TT Day 10: Choose Luck!

There has been a lot of riding and camping since my last post, and no serious drama but also no wi-fi. I will try to catch up at least a little bit in a couple of posts tonight.

Five days ago I arrived in Hobart in police custody, with a badly limping Booster strapped to the roof of the squad car (read: kickass 4x4). Bent derailleur, bent brake rotor, sidewall tear, and after much deliberation I converted to tubeless so I don’t have to keep worrying about pinch flats on single track. But because of the sidewall tear (big enough to rule out tubelessness) and because they didn’t want to sell me a new tire (these ones are only a few weeks old), Booster is running one tube tire and one tubeless. That gives her a kind of Millennium Falcon vibe, which is all to the good.

I spent most of my time in Hobart trying to figure out how to get away from Hobart. The Tassie Trail is remote by design, so public transport doesn’t go there. Or even anywhere near there, really. (Plus you already know about the puzzle-solving required to get Booster on an intercity bus.) So I didn’t do any of the typical Hobart tourist things. I didn’t get up to Mount Wellington, didn’t do the Derwent River cruise, yadda yadda yadda. But I did get to walk around town a little bit, so I might as well post some pics.

I also went out to the Hobart Rivulet in hopes of seeing a platypus in the wild. It was a long shot. They’re nocturnal, so they’re only really visible at dawn and dusk, and I don’t really do dawn. Plus, we’re talking a small brown creature in a large brown pond, and it spends most of its time underwater. everyone I spoke to said the rivulet was my best chance of seeing a platypus and my chances were slim.

But I have recently stumbled across a rule that seems like a pretty good way to live your life: choose luck.

You’ll never get to a point where you get good luck on demand, but you do get to pick whether to spend your time doing things where luck can strike. It can’t happen watching television. Something lucky can happen for your favorite player or favorite team, but never to you.

Choosing luck is usually more work, and it never promises results. But it’s up to you: you can choose predictable or you can choose to grab your camp chair and go down to the water an hour before sundown and sit there and see if any platypeese swim by.

And one did! Close encounters with wildlife are my very favorite thing when traveling. Preferably big powerful critters that can kill me, but anything I haven’t seen before is a thrill. (This is part of why I’m such a slow bicyclist. If I’m not going to stop and watch a wombat, why did I fly all the way down here in the first place?) The platypus isn’t likely to kill me, except by being adorable enough to die for (which it is), but the male does have venomous spurs in his hind feet, which has got to count for something. And the female is one of just two creatures on earth that can make her own custard. (Echidnas are the other one. Nothing else produces both milk and eggs.)

I couldn’t get a decent photo myself (low light, no super duper lens) but this captures what I saw. So lucky! On top of that, at the backpackers I was staying at, I was talking to the person at the front desk—a lovely Brazilian woman named Joyce—about The logistical challenges of getting back to the TT. I told her I wasn’t above just paying somebody $100 to drive me out there. And she said, “Sure. I’ll take you.” Turns out Joyce has got a lot of hustle. She’s working two jobs, aspiring to start her own business, and doesn’t turn down an easy hundred bucks. Plus—get this—she loves talking philosophy! The drive to the trail was the best conversation I’ve had since I’ve been down here.

Choose luck!