Normally Sydney Airport is a profoundly depressing place; an ill lit retail bunker from which aircraft occasionally evacuate the desperate. On this day however it is my low wattage beacon of hope, a feebly shining gateway through which I shall pass to leave my plague riddled home town behind me and step out into the wide, glorious world.
After a short two hour flight I shall descend on Tasmania like the barbarian hordes of old and deliver myself into the tender mercies of my Tasmanian correspondent who for reasons best known to herself has volunteered to be my personal Virgil through the wetter, chillier parts of Purgatory.
Somewhat to my surprise there wasn’t a last minute COVID induced refusal to permit me entrance and we actually turned up somewhat ahead of schedule. Hobart Airport looks like someone has cobbled together a row of portable classrooms and added a sign saying “Hobart” for the information of those who may have been disoriented by the flight and thought they landed in Paris instead.
Bio security measures were in force to ensure the new arrivals didn’t introduce any diseases. Such measures consisted of my approaching a desk and being asked if I’d been anywhere dangerous. On my answer of “no” I was waved through.
Out in the car park my correspondent didn’t duck out of sight quickly enough and was saddled with actually fulfilling her obligation to pick me up. A quick car ride took me away from the airport, through Hobart and to my correspondent’s abode in the shadow of Mount Wellington. For the record my correspondent lives on the side of a valley. She is on the desirable side which can get up to three hours of sunlight a day. The wretched denizens of the other side exist in a perpetual darkness penetrated only by the howling of wolves.
Actually it was the howling of my correspondent’s dogs. I’m not saying she set the dogs on me but she did nothing to intervene while the local chapter of the Baskerville Appreciation Society hurled themselves upon me and promptly managed to transfer half their saliva and body fur to my person.
Once I had dusted (and dried) myself off my correspondent offered to take me down to a local rivulet so I could not see a platypus. She had seen (and filmed) a platypus there quite recently. Not seeing a platypus was appealing but on the other hand…
“We could use this opportunity to speak, get to know each other and connect on a deeper and more personal level than our usual email driven antagonism”
After we finished laughing we set out to not see a platypus.
At first things went well. We wandered past dams under renovation and along a charming rivulet with lots of little pools where non existent platypus could frolic but didn’t. After a while though I noticed that we seemed to be gaining elevation and my correspondent has ceased to talk about platypus and was waxing lyrical about fungi. Finally when we reached an area where a platypus would have needed climbing gear to get about she admitted that there may have been a slight change in agenda.
As we struggled (well I struggled) upward we passed a disturbing number of memorials to those who had died until I started to wonder if anyone had ever survived the trip. My favourite was the wooden bench set up to remember a little girl who had been hit by a tree. The subtext was that the bench had been made out of the tree in question as an act of revenge.
Despite the vulture of death hanging over us we survived the walk and stumbled (well I stumbled) back to her place so that I could once again undergo ordeal by hound.
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