Saturday, July 2, 2011

Tasmania???


Day 28: A day of travel

This morning we woke up early (6am) again to catch our last sunrise over Uluru. Rachna’s knee is not better, so no hiking today! The sunrise was beautiful, lighting up the rock from the darkness, and we were happy to have gotten up to see it.

We went back to the hotel to sleep a bit more, and then packed away our stuff for our next destination: Hobart, Tasmania. After lunch, we dropped the car off at the airport only to find out that there was a complete communications outage in the town, and nothing was functioning (no phones, no computers, nothing). So we were essentially thrown back into the “stone ages”, haha, and were manually checked in for our flight – hoping it would actually take off today. At check-in, we found out that the Hobart airport was closed down due to the volcanic ash from Chile (still a big problem here), and that we would not likely be making it out there today. Attempt number two to get to Tasmania seemed to be a failure!

We charted out our various options in case we wouldn’t make it out to Tasmania, but thankfully, when the communications came back up, we were told we would be flown through our two connecting flights to arrive in Launceston (another town in Tasmania), and then bussed to Hobart upon arrival. Talk about determination – after losing millions of dollars and disrupting thousands of passengers, our airline was going to get us to our destination, no matter what (nice job, Virgin Airlines)! So we flew from Ayer’s Rock to Sydney to Canberra to Launceston, only to land and find out that our baggage was lost! What an adventure! We still took the bus to Hobart, and hoped our luggage would meet us there tomorrow.

After arriving at Hobart airport, we hopped on our final transport – a shuttle bus – to our hotel (Bed & Breakfast), where we arrived at 1:30am! We checked in to our very nice room, called home to let them know we were safe, turned on our warm electric blankets, and passed out!

Sunrise over Uluru

Kata Tjuta in the distance

Goodbye, Uluru!

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