Tasmania!

Wow! Another wonderful holiday. I think that the word which summarises the whole holiday must be "water". I woke at about 5:30am on Friday to discover that my kitchen was flooded. This is a complete mystery. The top kitchen drawer was completely flooded, the floor was soaking, but no water was in the sink, coming through the ceiling or from the walls. I was terribly annoyed! Anyway, I drained as much as possible, turned off the water (to discover a pipe about to explode in the garden - which it did a few days later) and sent a work colleague a panicky email before running off to meet Alice and catch the train to the airport (meeting Anna en-route at Central).

I like my travel companions. We all decided that we'd prefer a window seat on the flight instead of sitting together and so were rather spread out through the plane. Alice, getting the short straw and sitting over the wing! We had a great flight over the bays South of Sydney before the clouds arrived and we had a fun bumpy flight into Hobart. (By the way, the photos on this page are a bit of a mix. I've rudely stolen quite a few of Anna's and Alice's photos - simply because they are better than mine. I can't find out on "blogger" how to give credits, but the good ones are probably not mine.) It was raining in Hobart. Apparently, it is almost always raining in Hobart! Anyway, after Anna had managed to extract herself from the quarantine dog that had caught her trying to smuggle in an apple, we went off to find our car. Anna was terribly embarrassing (actually, I decided by the end of the holiday that Alice was even more embarrassing) and asked the car rental agent -- whilst trying to convince the agent to let her drive the car -- whether they could recommend some good wineries that we'd be driving past (this is a question that I don't believe you should ask car rental personnel). Oh well, she did get signed on and drove us into the town/city of Hobart. It's gorgeous. We walked around the boats in the harbour, had a terrific fish-and-chips, bought an old map of Hobart in an Antique shop and then started on our long drive across into the wilderness.

What a drive! I must admit that I expected that the main road across Tasmania would be quite fast and well made. In fact, it was small, windy, full of holes and great fun to drive on. We started off following the Derwent river inland through little towns like New Norfork, Gretna, Hamilton and Ouse. We stopped at Ouse, on the river Ouse, to buy some sweets, to be told that we were still many hours from our destination and to look around a little church. It really did feel as if we were driving through England! I haven't seen any countryside look so green for ages. Also, buildings were old! It was beautiful. We kept driving .... Alice and Anna would pass the time singing in two part harmony before we'd screech to a halt because we'd seen a great view that needed photographing, or a dead Tasmanian devil, or a live echidna!!! As we got into the wilderness the scenery became stunning! As a sign said: "If you're travelling West, you're venturing deeper into the wet, wild, west coast wilderness, which receives an astonishing 2.5-3metres of rainfall a year. Its foundations are billion year old quartzite rock, formed in primeval seas. It's a land of ancient rainforests, swift dark rivers and rugged mountains."

Wow!

I decided during the drive that there was no way that I'd be able to describe the scenery (and now, after cooking and eating half a kilogram of kangaroo, I'm feeling to fat even to try). The views were stunning. We were driving amongst mountains about 1.5km high that were covered in rainforest and with huge waterfalls pouring over their sides. My book describes the region as "one of the planet's great wildernesses, an almost uninhabited landscape of fretted mountains, glacial lakes, majestic rivers, waterfalls, gorges, virgin temperate rainforest and 1000-year old trees". We stopped driving to have a short walk through the rainforest to see a waterfall. I don't think that any of us was ready for the shock of actually seeing the waterfall. Alice was bounding on ahead. She turned a corner and came face-to-face with a wall of thunderous water. She squealed! It was all very exciting, dramatic and wet.














As we'd totally miscalculated the time it would take to get to Queenstown, it was getting dark by the end of our hike and so we put a Sibelius symphony on the CD player and had great fun driving down a ridiculously windy road (with a huge drop on one side) in the dark and rain into Queenstown.