Australia: Southern Victoria and Tasmania

When our position at the vineyard ended, we found a home-stay in Winchelsea, near Geelong, to work in exchange for accommodation for a week. We got the train down to Geelong and met our hosts; Kate, George, their daughter, Maggie, and their two golden labs; Sally and Chilli. During the next week, we helped with a few easy jobs such as cleaning windows and pressure washing the outside of the house.

We learnt that Kate had bought the house (her childhood home) from her parents and they had moved from Western Australia to renovate the house in order to sell it. We were also able to explore the area a bit as one day Kate let us borrow her car to go to Anglesea beach for the afternoon, so we got a sneak peak at the Great Ocean Road!

When we weren't helping Kate, we were putting together a plan for the next couple of weeks. Initially we were looking at a campervan relocation from Hobart in Tasmania to Melbourne, but the day the van had been booked for the ferry wouldn't have given us any time to explore Tasmania. We kept an eye on other relocations over the next few days, and saw a free 12 day relocation from Cairns to Melbourne. We enjoyed our first East Coast road trip so much, we decided to do it again! This still gave us about a week before we needed to be in Cairns, so (inspired by the first relocation) we booked flights to Hobart to do another home stay just outside of the city.

Mike (our Tasmanian host) picked us up from the airport and chatted to us about our travel plans for while we were in Tasmania. He had lived in Tasmania his whole life and had travelled most of it numerous times, so he was keen for us to also be able to experience as much of the island as we could. We ended up booking a camper for the second half of our week there, which still gave us a few days to help Mike and see Hobart. Mike's farmhouse had a really homey feel and awesome views. There were also some friendly sheep, alpaca and wallaby neighbours who hung out outside our windows!

The next day we did some work for Mike’s mum, Irene, in her garden for a few hours in the morning then walked down into Hobart.

In a few hours, we managed to walk down Elizabeth Street to Elizabeth Mall where the majority of shops and restaurants are, through Franklin Square, visited the Tasmanian Museum and walked along the harbour then ate some chips on one of the floating restaurants looking onto the harbour.

The next day, Mike offered us his daughter’s car for the day so we could drive down to the Tasman Peninsula and do some sightseeing. We visited the Tessellated Pavement (where we almost ended up adopting a stray puppy - she even put her paws up on the front of the car when we tried to drive away!), Doo town, a holiday village where all the houses contain 'doo' (there were some hilarious names), and saw the Tasman Arch, Devils Kitchen, Remarkable Cave and White Beach.

On our way back we drove through Richmond, home to the oldest stone bridge in Australia.

We were able to keep the car until the next morning to visit Salamanca Market, a huge market in Hobart. We bought some snacks from the food stall, then drove up Mount Wellington. If we had more time we wanted to walk up it, but having experienced how steep the road was, we were glad we still had a car!

The plan was to meet Mike to return the car, but he was running a bit late so we found a pub at the bottom of Mount Wellington where we sipped at a beer each by the fire for a while.

Once the car was returned, Mike drove us up to Springs Beach where he's building a beach house. We spent Sunday clearing and levelling an area to put a new water tank before heading back to Hobart.

We picked up our campervan the following morning to explore around the rest of Tasmania. On day one we drove up the east coast to Coles Bay, where we walked up to a viewpoint to see Wineglass Bay, drove around to Cape Tourville lighthouse, then went up the coast to Bay of Fires for the night. In the morning we drove to a couple of stops along the bay before heading across to Launceston to do some of the walks around the Gorge and continuing west over to Cradle Mountain for the night.

We got to Cradle Mountain fairly early the next morning and did a 3 hour walk from the information centre down to Ronny Creek via the board walk, then to Lake Lilla and finally to a stunning view over Dove Lake.

We drove down to Strahan and did a short walk Hogarth Falls in the evening, then made the long drive back to Hobart - via a quick stop at Russell Falls. Mike was kind enough to let us spend a couple of hours back at his house once we'd dropped the camper, where we realised we'd left a laptop and a case of chargers in the van! Luckily our host offered to go to the office in the morning when they opened again and post our things to Kate's house in Geelong, where we'd be staying for a few more nights after the Cairns road trip.

The last few weeks were very unorganised and spontaneous but we met some great people, had some wonderful experiences and got to visit a part of Australia we otherwise wouldn't have seen.