We stopped for a bit at the famous Salamanca market. Couldn't get Kam to buy anything!

You know the Aussies are backwards when they offer Christmas sales in the middle of summer. After taking a few pictures of these signs, we ran to the nearest bathroom to see if the toilet water swirled backwards!

The evening of our arrival, we drove from the Hobart to Lake St. Clair to begin our momentous hike. Made it in a few hours to a nice hotel where we shacked up for the night.

Our first morning in Tasmania, beautiful weather. We took the ferry for a half hour on Lake St. Clair to the beginning of our hike.

Expecting horrendous trails with man-eating snakes and poisonous lizards, we were surprised to see that the Tasmanians built wooded walkways for the trails for long stretches of the overland trail (like here). Evidently it rains so much here that the number of people hiking over the trail destroys it in short order. Also, I imagine the leeches come from everywhere to crawl into your boots. Better to put a little distance between your feet and the water I think.

We began a 3-hour hike to Pine Valley. The first few hours took us along the wooden platform, dodging lizards every few meters through the brush as you see in the photo here. The nearby mountains were beautiful, what a great hike!

We dropped our packs at the first hut, wondering if we should set up our tent our not. A few people told us that it was going to rain. Being the skeptical people that we are, we didn’t believe their threats. We started on what we thought was the most difficult hike of our lives. Little did we know the hikes we'd do in the next few days would make this one seem a lot easier. We made it really close to the top of Acropolis Mountain as you can see behind Todd in the photo (right before it started to rain or course).

Beautiful Kam does the Acropolis

We liked how the snow fell on the side of cradle mountain. It looked like a man telling us to get down the mountain!

Still in Pine Valley

These were cool. Really pretty.

We hiked into cradle mountain - took a picture to prove it.

This was a pretty tough mountain for us to climb. We all but fell on the rocks on the way up. These were big rocks, let me tell you. I'd like to see rock monster take a bite of these babies.

Our plan to do the entire Overland Trek, we settled for hiking in past Cradle Mountain to the first camp site. It proved to be an incredible place.

True to it's name, there were a bunch of waterfalls.

A famous scene in this area. You should go there if you have the chance.

Back through Hobart, we just had to drive down to see the famous Totem Pole, a free standing GIANT rock that crazy people like to climb.

There is a huge rock, then a smaller one. The smaller one is Totem Pole. You're looking down at it here.

I think this was called candlestick, evidently not as cool to climb. Who would have guessed (shrug)?