture trip with my San Diego-based friend Bruce. Furthermore, it has almost become a tradition that during each of these trips, outline plans are put in place for the next one. So during our South America trip in May 2009, we agreed to have a look at doing something in the South Pacific one year on, at the very least involving Tahiti. We both worked on the idea over the summer and we both met with an equal degree of success: specifically, none at all. A quick conference resulted in a change of plan and a switch of destination in favour of Australia.

I had visited Australia on two separate occasions. The first was in 1993 and it was quite a comprehensive affair, involving visits to Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef, Alice Springs, Ayers Rock and Perth. The second, in 2004, was of course part of the RTW trip that gave rise to this website. During planning of a possible fourth RTW trip, I had then looked closely at a number of further Australian options, including a visit to the island state of Tasmania. Imagine my surprise then, when during our discussions of a possible 2010 visit down under, Bruce casually mentioned that he'd had a notion for years of doing Tasmania! It looked as though it was simply meant to be.

Detailed investigations were carried out, arrangements were made and the whole intricate picture rapidly started to come into sharp focus. While it's always nice to put complex plans in place and see them come to fruition, it's also sometimes necessary to stay a little detached from one's brainchild and remain as flexible as possible. Proof of this was provided when, with the journey already underway, a misbehaving Icelandic volcano threatened to undermine all the planning and throw the trip into a state of chaos, perhaps ruining it altogether. However with a bit of impromptu surgery on the arrangements, I was able to put my plans beyond the reach of the Nordic threat, allowing myself to get just about as far away from its malign influence as it was possible to be.