Tassie Road Trip

Before Eug could openly admit he wanted to stay in Sydney to read more poetry to me at Bondi beach for a few more days, we found available accommodations in Tasmania and flew there.  We usually don’t book ahead more than 2 days in advance, but because January is the busiest season for Tasmania, we went ahead and booked our full 6 days there.  These included our plane tickets flying in from Sydney and flying out to Melbourne, our rental car for the road trip, a river cruise, and 3 different hotels.  The entire research and booking process took us about 8 hours altogether, we were pretty worn out after that.  It felt like the time we put together an IKEA Pax wardrobe with the sliding door!  Not fun I tell ya.  Sorry for complaining about trip planning but when you are used to just going with it, it’s actually tough to plan out an exact itinerary for an entire upcoming week.  And an exact itinerary strips away a lot of the fun and adventure in the journey.  Since Mellissa offered us such a welcoming and comfortable stay in Sydney, it was a little hard to pack up and leave.  The road was beckoning though, so we moved on.

Tasmania is an island state almost directly below Melbourne at the south eastern corner of Australia.  It is reachable via an overnight ferry from Melbourne or via flights from other cities.  Tassie (as it’s nicknamed) is well known for exquisite beaches, beautiful mountains, abundant wildlife and wilderness.  It also produces high-quality cheeses, wines (especially Pinot Noir and Riesling) and seafood.  Our first stop was the capital city Hobart.  We walked around Hobart the first day covering the historical parts of town, Salamanca market, and the waterfront.  Eug said the waterfront has an incredible resemblance to Halifax.  I’ve never been but I’ll take his word for it.  We also came upon a very happening venue on the water that had a free concert going on with lots of wine and beers.  We went in to check out a live blues performance in a packed tent, which almost broke our ear drums.  We found out later that the weeklong celebrations were for a new art museum opening up in Hobart named Mona Foma, housing the $100 million private collection of a guy named David Welsh.   When we returned to the city after our road trip we discovered that on the last night of festivities Mick Jagger was headlining a performance.  Locals were super excited as our waitress told us he was the ‘biggest celebrity’ to ever stage a concert in Hobart.

The next day we picked up our Nissan Micra from Budget Rent-A-Car and drove to Port Arthur, a natural penitentiary chosen by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur in 1830 for those who committed crimes more than once.  Port Arthur is nestled in the Tasman Peninsula on a vast grass field in a bowl shape, with hills on one side and water on the other.  The natural landscape made it easy for the guards to keep an eye on the convicts and near impossible for the convicts to escape.  The admission ticket included a 40 minute guided tour and 20 minute harbour cruise.  The tour was informative and we each got a card at the end which represented a convict we could follow through a sort of ‘choose your own adventure’ path to see what happened to his life in Port Arthur.  The jail was brutal in how it treated its prisoners, with many being literally worked to death.  It was also “forward thinking” when it abolished lashing as punishment to prisoners and instead placed them into small cells with masks on in solitary confinement, ie. physical torture was replaced with conditions that fostered insanity.  It was a solemn place to visit, to say the least.  Afterwards, we headed west to Strahan, a small town in the west coast where tourists go to get a taste of the wilderness via train, seaplane, or cruise.  We took the famous Gordon River cruise which brought us out into Macquarie Harbour and Hells Gate (aptly named by arriving prisoners at the penitentiary here) in addition to the Gordon River.  We also did a forest walk where we saw some of the world’s oldest trees in the world’s densest rainforest.  I was pretty excited to see what a 2000 year old Huon pine (world’s 2^nd longest living tree) would look like, only to be disappointed by what resembled a scrawny, wrinkly trunk covered in moss.  It definitely wasn’t as regal looking as the world’s oldest trees, the sequoias in California.  We also cruised by Atlantic Salmon and Rainbow Trout farms in the tea-coloured half salt-half fresh water harbour.  That was pretty interesting to see.

The next two days we visited two great hiking spots, Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park and Freycinet National Park.  We did a few of the famous hikes there.  One was the Dove Lake-circuit underneath Cradle Mountain and the other one was the Wineglass Bay lookout and Beach circuit in Freycinet.  One problem with traveling for a long period of time is that we’ve become somewhat travel snobs.  We started out being Roman ruins snobs after seeing the amazing ruins in Libya and comparing them to all the others on the Mediterranean.  We later became dive snobs after going to Palau (regrettably not listening to Eug’s dad’s advice).  Now we are lake snobs after seeing Jiuzhaigou in China, and winery snobs after being in South Africa.  The Dove Lake circuit was nice and is rated one of Tasmania’s top hikes but we couldn’t help but compare the lake and mountain to our last hiking experience, which was in China.  To be fair there was a big Dutch group who came to Cradle Mountain park just to snap pictures of the flora and fauna, and they were fascinated.  Wineglass Bay, however, was indeed gorgeous as you can see from the above picture.  It was unlike anything we’ve seen before so we could see why it was ranked one of the world’s top 10 beaches by the US Magazine “Outside”.  The white sandy beach with turquoise coloured water was encased in a perfectly parabolic bay.  It was a great workout too, to hike there after being in the car for so many hours.  At the base of the hike the park had signs posted that rated the walk very difficult and not recommended for children and the elderly.  Really it was probably equivalent to hiking to the first 1/4 mark of the Grouse Grind and we quite enjoyed getting our hearts pumping.

One interesting/disgusting thing I should mention about the driving is the amount of road kill we came across while driving trans-Tasmania.  We consciously kept a record and we saw, on average, one dead animal for every 5km we drove on the highway.  Some of the carcasses were pretty big, comparable to a big dog at home.  They were mostly wallabies and possums I think.  Either way, the sheer number of dead animals was crazy.  The roads were extremely windy all through Tassie, and though posted limits were about 100 km/h, Eug usually kept it around 80 km/h as one turn inevitably blended into another and going at 80 clicks around a corner in our Micra didn’t feel too stable.  There rarely were any straightaways on the road.  The local Tasmanians, however, were obviously used to driving on the curvy roads at high speeds as we were getting constantly passed whenever they had a chance.  This must be why there is so much road kill on the highway!  I went to Australia for a month about 10 years ago, so I’ve had my fair share of seeing live Kangaroos and Wallabies hopping around.  Eug, on the other hand, has seen more dead wallabies and possums than live ones because of this road trip.

We ended our Tasmania trip in one of Hobart’s coffee shops called The Cupping Room where they roast their own coffee.  The coffee shop itself had a cool urban vibe to it and needless to say their coffee was really good.  As Eug mentioned earlier, Australia has a serious coffee culture, and we were not disappointed with the small cafes here at all.  We were also told that Melbourne is known for the best espresso, and that is where we are headed next.   We’ll report back soon.