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.

Conservation Volunteers Australia—Final Thoughts

read the first and second posts before this, the third.
Out there the weather changes so quickly and sharply that it would be easy to get stuck, and was evidenced by spectacular downpours we saw on the drive back, opposite bright blue skies. Rainbows appeared every 10 minutes on the road, as we passed through showers and storms. It actually snowed in Melbourne that weekend, something it hadn’t done in a while. While working on the site we could noticeably recognize and impending storm, the temperature dropping considerably as one of the most noticeable signs. Also It should be noted that Australia’s sky is incredibly high, which is even more present when you can see for miles under the great blue thing.
Out there we saw things that we could never have in the city. The wildlife for one, but also the dramatic landscapes that make up Australia. Out here the hills are numerous, and nature abounds. There were cows, this was truly farming country. The ground was hard, filled with rocks where it hadn’t been tilled. Though the hills were green, it was deceiving; this wasn’t grass, rather a weedy substance that meant that livestock could only be kept in small numbers.
I’ve probably made this out to sound like the most miserable place on earth, but the rain is desperately needed in this area (like the rest of Australia). Badger pointed out that for every centimeter of new plant growth was a centimeter of rainfall. The amount of rain we had had in the proceeding weeks had been bizarrely abnormal, and as a consequence there were several inches of new plant growth on the already established trees.
And finally a short note on Badger. This crazy dude has been all over the place. Fighting wildfires, playing baseball in America (he’s serious obsessed with this terrible sport), and meeting random celebrities like WWE’s Rick Flair, the Game and Batista. He was full of stories. And I mean busting at the seams. He was energetic and a generally good person to be around, truly amicable. This guy’s crazy.

Sunday at St Kilda

(What I’m going to attempt to do this week is to go through some of the major events that have happened since being here so I can work on being a little more current, interspersed with some anecdotal/random posts)The Sunday before classes started a friend from AustraLearn, Victoria, and I took a tram ride down to St Kilda—the closest beachside resort for Melbourne. Of course, in typical Melbourne style (or at least the Melbourne I know) it rained for most of the morning before trying desperately to break through to sun in the afternoon. The actual purpose of the trip was to go to the Sunday artist festival but because of the rain not many of the artists showed up, so we did the town, beach and pier.
As you get into St Kilda you’re greeted by a giant face, creepy amusing scary it covers them all and it also fronts Luna Park which looks eerily like Coney Island in New York (in fact its modeled after it)—a mini amusement park. There was also one of those human statue people, interesting enough, took a picture. Getting past that you hit the sand, and your first good shot at the sea. And while it is technically still inside the Melbourne harbor due to two giant peninsulas that leave a singular 5 km straight, the feel is still the seaside. The sand was crisp and the water was…ABSOLULTY FREEZING. Turns out the Melbourne Sea, like everything else in Melbourne in winter, is cold and wet. We made our way along the pier (apparently pretty famous) up to the end where there are supposedly little fairy penguins (we didn’t see any—only a load of dead starfish and a couple of fishermen). There’s a reserve up the end for these little critters, and they’re apparently joined with some sort of, and what can only be described as a, sea otter (rakali). We walked into the café on the end of the pier, partially to warm our hands and partially to see the prices—to expensive.
We went back into town to find something a little more pocket friendly and stumbled upon several very good looking cake shops (identified by crowds of people drooling on store fronts). There were lots of other small shops along the street, all small personal business each with their own little culture. I had no idea what the one pictured to the right is selling but it had an awesome shop front. Taking a hot pie and a cup of tea from one of the delicious-looking cake shops, it was just right for the cold weather and rain, and with that the sun began to come out. Yay! With the sun came more people including a couple of people rollerblading—one of whom wiped out spectacularly. St Kilda’s is literally filled with scenic beauty and hinted with grunge attitude. It would probably be a lovely place to live, though we went in the middle of winter and I can only imagine how crazy this place must get in the middle of summer.

Rain, rain go away…

Who said Australia was in a drought? As I write this it is currently pouring outside, and has been all morning (fun for walking to classes!). This is probably the heaviest I’ve ever seen it rain here, but regardless it hasn’t been sunny everyday here. Melbourne is bizarre in that you can see sun in one corner of the sky and it can be raining on you. The random and unpredictable showers have the habit of catching you out…generally when you have two hands full of groceries. Back to the original thought of Australia drought, I can’t conceive that this country could be in a drought with the amount of rain we’ve experience just in the last 4 weeks. The water restrictions (they say 4 minute showers, no washing cars etc.) seem a little extreme. On the bright side though (excuse the pun), the sun-shower mix means that we’ve seen some pretty intense rainbows—in fact quite a few. Pictures!Also props to whoever said that I would get here and it would rain all the time…thanks!