Tasmania - Day 4

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Nice and easy day today. It was our rest day in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. A few of our companions had a late flight so we got to visit the town with some company. David, Nayeli and Emma had the same late flight, Vicky and Shizuka were also spending the day at Hobart so the 7 of us decided to do the city route suggested by the Lonely Planet, but before that we went to have breakfast.

Very modern...a custard danish with a beeper instead of my hot chocolate...

As soon as they finished with my chocolate all the lights of the beeper went off so I could exchange the beeper for a hot chocolate and once with a full stomach and a big smile on our faces we were all ready to start the walk.

We had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant and they didn't have "Vietnamese rolls", that was the first clue that something wasn't right with the place I should have known better. My roasted duck was in reality roasted duck bones because eating it was more like a mining operation than having lunch. A total disapppointment.

After lunch David and I went to the park while all the girls went shopping, then after saying good-bye to everyone Aída and I went out again, this time to a recommended bakery and had dinner there. It was nice.
Someone had recommended this bakery to us in the morning but we went to another which was just in front without seeing this one thinking the other was this one. It was only fair to come and try it out and I can concur, this was a nice bakery. :-)

As tomorrow we have an early start we decided to call it a day.


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Tasmania - Day 3

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Today we have an easy day in front of us with very little driving.

We started the day by going to an old british prision in Port Arthur.

The first part is a museum where you can follow the life of a typical convict. This was one of the first prisons in the world to use a maximun and minimun security regimes, although they had different names back them. If you were chosen to work on a gang (usually working with timber) your life expectancy would be dramatically reduced and in most cases you would probably die in a few years.

When you enter the museum you are given a poker card that represents a real prisioner and you are meant to follow his life through prision. Let me tell you that if you happen to come and visit this prision DO NOT TAKE THE 4 OF SPADES! it represents a poor guy called William Steward that was convicted for stilling a bunch of candles and sent to Port Arthur for shoting his master. The poor lad died while working on a gang before the age of 26. Your trip throughout the museum ends there...unless you just start reading about other convicts randomly. Pretty soon you start wondering why you ended up with such a crap convict...they were some cool ones who even escaped or attempted to escape.


Then we had a guided tour around the prision and when it ended we were left to wander around for 1/2 hour where we all took a few pictures.

Initially the main building had a wheel, like the ones you see with the hamsters but obviously bigger since the idea was using the prisoners as hamsters in order to make flour. That didn't last long because they were doing shifts of 20 min and required a lot of resources in order to keep it going so they stopped using the wheel and focused on the timber business.

For the ones about to get married or thinking about it, apparently the church is not consegrated and they perform wedding ceremonies without you having to belong to any religion in particular, in case anyone is interested. ;-) The guide said it's proven to be quite a popular place for weddings but I'm not quite sure what kind of crowd gets attracted to the idea of a wedding in an old prision...makes you wonder, doesn't it? But again... some people get married dressed as Elvis Presley so what do I know!

Then it was time for the Port Arthur Cruise...which was not more than a glorified boat trip around the bay no more no less.

After lunch we headed to the Tasmanian devil conservation park were we saw our first Tasmanian devils for real!. I thought that was going to be the highlight of the park but not, after seeing how the fed them we walked about the park and got to the kangaroos area, I wasn't going to take any pictures because I already had lots of pictures with kangaroos but these were used to people and you could get really close to them, next thing we know they were eating from our hands!!

Relly cool and totally unexpected! :-)

After the park was time to visit "Devil´s Kitchen"

Then off to "Tesselated Pavement"
Which is a rock formation that looks like tiles but they are all natural.

and that was the end of the Tasmanian West Coast Tour. We went to spend the night at Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.

As it was our last day together, after dinner we all headed to the pub for a proper Good-bye.

Although we only spent 3 days togeter we got really close and had a lot of fun all together. It is really sad having to see them go, it would have been great to have them on the Tasmanian East Coast Tour too, which, by the way, Aída and myself will be starting this Thursday 25th of Feb.

We ended up spending the two nights in Hobart at the Leisure Inn

The lift worked occasionally, we decided to do a laundry since when you are on the road you never know when you are gonna have the opportunity to do another. Laundry was on the 9th floor, we were on the 4th. Lifts not working, one trip for setting up the washing machine, half an hour later another for the drier, 2 hours later another to pick up all the close, plus the coming and goings from and to the hotel...I can tell you, I never climbed so many stairs in my life!

If anyone had to do that kind of exercise every time they do a laundrey they would either stink like hell or would be the fittest people ever!

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Tasmania - Day 2

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We left Bicheno at about 7:00-7:30 am and we headed for Wineglass bay.
This was a very impressive bay with an even more impressive beach.

We had two options, either climbing Mount Amos (which was about 1500 m) or going to the beach you can see on the above picture.

I decided to climb Mount Amos whereas Aída, being the fish she is, decided to go to the beach and have a swim.

You don't really need to be a professional climber but what you do need is good shoes with good grip and you'll spend most of the time climbing with hands and feet it's not a walkers walk, it's a climber's walk.


It would have been nice being able to do both since both walks were really interesting. Aída loved hers and we've had a couple of conversations of the type my view was better than yours...the issue still creeps up every now and then ;-)

The path going up the mountain wasn't the nice and easy path you see in most touristic areas, this was the kind where you had to actually climb using both your hands and feet and in some cases through some wet rock walls. The views and the rock formations were spectacular but it was a trek very prone to accidents.

The climbers in my group, right to left: David, Martin, Brita
myself and Nayeli taking the picture.

The rock formations were spectacular at times, specially the colours and the views from the top hard to match.

On the way down I was walking with Brita and Roisin and we got to a point where we were crossing a wooden bridge and none of us could remember having crossed that bridge before so we thought we had taken the wrong path somewhere.

We backtracked half a kilometer or so until we found another path and followed that one instead, by the time Roisin had eaten her first spider web we came to realise that that path wasn't used very often and we were definetely on the wrong path but as it was going in the right direction we decided to follow it, a few minutes later we got to a place not far from the road.

We made our way to the road and stopped the first car that was coming in order to ask the driver where the car park was, on our right or our left. We knew it was close but not in which direction.

It turned out the car belonged to a couple of British retirees, really nice, which offered to give both Roisin and Brita a lift to the car park (there was only space for two people). I continued my way on foot, although it only took me 5 minutes to reach the car park.

As it turned out, we were on the right path when we found the wooden bridge, had we continued through that path we would have reached the car park in no time. :-)

So that was my first time lost in the woods in Australia, although I must admit that Brita and Roisin managed to make the experience quite enjoyable. :-)

The three adventurers lost in the woods

Once we were all in the bus again we went to have lunch to another beautiful beach in Honeymoon bay. Crystal clear water. Really nice although the water temperature in Tasmania is not exactly warm. I would say that is like swimming in the Atlantic Ocean.

Another group picture, some people were missing though.
From right to left:
Brita, Aída, Martin, Kara,  Nicole, Emma, David, Nayeli, Shizuka, Kayoko

There was a moment when I decided to take the above group picture and out of the blue 7-8 cameras appeared on me

After lunch and enjoying Honeymoon bay we went to see "Remarkable caves" but before we got there, we made a stop at Kate's Berry and Chocolate farm which despite of being in a really isolated place, it was full of people.

They produce their own berries, strawberries, rasberries, etc which then use to make icecreams, milkshakes etc. The chocolate wasn't bad either. Definetely not the right place to go if you are on a diet...luckily for me I wasn't on one. :-)


"Remarkable caves" was a cave produced by the sea erosion and it's quite a long cave. The weather had turned a bit grey and it was a bit chilli to take a swim there...although I must admit I was really tempted.

From there we went to Port Arthur and on the way we stopped to take this photo:
The only place on earth where you can find this sign!

We just couldn't drive by without taking that photo! :-) The Tasmanian Devil's sign!

When we got to our destination we had dinner and played werewolf once again. I got them all hooked up with this game.  We had some really interesting games although for some reason they kept killing me at the first oportunity...it seems I either look very suspicious or talk to much and look guilty for that, who knows. :-)

And this goes for all the animal lovers out there:

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