Life before lockdown
Since the last blog post I wrote we seem to have escaped from one disaster and entered an even bigger one! Whilst before we were locked inside due to thick bushfire smoke, we now have clearer air than ever but the slight inconvenience of a massive pandemic..
I had a short but lovely trip back to England in February, mainly to interview for a place on the Internal Medicine Training programme. It had been a tough decision, as we both love our life together out in Australia and have had such fantastic experiences and adventures here. I think both of us would love to stay a bit longer, however with my formal training on hold whilst here and a huge difficulty in transferring said training between the countries if I were to start training here, we essentially needed to make a decision sooner rather than later.
It was brilliant to see family and friends again after so long, although certainly took a little adjusting to the cold temperatures and busy roads again having not driven on anything bigger than a largely empty dual carriageway in 30+ degree heat for 2 years!
I later found out I was successful in my application and got my first-choice job so will be spending the next 3 years in Winchester and Southampton from August! This certainly made the whole ‘moving home’ plan seem more real. Although I am fairly certain our reaction for the first few weeks/months of arriving home will be ‘what have we done?!?’ I know for me, the value of having the support of family and friends close-by going forward will hopefully outweigh the bad weather, overpopulation, and extortionate house prices!
On my arrival back to Australia, the virus was still only in its early stages and we certainly hadn’t predicted at that point the imminent deterioration in circumstances across the world; so little so that we booked everything for a trip of a lifetime for our final 2 months here – a month travelling around New Zealand and a month driving from Darwin to Perth. As you can imagine, that dream has since all been taken away rather rapidly.
Image: Celebrating my birthday with a dip in the Bogey Hole!
In early March, we welcomed Tom’s family back to Australia for another visit! The main wildlife left on the list to see after the last visit was a wombat, a platypus, a Tasmanian devil, and quolls..and so the quest began…
As I was working for their first week here, I stayed home whilst they went on an adventure up to the Bunya Mountains in Queensland. By the sounds of things, they brought the rain with them from England and weren’t blessed with the best weather. However, they enjoyed a relaxing few days away from civilization, followed by a few days at Rainbow Beach featuring a day 4WDing on Fraser Island!
We celebrated Tom’s birthday when they got back to Newcastle and were due to go to the Grand Prix in Melbourne, but unfortunately that was the start of the closure of mass gatherings and so it was understandably cancelled. However, these were the days before social distancing was even in our vocabulary, so we got our flights to Melbourne anyway, spending the day exploring the city and botanical gardens! It was only a brief visit as we had a morning flight to Hobart the following morning…
We rented 2 campervans for the trip and headed straight out of Hobart up to the Friendly Beaches in Freycinet National Park for our first night. The night sky was one of the clearest I’ve ever seen so we spent the evening stargazing on the beach and tried our hand at some long exposure star shots! We also had our first encounter with a wombat (which we almost missed in the pitch black – I only noticed it because I was wondering why something I thought was a boulder was grunting!)
Our route the next day took us up the East Coast further, via Douglas Apsley National Park where we hiked to a very refreshing (read freezing!) waterhole for a dip! We spent the night up in the beautiful Bay of Fires, in another beach-side campsite. The sound of the waves crashing on the beach next to the campervan all night was certainly something special!
Image: Apsley River Waterhole
Images: Bay of Fires
We had a long drive the next day to Cradle Mountain National Park, a place I had missed on my first visit and had been dreaming of visiting since! After covering the very wind-y Elephant Pass and across to Cataract Gorge in Launceston to stop for a stretch of the legs, we eventually reached Cradle Mountain campsite before dark. It was certainly the most equipped campsite we’d had so far – our first shower of the trip was certainly welcomed!
After dark, we piled into one van to drive into the park for a wildlife watch, spotting multiple wombats, possums, wallabies and pademelons!
The next day was forecast for rain from late morning so we got up early and Ellie and I caught the first shuttle bus into the park. The hike to the summit was tempting but the forecast suggested that wasn’t the safest choice, so Ellie and I decided to hike to Marion’s Lookout, one of the stops en route to the summit. We’d been advised against the steep rock scramble route up by the slightly over-cautious park rangers, due to the risk of slippery conditions. Instead we took a beautiful longer route up via Wombat Pools and Crater Lake. The place was breathtaking. Jagged peaks, and mirrored glacial lakes, it was everything I had hoped for! We were thankful for the early start as it felt like we had the Park to ourselves and didn’t see a soul for the route up ….until we arrived at Marion’s Lookout and were surprised to see Tom and Gill already there! Having arrived on the next shuttle bus, they had braved the short steep climb (which apparently was no way near as treacherous as we’d been warned) and beat us to it! We were all suitably red-faced and in need of a chocolate break!
I could have stayed in Cradle Mountain all week but there was so much of beautiful Tasmania left to see so we packed up to start the drive up to Stanley on the North West coast. After an hour or so standing on the ‘penguin viewing platform’ at dusk, we finally caught a glimmer of white coming in from the sea – our first fairy penguin sighting! The extra special moment was hearing cheeping noises behind us, turning, and finding two hungry little baby penguins stood at the entrance of their burrows, waiting for their mum to come back with some food!
We spent Gill’s birthday driving around the Tarkine wilderness in the North West. On our first stop at Bluff lighthouse, I managed to get a leech bite on my ankle but unfortunately didn’t notice until about an hour or two later when it was the size of a slug and had injected copious amounts of anticoagulant into me! Ellie saved the day by being the only one of us composed enough to safely take it off! But the bite mark then didn’t stop bleeding for most of the rest of the day…!
That night was the long-awaited platypus sighting, just outside Burnie. It didn’t seem like the most promising spot being very close to an industrial area, and although there were plenty of pademelons about I wasn’t hopeful about seeing a platypus and regrettably retired early to the van. Not long afterwards, Tom snr saw an unmistakable outline through a moonlit reflection on the water, passing under the bridge!
Another long drive the next day brought us over the Central Plateau conservation area and down to Mount Field National Park, not far from Hobart. We stayed in the overflow campsite there, and were surrounded by hundreds of pademelons, lots of very tame and enormous possums and even saw glow-worms on an evening stroll down to Russell Falls!
It was from here that things started to get slightly more stressful….
Whilst we were away, not only had Australia closed its borders, but so had some states, including Tasmania… so thus started a saga of flights repeatedly being cancelled by the airline, and rebooked, and cancelled again, and rebooked, and cancelled again…you get the idea. This of itself was merely a slight inconvenience if it wasn’t for the fact that not only had these cancellations meant Tom’s family missed their flight back to London with Etihad, Etihad (and most other airlines) had now grounded all international flights!
We extended our campervan hire and camped out near Port Arthur in Eaglehawk Neck peninsula in the South East, only an hour or so from the airport if we needed to make a mad dash for it at any point! It was certainly a beautiful place to be stranded and managed to make the most of it with some hikes and a break-in to the now closed Port Arthur Historic site!
After the third or fourth cancellation we decided it best to just go to the airport and wait for them to put us on a flight. It turned out that of the few flights that had been flying, only 50% of the passengers had shown up, so we ended up with a spot on the first one out. If only we’d known that sooner we wouldn’t have been in the difficult position of trying to get Tom’s family repatriated along with thousands of other tourists!
Alas, they were in luck as a relative works for BA, so after multiple international phone calls, she managed to get them safely on a flight home much sooner than many other people!
Despite the mildly stressful end, it was a fantastic trip that we were lucky to even do, as had it been a week later, Tom’s family would have never even made it into Australia!
It was back to work for the both of us – the Emergency Department has been eerily quiet as there has not been the influx of COVID19 patients in Australia we were anticipating and many fewer people are attending unnecessarily (and more worryingly people who need to attend but aren’t…)
Tom and I are now just finishing up at work having already handed in our notices prior to knowing the world was about to turn apocalyptic, so we are now trying to sort out how we will spend the next few months without any options to travel like we had initially planned! We’re at least making the most of the fact scuba diving is on the government-approved list of daily exercise...!
We hope you are all staying safe and staying well in this rather mad time and we can’t wait to see you on the other side! xxx