Yesterday morning I ate a hearty breakfast (well, enough museli to absorb a pint of milk, except they don't have pints they have 600ml), gave my tent to a manager guy who understood its intent, and walked out of Launceston to a good spot on the road for thumbing a lift. Launceston is a lot bigger than I'd thought, and it took freakin' ages to get far enough out of town that I felt I was on a main road leading out of the town, and my gear is heavy, but eventually I plonked it under a tree and stood in the shade with my thumb out, for the first time ever. After maybe ten or fifteen minutes of this a car stopped with a girl and a guy in it, and they said they couldn't take me to Derby (my intended destination) nor even to Scottsdale (a town on the way) but they'd take me out of town to a better spot so people would know where I'm headed and it'd be easier to get a lift. Grand, sounds good, so I loaded up my gear and off we set. They were locals and pleasant enough, and she drove really fast with more regard for a perfect racing line around corners than staying on the appropriate side of the road, but from what little I've seen so far that might be the traditional Tasmanian approach to driving. After a while they decided that if the lady who owns the car didn't need it back, they'd take me all the way to Scottsdale (I think they were a bit bored of a Saturday morning and were enjoying the drive), but after stopping at a petrol station for fuel they determined that she does need the car back, so they'd find a good spot for me and let me off there. It took quite a while to find a good spot, but a good spot it was indeed - a straight stretch of road (lot of hills in this place so roads tend to be twisty) with a place cars could pull in. I figure one or both of them had hitched before. By that stage I was halfway to Scottsdale, and in the middle of nowhere which certainly meant there'd be no ambiguity as to my destination.
So out with the thumb again, and traffic was naturally much lighter out here, but what there was was almost certainly headed for Scottsdale. After another fifteen or twenty minutes a car passed by, then turned in a gateway and came back, to enquire where I'm headed. I said Derby, and they said they're going past Derby to the wilderness beyond, so grand, perfect, I got in. They were Courtney and Sam, siblings who work (graphic designer) and study (computer networks) respectively in Launceston, but who go out to the family home at the weekends, and that's where they were headed.
My plan had been to go to the small town of Derby to see a cool-sounding recreation thing of the tin-mining days and then camp in a picnic ground that the Lonely Planet book says you're allowed camp in for free, but Courtney and Sam offered to take me out to their parents' house for a cup of tea, and although the idea of being an imposition fills me with dread I have learned that the absolute best way to see a country is by getting to know the locals, so I gratefully accepted. So we drove out beyond Derby (the tin centre thing is closed, alas) to a village called Herrick (I think) with about 45 inhabitants, three-quarters of whom are related to these folks, they estimate. There's eight offspring in their family, and their aunt lives nearby with eight of her own, so that's half the population of the town already.
I was brought in and introduced to their mother (an artist) and father (some combination of studying, webpage design and government work), and an assortment of younger brothers ranging from about sixteen to about ten. Leonie the mother made sandwiches for lunch (with a family of that size every meal is like an Army meal, so adding an extra person doesn't seem as inconvenient as it might in a smaller group) and cups of tea, and we sat about talking for a while (I was mostly chatting to the father, who's talkative and has a good line of stories from various things, including his days working as a jackaroo, which is Australian for cowboy as near as I can figure). After a while Courtney suggested that we take a drive up to the Blue Lakes, which are old tin-mining holes in the hills that have filled with water, but some chemical (later revealed to be copper - I feel pretty silly I didn't think of that myself actually) in the water turns them bright blue-green. This sounded cool, so I jumped at the chance to see them. So, Courtney and Sam and myself piled back into the car and drove up the hills. The first couple of lakes we got to were sort of forest-green, which didn't seem right and they said wasn't how they remembered them from when they were swimming there in their youths, but we drove to another that's fenced off and inaccessible to swimmers and it indeed was a weird freaky colour, like a blue-green swimming pool. Difficult to describe, so I took a photo. After that we went to a waterfall thingie which is like that one in Wicklow that I used to stop at for lunch during some hikes with the Scouts, and which also reminds me of that place from the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that I visited in China.
After that we went back to the house, watched the second half of Lilo & Stitch and then I was shown around the art studio and study, where the father (I think his name is Peter, but I'm terrible at remembering names) offered to let me use his computer for Net access. Yay! So I burned my diary entries and photos onto a CD, spent ages figuring out how to do various things on Redbrick since the latest set of Big Changes, read my email and uploaded stuff. Shortly before the photo-upload was finished time was called for dinner, so we all lined up and served ourselves, buffet-style, to rice and salad and pork and chicken-in-sauce-stuff, which was really tasty. A bit of conversation later revealed Zach, next in chronological line after Sam, to be something of a movie-maker, and he was eventually convinced to have a screening of a movie he'd made. The only version he had was the unedited one on his video camera, which is a shame because the ultra-cheesy over-the-top style of the movie would really benefit from snappy editing, but there were some really good ideas in it and he obviously was playing around with a lot of interesting techniques. The story was about a couple of cops who infiltrate a gang, get busted, one gets killed, then he turns out not to be dead but evil, and they fight and it's daft, but it was fun and got laughs in places where it was supposed to be funny, which is good. He says he's making a movie as a project for art class in school. And so after a while I went to finish up the photos stuff on my webpage and log off, and then I came back and we watched Monsters, Inc. which is still good-but-not-as-good-as-Toy-Story-or-Finding-Nemo, and then talked some more (being a jackaroo sounds like fun) before bedtime. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that, I'd been offered a bed for the night in the art studio, and with little to draw me back to Derby, and the fact that I was enjoying myself there, I accepted that too.
I awoke to find that despite it having come up in conversation several times last night, I'd forgotten to put my clock forward an hour (although I had remembered to set an alarm and everything) so I had to hurry getting my gear packed and ready, because the family were going to church soon. I loaded into the car and Courtney and Sam again drove me in Courtney's car to this golf club. The road is a bit windy so I'm going to walk along it rather than waiting here, until I find a good spot anyway. Traffic has been very light - I've been here three-quarters of an hour now and about five cars have passed going my way - but there's no hurry, it's Sunday. Next destination is St. Helens, an old whaling town on the coast.
So that was a rather lucky lift to get, I reckon. The family were extremely nice, friendly and welcoming, and I got to see some of the cool stuff in Tasmania that you can't see unless you've got your own transport. Just as we were leaving Leonie gave me a gift of a box of cards which are prints of some of her paintings, which I haven't had a chance to look at yet but which was a very thoughtful idea for a souvenir.
Something that struck me as interesting was the fact that the family takes religion seriously, moreso than I think any family I've been a guest of before (including that friend of mine when I was a kid whose father was the school chaplain guy). Grace is said before meals, and after dinner Peter (I hope his name is) read a bit from the Bible and then discussed what it means and how it relates to real life (he'd obviously thought about it, which is nice to see, rather than the blind unthinking acceptance that tends to characterise religion so much) and then said a prayer and they sang a Psalm (number 1 apparently, which I believe I can categorically state I have never heard before). Having had a typically modern Irish a-la-carte Catholic upbringing with my childhood schooling and friends being mainly Anglican (and all that of the church fetes and tea with the vicar type, not the more hardline Protestantism you hear about from the Old West) this was all pretty alien to me, but it's nice to learn that somebody is using religion as an excuse to be nice to people, when so many use it as an excuse to be crappy to people.
5:25 p.m. EST, St. Helens Youth Hostel, St. Helens
Traffic being as light as it was, it took a little while to get a ride, and when I did it was from a bloke in a ute going to the next village along the road to cut firewood illegally. He said he's a native of Tasmania but lived on the mainland for a few years, and he likes Tasmania and reckons it's a good place to raise kids. I bet he's right, I reckon I would have loved it (in that it's not dissimilar from where I grew up, and that was great). He left me off at a pub in this village, and I hoisted up my gear (it's heavy) and walked out of town a bit to another suitable spot, and waited another while. Actually I was waiting quite a while here, but I didn't mind because the verge was nice and soft and I was thinking that if I were forced to wait the many, many hours until nightfall and then spend the night there it'd be very pleasant. But fortunately 'twas not to be, and a carload of folks going past slowed down and then drove on, but came back from the opposite direction about a minute later, and the guy said he couldn't just leave me standing there. They were going to the next town, and there were now two women and two kids squashed into the back to make room for me, which was nice. It didn't take long of driving along before the guy started telling me about God, which is obviously something he's very excited and enthusiastic about. He's a Born-Again Christian, something I've had nigh-on zero exposure to (although that might be what the Duff family from last night are) so I let him chat on about it, and show me a photo of himself from before he was saved (he was kinda scruffy, which I gather is indicative of how there were demons in him), and I asked a few questions to get a clearer picture of what exactly it's all about. It seems to be basically that you junk all the trappings of traditional Christianity except for the Bible, because everything else is made up by people and the Bible is the only actual real stuff we have to go on. The lady who I assume to be his wife in the back seat interjected once or twice too, and fortunately they weren't pushy or going all-out to convert me or anything, just talking about something really cool they'd found - fair enough, we all do that sometimes about something. When we got to their house (which God gave to them for fifteen thousand dollars, which was very reasonable of him I have to say) he ran inside to get me a pamphlet thingie which is his story of who he used to be and how he got saved and all that, for me to read when I'm waiting for my next lift. He also gave me a thing about how my absolute favourite theory, that of evolution, is a hoax.
I read those as I was waiting for another lift, a bit out of that town, and his testimony thing was interesting enough, although slightly spoiled by the guy who put it to paper putting inverted commas around everything that could possibly be considered a colloquialism or figure of speech. The evolution thing is just a load of quotes from scientists with no context. I was still working on it when my next ride pulled up, a couple who'd been going into that pub back there when I was getting out of that guy's ute. They're from Sydney (although the guy's accent indicated a European origin, but if somebody wants to move to Australia and call themselves Australian, that's fine by me, since I usually tell people I'm from Dublin, and the woman was Asian and quiet so I didn't hear her accent) and here for the long weekend (it's a bank holiday Monday this weekend in New South Wales, apparently) with a rented car, operating out of Launceston and going on day trips. They were going to St. Helens, and when we got there they parked in the town centre and went off to explore, and I donned my gear (it's heavy) and went in search of the hostel. It'd started raining just after they picked me up, and then stopped, and then started again shortly after we arrived. The street that the Lonely Planet said the hostel is on wasn't to be seen on the map of the town on the information board, but the book did say something about a beachfront location, so I walked toward the sea, looked for beach and didn't find much, so walked along what I did find and then found the right street, found the hostel and booked in for one night.
I was introduced to Ron, a pensioner who's staying here while looking for a more permanent place to live, and spent the afternoon talking to him (well, mostly listening). Also here at the moment are a couple from Northern Ireland and a Dutch guy. I made it to the shop just as it was closing and secured myself some food which I'll get around to cooking shortly. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I think I'll rent a bike and go see some of the nice beachy parts around here, apparently the Bay of Fires is pretty cool, and there's some interesting dunes of some sort not too far off.