Getting from Launceston to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania and our final destination in the country, wasn't as simple as you might expect given the usual ease with which backpackers can get around Australia. For a start, Tasmania seems to consider itself to a certain extent to be a separate entity from the rest of the country and has its own companies supplying public transportation - companies which don't seem to be affiliated with the equivalent networks in the rest of Australia. Greyhound, for example, which is probably one of the most famous coach companies in the world and has an extensive network all over Australia (albeit confusingly under two different names - Greyhound Pioneer and Mcaffertys) has a coach station in just about every town in mainland Australia and is used extensively by backpackers. They have an impressive selection of passes to suit everyone, from the highly flexible Kilometre Pass to special Day passes which expire after a given number of days. On my tour of Australia in 1998, I bought a Kilometre Pass in advance from my travel agent in England - this allowed me to pay for a specific number of kilometres and then have the length of each journey taken off every time I made a trip within the country. This was, for me, a great option as it didn't tie me down to any particular route or require me to use the pass up within a specific amount of time - in theory, I could've returned to Australia at a later date, within a year, and carried on using the pass until I had exhausted the kilometres remaining on it. Another great Australian idea which you don't see copied anywhere else.

Greyhound also provide a number of different styles of Explorer Passes, which are valid for travel on specific popular routes but only usually in one direction - so no backtracking. Of course, if you don't want to pay any money up front for a pass, you can just turn up at the coach station and pay for a single fare to each destination, although this will end up costing you considerably more. In short, Greyhound provide a well maintained and extensive coach network across the entire country. Except Tasmania. In Tassie, coach travel is provided by a company called Tassielink - something which it took us a while to work out, and which must really annoy many people who have already forked out a substantial amount of cash for a Greyhound "country-wide" pass and then found that it doesn't cover Tasmania.

You may remember that I had been slightly worried before we headed for Tasmania that there would be nothing to do, due to the warning we were given by our travel agent in Melbourne about the state not currently being in its tourist season. Well, by the time we arrived in Hobart we had started to take this warning with a pinch of salt as we had already found ourselves staying with quite a few other travellers at the Launceston Backpackers and had not come away with any sense that the town was dead or that there wasn't anything for us to do. In fact, Cataract Gorge had been fullof people and there had been queues waiting at both ends of the chairlift, so we got off the coach in Hobart expecting to find a lively state capital full of possibilities and tour companies willing to take us to see all the local sights. It didn't quite turn out like that - in fact, if anything, Hobart was the epitome of a town out of season.

But, in many ways, this turned out to be something of a bonus for us as it meant that we ended up getting a one on one tour of the nearby Styx Valley with a very enthusiastic tour guide who otherwise probably wouldn't have had any work for the next few months.

We had booked ourselves into a hotel with the sort of name you would probably only find down under - The Pickled Frog. Generally, places which give themselves bizarre names like this tend to be aimed at the backpacker trade and stand out in the guide books as being places where you'll find a warm welcome and no shortage of people willing to advise you on things to do. The Pickled Frog didn't seem to be able to make up its mind whether it wanted to be a friendly local tavern of the sort depicted in the famous eighties television show Cheers, or a hostel for backpackers - I strongly suspected that the forward thinking family that runs it have designed it to be both, providing a warm and friendly welcome and a room to call your own during the tourist season and a local pub for the rest of the year. Certainly, the front door opened on to a room which seemed uncertain as to what purpose it should serve. It was a cosy room, a sort of mixture between a pub, cafe and coffee shop of the type which Starbucks seems to be inserting into every street. Instead of hard wooden seats, there were plush sofas everywhere, there was a roaring fire on one wall, and where you would expect the bar to be there was instead a bar shaped counter with stools lined up along it and shelves offering food, snacks, crisps and cakes as well as alcohol.

Scattered around the various other downstairs rooms of the Pickled Frog, often hidden away in little nooks and crannies which gave the place an atmosphere all of its own, were a pool table, big screen television and a back room seating area which seemed like more of a conservatory and contained large open areas which were often surplus to requirements - I thought that maybe, during the tourist season, they might turn the room into a nightclub and get people dancing in there! At the bottom of the stairs, staring at us teasingly whenever we came down from our room, was a large noticeboard onto which were tacked advertisements for wonderful sounding local tours, but enquiring about any of them would generally illicit the response "Sorry, that one isn't running at the moment. It's not the tourist season, you see."

The young lady behind the bar would clearly have been more than happy to help us arrange anything we had wanted to do in Hobart, except that there currently wasn't anything to do in Hobart. Instead, she turned out to be something of an expert at providing us with drinks and engaging us in friendly conversation. Whenever we came back from wandering around downtown, there were always two or three locals sitting at the bar with a beer, chatting up the staff, and they'd always have a friendly "G'day" for us as we passed through. It was here, in fact, that we were introduced to the guide who would take us to the Styx Valley. We were sitting at the bar in the evening, chatting to the young lady behind the counter about how quiet it was out of season and what a shame that there wasn't more to do, when a light bulb suddenly seemed to go on above her head and she wondered out loud if one of her local customers, who ran a tour company during the tourist season, would be willing to help us out. She said that he would probably be in for "a cold one" later on, and so we should come down to the bar in a couple of hours time. When we did, we were introduced to a friendly, stereotypical Aussie type who was leaning on the bar chatting up the staff and who immediately extended his arm as soon as he saw us, gripped me firmly by the hand and shook me up and down for several minutes. John, which is what I shall call him as I am writing this several years later and can't for the life of me remember what his real name was, was more than happy to give us the address of his office just around the corner and invite us to stop by in the morning to arrange something.

Downtown Hobart was as quiet as the grave - it felt more like a small town than the capital city of the state, but then we'd got used to the Australian definition of "city" by now. Looking for somewhere to eat, we found a large open plan food court in a building a few blocks from the hotel which seemed to be open pretty much round the clock. Inside, it felt more like a motorway service station - kiosks selling different varieties of international cuisine were built into the walls and seating was arranged around tables in the middle with the occasional flower pot thrown in in an attempt to give the room some life. It didn't work. The place was mostly empty, and the people serving at the food stalls were leaning on their hands and looking bored when we entered, perking up somewhat at the thought that we might actually want to buy something from one of them. As we sat with our meals, a large group of teenagers filed in, sat down and started discussing who was dating who in loud voices for everyone to hear, but that was about as much excitement as downtown Hobart could offer us outside the tourist season.

Opposite the food court, a row of otherwise unremarkable back street shops stood out for me because one of them was a kebab shop which had chosen to advertise its products using a large sign flapping in the wind outside which contained probably one of the most remarkable statements I've ever seen:

KEBABS - AUSTRALIA'S HEALTHY OPTION

I fully appreciate that this may sound totally unbelievable to anyone who lives in the real world where eating a kebab is pretty much considered by any sort of authority on healthy eating to be something akin to legalised suicide, so I took the time to do a little research on the internet just in case my memory, on this occasion, had somehow proved to be faulty. In no time at all, I had discovered a number of debates raging on Hobart message boards about where to find the healthiest kebab. I jest you not. People in Hobart, and possibly Australia, actually seem to believe that kebabs - universally known all over the world as a heart attack on a stick - constitute a healthy diet. Personally, you wouldn't get me anywhere near one of those great elephants feet you see revolving in kebab shop windows if you paid me, although I freely admit that I might change my mind as the amount you offer to pay me gets closer to a million pounds! In the UK, it is generally acknowledged that the only reason most people would want to eat a kebab would be that it was three o'clock in the morning, they'd just come out of a nightclub having emptied the place of alcohol, and they only had three brain cells remaining in a working condition. Under these circumstances, it is acceptable for a British person to point at a kebab shop and say in a slurred voice: "Hey, what we need right now is a kebab." Anybody saying this under any other circumstances clearly has major issues. There is a reason why nearly all kebab shops are within puking distance of a pub. The only way that anyone could get away with describing any sort of kebab as healthy would be if they removed all the meat first and ended up with an empty piece of pita bread.

To be fair, Eloise doesn't remember the kebab shop at all, even though it was an anecdote which immediately stuck in my mind as worth filing away for later. She seems to be one of those people who is brilliant at remembering all the major details about the places we've been, whereas I seem to be blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with the ability to recall every tiny little detail, however irrelevant - which, of course, is great when I'm writing a book like this but not quite so great when I'm trying to hold a conversation in which people don't fall asleep. When reminiscing with Eloise about our trips, I am able to describe the route we took from our hostel somewhere to a particular cafe almost turn by turn, adding in little comments such as "then, do you remember we had to turn left where that guy in the green jacket was coming out of the shop carrying a packet of cheese and onion crisps?" Not surprisingly, Eloise's response to this is usually "No, of course I don't." At one place in New Zealand, we ate breakfast at the same small corner cafe every morning and talked at length to the same woman each time about how her family had built the place up from nothing with her husband and how it had always been her lifelong dream to own a picturesque little corner cafe next to the river. She made us homemade pancakes, which were delicious but which she only served at a certain time of day. Often, she went out of her way to make us a batch specially because we had missed the deadline and she was so nice that she didn't want to see us going without our breakfast. Eloise doesn't even remember the cafe.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.