Tassie: 'The Kind of Photo You Might Use as a Screen Saver'

(Continued from ‘Welcome to Another Beautiful Day in Paradise’)

Day Five:
• The second half of the 6 day tour follows the east coast down to Hobart. As we awoke the Spirit of Tasmania II was docking from its trip from Melbourne.
• After breakfast at the Elizabeth Town Café for breakfast, we exchanged travelers from those doing the west coast for those doing the east coast. With three others doing the entire six days like myself.
• The ETC was about half way between davenport and Launceston. At Launceston we stopped at Cataract Gorge.
• At Ledgerwood we stopped to see the chainsaw carvings of Eddie Freeman to honor the soldiers of WWI (and ‘trim’ some annoying trees for the town).
• Through the farm land we entered cool temperate rainforest again to see St. Columba falls—90 meters of waterfall.
• Out to the coast and to 2009’s Lonely Planet Tourist Destination of the Year, the Bay of Fires. With white sands and bright blue-turquoise waters, countered by the red rocks it’s easy to see why. However it rained the entire time we were there.
• That night we stayed at Bicheno (bick-en-oh), slightly further down the coast.

Day Six:
• The rain hadn’t stopped that night, and the east coast is supposedly substantially better than the west for days of rain a year.
• We stopped quickly at the Bicheno blowhole on the rocks of the shore.
• With rain still coming down hard we arrived on the Fraycinet Peninsular and National Park to see Wineglass Bay (the east coasts most iconic sight). Here it is:• I swear its there…somewhere.
• On our way down the to the Tasman peninsular along the coast we took a short cut through sclerophyll forest, along a fairly good dirt track—it is adventure tours after all.
• We arrived in Port Arthur that night, the most notorious convict station in Tasmania and probably Australia.
• Me and Mary, someone else who was doing the whole six days, took a ghost tour of the supposedly haunted place.
• The Separate Prison was perhaps the scariest place, the doors banging and draft from open windows didn’t help.
• After raining most of the day, it had stopped by the evening, and was clearing.

Day Seven:
• With clear skies in the morning we had a chance to see the dolerite columns on the coast, and remarkable cave (but the trail to it was closed—apparently its remarkable)
• We had time to explore the penal colony known as Port Arthur.
• With only a short time, we had a tour as well as time to look around ourselves with a guide book.
• Lunch back at the ATA accommodation (fittingly named ‘the penitentiary’) before going to see some Tasmania Devils have their lunch.
• Khani says he never misses the devils feeding, and when you watch them you can understand why.
• They’re unbelievably cute marsupials given their vicious nature and the jaw strength second only to the salty crocodile—strong enough to bite through bone.
• Tasmanian Devils are only found wild in Tasmania now, and due to a transferable cancer known as devil facial tumor disease were recently marked as an endangered species (May 2008).• The centre also had a dancing and talking corellas, and hand feeding kangaroos and wallabies.
• As we left it began to rain, and rained the entire trip back to Hobart to conclude the tour.
• That night I walked out along to battery point, on the west side of Hobart.

Day Eight:
• If everything had been right I would have come home on this day, but because of an error by STA Travel quoting six a six night tour instead of 5, I had an extra day in Hobart.
• This was actually good because I didn’t get to see much of Tasmania’s capital city on my first night.
• In the morning the sky was clear again and I went to the Salamanca Market, the most beautiful market in the world. The whole street is lined with tents and stalls, below the sandstone buildings of Salamanca Street and Mt wellington in the background.
• After a good while in the market I went to the Tasmania Museum for a couple of hours.
• Following that I took a walk up to the botanical gardens. I missed the actual gardens the first time through, walking up through the soldier’s avenue, queen’s domain. On the way down (Hobart is built on a hill) I managed to find the actual gardens—much smaller than any of the other state’s.
• Somehow I managed to stumble upon the site of Beaumarie’s Zoo, famously the last place of known existence for the Thylacine (or Tasmania Tiger). It’s now supposedly extinct, though no one can prove either way.
• With that my last day in Tasmania ended, the next morning was my flight with pickup at 7am.

6 nights and 475 pictures and movies later my time in Tasmania was over and I had to head back to Melbourne to finish my exams. The whole trip was enjoyable, but the west coast substantially more that the east. Perhaps it was the weather, the things we did or the other people on the tour, but the west coast was truly spectacular, while the east coast was just good.
Oh, and the names of these two posts come from sayings Khani said pretty much every day.