Today we took people from Turkey, Honduras, China, Myanmar, Thailand and England on a walk through tall trees, giant tree ferns and stunning waterfalls. None of these people had been to a national park before and were all very happy to learn about how Tasmanians love their parks. There were good discussions about rubbish in parks and fires in parks and now everyone understands the reasons we have “leave no trace” principles in our parks. At the beginning of the walk we asked, on a scale from 1 – 10, how people were feeling? The average was a 7. We then asked the same question when we returned and everybody said 10 or higher! I am always surprised how just a little time spent in nature connecting to our natural places can make such a big difference in peoples lives. We asked the people to name one thing they liked about the day and some of the answers included ” harmony in nature” “very happy here” and “I want to comeback”.