Dumb questions / comments about bushwalking in Tasmania

[frank_in_oz]

Ok,
This thread is not meant to be nasty or mean about people (much) It is just a place to document funny questions, comments and other little tit bits you may come across either in these forums, at other places (like work) or when you meet others hiking.

My favourite was when a guy from the US was corresponding with me about the OT and the walk we were doing together there in May. I kept on telling him it was wilderness, there was no lights , power etc.

He was still concerned about whether he should buy a second rechargable battery for his camera or whether he would be able to charge it in the hut. He thought the first battery might last until Pelion...

Finally I cracked and email back saying that they had implemented a new system at Pelion especially for American hikers. They had established a special generator room that was turned on specially each night so walkers could charge their camera batteries. The only hitch was it was $15 a recharge because of the cost of choppering fuel into the huts etc. You DID have to take $15 in coin with you as they had not worked out how to take credit cards.

Finally he was happy that this cost was cheaper than a new battery and asked that I remind him to stop and get some change before we hit the track.

Funny thing about that walk was there was very low cloud for 3 of the 4 days we were there and he took about 20 pics (with plenty of camera life left in his solo battery)

[tas-man]

After taking some visiting mainland friends bushwalking to Cradle Mt some years back, we stopped at a park in Sheffield to have a BBQ on our way home. One of them made a comment about how long the electric BBQ was taking to cook the sausages and I straight faced explained that it was due to the fact that Tassie's power was generated by water powered turbines, and this electricity was not as hot as mainland coal fired electricity. The explanation was accepted and it was some time before their "penny dropped" that I was having them on.

[ClockworkLemon]

A few years ago I visited St Columba Falls, and, on the walk in, was amused to hear a group of tourists complaining quite loudly about how the car park should have been built closer to the falls...

[the_camera_poser]

*&%$#! yanks!

(this was said with my very best (and it ain't good) fake Aussie accent LOL)

[tasadam]

*&%$#@! yanks!

(this was said with my very best (and it ain't good) fake Aussie accent LOL)

So it was YOU, was it!!

[Whos_asking99]

*Deleted*

[Taurë-rana]

And I managed to convince a yank that i spoke "Australian"....

Um.... so?

[Whos_asking99]

Your right, post unrelated....deleted.

[Chris]

I think DA may have meant you probably do speak Australian

[corvus]

Well said W-a-99 and dont be intimidated by comments from dominie

[Whos_asking99]

Dont worry corvus....i'll try not to be

Yea, I must remember to make my posts a bit more understandable/relevant.

[flyfisher]

G'day W_A99, i think most of us knew where you were coming from
FF

[Taurë-rana]

Oops, sorry W_A99, I did actually mean what Chris said - that you do speak Australian already. No intimidation intended, I'm really not an intimidating sort of person .

[tasadam]

Yeah, like Australian language is more recognised than American language. I just did a google -
Australian language finds 137,000,000 hits.
American Language finds 103,000,000 hits.

To make the Australian language seem more in place, let's compare that with population.
Australian population search = 20,434,176
American population search = 301,139,947 (Crikey, there's a few of 'em, aren't there...)

Australian Language divided by Australian population = 6.7
American Language divided by American population is only .34
(there's that MATHS again... )

And we're supposed to be multi-cultural...

To put the Australian language into greater perspective, googling english language derived 263 million hits. The english population is 60,776,238.
So their division equation is only 4.3

Australia wins again! (Don't mention Cricket )

OK, I know, I have rambled enough, going to get coffee!

[Whos_asking99]

Oops, sorry W_A99, I did actually mean what Chris said - that you do speak Australian already. No intimidation intended, I'm really not an intimidating sort of person .

Haha its all good

And yea, lets not mention cricket....

[NickD]

Happened to a friend, or a friend of a friend maybe, but whilst guiding on the franklin river he was asked by one of his clients....

"Is this fresh or salt water?"

[tasadam]

Happened to a friend, or a friend of a friend maybe, but whilst guiding on the franklin river he was asked by one of his clients....

"Is this fresh or salt water?"

OK, How could we answer that?

It's salt water, we had to time our run carefully to catch the outgoing tide when rafting the Franklin, otherwise we would have ended up back at Collingwood River.
It's salt water - watch out for the crocodiles.
Taste it and see?
It's neither - see the colour? Fresh water is clear, salt water is blue, so it's neither...
How about "Do you really want me to answer that? / Are you for real? / What part of the galaxy are you from?

[MrCAMEL]

People I work with, oneday, somehow, trying to stir me up asked me "What is the actual point of bushwaking?"
I made them answer their own question by asking them what the point of anything was.
They listed the things they liked to do and why they liked to do them. I said, "Well that's your answer."
Ferals.

Also, funny was the day I was going to have a go at climbing Ossa, I had some plain white socks on and a woman asked me, "What's this? Clean sock day or something?" I said it was always clean sock day.
Her question by itself is very amusing.

[JohnM]

Sorry, not Tasmania, but I had a ripper last week on the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria.

Fellow bushwalker:
"Do you think the tank water is drinkable? It looks a bit yucky."

Me:
"Not sure, but I can give you my water filter to use if you like."

Fellow bushwalker:
(pauses for a few seconds, then makes the shape of a huge kitchen-bench terracotta filter with her hands and says)
"Wow... you carried one of those all the way up here!?"

[frank_in_oz]

Fellow bushwalker:
(pauses for a few seconds, then makes the shape of a huge kitchen-bench terracotta filter with her hands and says)
"Wow... you carried one of those all the way up here!?"

And the dishwasher

[Steve]

Sorry, not Tasmania, but I had a ripper last week on the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria.

Fellow bushwalker:
"Do you think the tank water is drinkable? It looks a bit yucky."

Me:
"Not sure, but I can give you my water filter to use if you like."

Fellow bushwalker:
(pauses for a few seconds, then makes the shape of a huge kitchen-bench terracotta filter with her hands and says)
"Wow... you carried one of those all the way up here!?"

[olblackbilly]

someone once asked me is the world really round or flat,......i said its probably a bit undulating,...especially when your traversing the western arthurs.....not to mention the yo yo track....

[tasadam]

Another good stir is to tell the "visitors" that if they ironed Tasmania flat, it would be bigger than the mainland...
Mind you, sometimes I wonder...

[nothingwmn]

I was once told quite a disturbing story by one of the rangers on The Overland...
Apparently there was an entire family from Canberra with three young boys who attempted The Overland in the middle of summer with plastic ponchos & fleece jumpers as their only protection against the elements (this was years ago before the booking system). Of course the weather turned nasty, they got caught in a snowstorm & the kids nearly died of hypothermia before they finally made it to Waterfall Hut. When the ranger asked hadn't they read about the unpredictable weather on the Parks & Wildlife website & what were they thinking(?!), the parents replied that yes, they had seen the weather warnings, but they had been friends with the lady who had died after jumping into Lake Windermere with heat stroke the summer before. Yikes!

[Joel]

Don't worry, that still happens with the booking system too. I have millions of stories about the OT. The worst was winter 08, in very bad conditions when I was doing the High Circuit with some guests. Got to Kitchen Hut, opened the door and was met by a young woman whor burst into tears when she saw us. This is almost beyond belief but I promise it's true. She and her father set off in blizzard conditions, with no gloves, no beanies, no waterproof clothes and sneakers.
They got to the Kitchen Hut and freaked out, used all their gas on the first night trying to warm their hands up, so after that they couldn't even have a warm drink. Spent two nights in the hut, afraid to leave, convinced they were going to die. We had to carry their packs out for them and give them our gear.
The thing that amazed me was she kept asking "Is it always like this?"
Couple of quick others, had a swiss lady ask me halfway up if there was a cafe or anything on top of cradle. I explained there was a big difference between Tas and Europe.
An American lady asked me what altitude we were at at Wineglass Bay.
Salt or Fresh is an unbeleivably common question in regards to Dove Lake.
German blokes told me they were carrying day packs along the OT because "we're going to buy everything else at the huts".

[ollster]

Not actually a question or comment, but whatever...

Going Sth->Nth once, we were on our second last day and turned up at Waterfall Valley hut.

We ran into this poor English kid about our age (mid 20s at the time) who was walking by himself. Earlier in the day he'd been cutting up something for lunch and decided to pick his nose with his knife. You can guess what happened. He had taken a fair chunk out, had been bleeding for a while, and wasn't feeling too good. He eventually stopped bleeding, but we agreed to walk out with him the next day.

The most surprising part for us was that he's never heard of The Goodies!

[tasadam]

decided to pick his nose with his knife

They walk among us...

[bcshort]

decided to pick his nose with his knife

They walk among us...

On a slightly unrelated note - if you have frozen food on a plate, dont try and prise it off with a cooks knife.
That cost me a minor artery and 6 hours in RHH ER a couple of years back. Have Never done it again.

[jwalker]

A few years back working in a visitor centre, I was asked by a German backpacker whether there were crocodiles on The Overland Track! I had a good old chuckle!!

Later however, i thought it probably wasn't a bad question if you'd just lobbed in from the other side of the world with limited knowledge of the region.

[north-north-west]

A few years ago I visited St Columba Falls, and, on the walk in, was amused to hear a group of tourists complaining quite loudly about how the car park should have been built closer to the falls...

My one and only visit to Mossman Gorge, I heard a (Yank) tourist complaining about almost everything, finishing with "there aren't even any monkeys!"

Then there was the time I was out for an amble in the Royal during one of the big bushfires - Black Friday, probably, with both the Adelaide Hills and the Dandenongs well ablaze. There were two locals with two Yanks friends at the picnic ground the track I was heading for started from - a lovely little setup they had, too, complete with horrid little fluffy white yapping 'dog' and radio turned up loud enough for everyone else to hear. Being a little hard of hearing, I wandered in closer while passing, as the news bulletin had just started. After a full report, which concluded with the sobering statistics of 'xxx thousand square miles burnt out, xxxx millions of dollars damage, xxx people homeless, xyz deaths', the female yank said "Gee, I hope we get to see some of those Awstrayliun bushfires while we're here."
Even her husband looked a little shocked, though he wasn't at all appreciative at my suggesting that if she was really that keen, it wouldn't be too difficult to hire a chopper to drop her in the middle of one.

But my all time 'favourite' is the repeated, wide-eyed (whenever I'm somewhere like the Rawson walkway, with heaps of pseudos around) "Are you a bushwalker?" Often followed by insistence on taking photos if I answer in the affirmative. (Though a sarcastic 'no, I'm doing hard labour for murdering an idiot tourist' is a more likely response.) I'm sure they later spend hours trying to find 'bushwalker' on their list of wildlife so they can check it off.

Of course, none of these has happened in Tassie, so I suppose they're not really eligible for this thread. So just ignore this post. Sorry for wasting your time.