Tassie Rainbow

We just arrived home from a fantastic two weeks in Tasmania!

We had planned to be the whole time at the Australian Rainbow Gathering, but as it turned out, the gathering ended a week sooner than anticipated (seemed that there was some lack of communication going on), so we rented a car and spend the second week driving around the island, sightseeing, doing short hikes and free camping in gorgeous locations.

Anyway, I'll do a second post for the Tassie travels part of the trip, and stick to the rainbow gathering for this one :)

We started the trip by waking up and leaving at 5am. Considering we are a family that generally goes to bed around midnight and gets up around 10am, this was really the middle of the night; it was still dark for goodness sake!

My good friend Ansanity drove us to the airport. Getting our luggage checked in was easy - I think we did pretty well; full camping gear for three people in a cold place all in 2 backpacks of 18kg each :)

The plane had those little screens on the back of each seat, but they flashed up on this screen:

"Due to normal aircraft movement programming is temporarily unavailable."

So... does that mean we can watch stuff only during abnormal aircraft movement? Are they just saving the shows as a distraction if we crash?! LOL

After changing planes in Melbourne, stopping long enough to catch the horrific news of the bushfires in Victoria, we arrived in Launceston easily, and rented a car to get to the gathering; just an hour from the airport.

Purple dropped me and Littletree off with the bags and went to return the car, while I set up our camp. We were all sorted and ready in time for dinner circle, which was nice - I was pretty exhausted after a half-night's sleep, 2 flights and being in four states in one day!

We stayed at the gathering for a week and had a fantastic time.

Main Circle:

Magic hat parade: 

Full Moon Rising: 

Dreadlock making:

We were blessed by a rainbow over main circle

And invaded by hoards of cheeky possums who would troll around at night searching for scraps. 

The river was spectacular; freezing cold but I enjoyed a good swim every day. I enjoy that bracing feeling when it's so cold it burns :)

I couldn't help myself and ended up in the kitchen making dinner three nights in a row, which was great fun. We had good music;

And a little kitchen god appeared one day to oversee the salad.

It was a really wonderful gathering, weird rainbow politricks aside; I had a great time and I was sad to leave earlier than planned, but also happy to have seen so many old friends and to have the chance to travel around Tasmania a bit with Purple and Littletree.

More photos can be seen on my flickr page