Secret Beach Day

Ever since getting here, I've been hanging out to see what the beaches here in Tasmania are like. Tim and I accompanied Air on this busride adventure to a little lesser known beach called Boronia Beach that is usually quite nice and empty. Being to it once by car, Air felt it was "nearby", but when we got onto the bus, "nearby" really turned out to be EIGHT bus sections instead of the predicted two, but the kind bus driver, or more the lazy bus driver gave us all student tickets of $2.30 so he wouldn't have to wait for us to count the silver coins for $6.40. There was some confusion then from Air, who hadn't actually looked it up on a map and only had a vague memory of it from car-ride, so we ended up getting off the bus on the advice of an elderly local, for what should have been a short, less than 4 minute walk to the beach, but really turned out to be a 27 minute hike. And what was funnier, is that the same bus we were on passed us at the 20min mark after doing it's full loop, the bus driver waved to us as he passed, and we passed several of it's bus stops, right next to the destination road Boronia Beach was off at the end of our half hour walk.

After that, it was all cool though. We had to walk through a dirt track in bushland in the backyard of private property, off a road called Private Road and even had to go through an old gate that lead to a series of long wooden steps, all the way down through more bushland to the small beach. Reminded me a lot of Rottnest. We found out later the beach is in fact an unofficial nude beach, and there were quite a few people there on this particular day, fortunately the only nude person was a little boy. Mind you we all thought the kid was way to old to be naked anyway. He was maybe 6 yrs old? He seemed to keep popping up loudly schreeching and running in the way with his giblets freely shaking about. it was really very annoying.

Besides the squealing, jingly-rude boy, the beach was great. I wished I had my snorkle with me, coincidentally another of our colleagues from work was there too and he told us there was a large stingray swimming back and forth by the reefs on the right and teams of fish all around. Without my snorkle, I didn't dare go past the thick black seaweed and deeper than I can stand. Yeah, despite my love of the ocean, I am contradictory scared of it too.

It was 34' and muggy, excellent beach weather, but our colleague and Hobartian wasn't kidding when he said the water is always bitter cold no matter what. Well the closest continent South is Antarctica, so of course it'd be a bit cold. It was ice-freezing-Omigod-PENGUINS! cold. Nevertheless, me and Air swam around for ages. And although I didn't go past where I could feel the sand beneath my feet, I stayed almost 2 hours just swimming and floating on my back with my eyes closed, the cold water feeling refreshing and peaceful, after the first shocker of a 5 minutes.

The only photo I got was a dodgey lomo one where the button was pressed by mistake as I packed up my things, the lense pointing, I think, straight up my nose as I went to put it into my bag. So instead, here is what I wore on the beach. In my excitement of finally going to the beach, I made the mistake of running out the door wearing some sneakers with no socks, that I had never worn before without socks. And I didn't grab my thongs, thinking I'd just take off my shoes once at the beach anyway. We hadn't even got to Hobart centre, where we were going to catch a bus from, and my toes were stinging with liquid blisters. So I had to buy some flip-flops then and there, but it turned out great as I found these Paul Frank ones on post xmas sale, that came in a nifty vinyl bag, plus had a stripey coin purse to put all the loose silver change I've been carrying around with me. (ever since I found out Tim has been dumping all his silver change at home and now has an insanely heavy box full of 20 and 10 cent coins, I've been trying to get rid of them, counting out five dollars worth of silver coins. Do you know how heavy that gets to carry in one's pockets?!).