Taz and Tazmanians - Burnie, Australia
Burnie, Australia
On the advice of the reception girls at the budget Ibis in Sydney, we took a taxi from outside the ship straight to the airport. Believe it or not, it works out cheaper to take a taxi than to pay three fares on the airport to city shuttle train (I know, I can't believe it either!). Just after we had unloaded the bags from the boot, and were trying to negotiate the many menus on the Jetstar self-check in machine, - Fred realised that he had left his beloved Galaxy tablet on the back seat of the cab! All we could remember about the cab and driver was the fact that the cab was white, and the driver was a bespectacled asian. - This descibes practically all of the cabs and practically all the cab drivers in Sydney. We rushed down stairs to the cab office, where we found out that our rough description fitted at least a dozen cab firms that regularly ply the cruise terminal, and each one would have to be paged seperately, asking people to check the back seat of their cabs for missing tablets. - It all felt like a lost cause as we trudged back upstairs to the check-in, and Fred's mad panic had begun to subside into resignation, as he contemplated loss of his music, contacts, pictures and all the rest. It was here, out of the blue that we had a massive slab of good fortune bestowed upon us. - Fred somehow recognised our cabbie amongst all the other cabs swishing past, flagged down the cab and retrieved his life support system from the back of the cab, which had been circling around for some mysterious unknown reason. The man just passed it through the window, smiled and waved, then drove away, as though he had been expecting us all along. Truly amazing!
Our first stop was a holiday park just outside Hobart, not too far from the airport, and the car rental place, where we had a rented cabin waiting for us. As the office closed at 6pm and we were arriving after 9pm the owners left the keys in a safe by the reception door. This all went to plan and we found both the park (which was kind of small and quite noisy), cabin keys and cabin...all without getting hopelessly lost, which is something of an achievement. Where things broke down was when me and Fred went in search of some much needed food. - As luck would have it the restaurant-cum-motel-cum-off licence at the end of the road, was devoid of cutomers and in almost total darkness, even though it was only 9pm, the place appeared to have been shut for quite a while (possibly forever). The park is neatly positioned in a desolate triangle of major roads, and feels as though you are staying on a junction of the M25. There is a builders' merchant, a roundabout, quite a bit of tarmac and zero people. - It is pretty hard to imagine people making any sort of holiday round here. Once we were out of the capital we realised pretty quickly that this place had given us a totally false 1st impression of what is undoubdtedly one of the most scenic, green and pleasant places I have ever been (and this includes Bognor). It's rather like starting a tour of the Taj Mahal in the broom closet. - Taz is like a wild, rural and compacted Australia. It has all the lovely small town, country charm of rural Oz, and big slices of its of wild, coastal scenery backing into huge tracts of untamed forest that covers almost third of the land area, it also boasts some of the cleanest air on Earth.
Our first stop out of Hobart is the former Victorian penal colony of Port Arthur, which is at the end of a long, wiggly road that winds its way down the rugged spine of theTasman penninsular. On the way you pass the impressively named Eaglehawk Neck, which was effectively the back door of the old prison settlement, and guarded (in those days) by a 'dog line' of bull mastiffs chained together across a slender strip of land that forms a natural bridge to the mainland (the prison was only accessible by sea in those days). The convict buildings of Port Arthur are incredibly well preserved, and include the Medical Officer's quarters and the Commandant's House, which bizarrely operated as a hotel in the thirties, catering for what would now be called 'black tourism'. Many of the old buildings survive intact, but some (including the Prison hospital and church) have been plundered for their stones into near-ruin. The prison is an open-air museum, and the ticket price includes a walking tour and a boat trip around the islands in the bay that house the prison cemetery (handily named the 'Isle of the Dead' in case there is any confusion) and the remains of the boys prison (presumably to stop them picking up bad habits on the mainland). The building that makes the biggest impact is the solitary confinement block, where inmates were walled up for 23 hours a day in tiny stone cells with one hours' exercise alone in the prison yard; all of this conducted in complete silence. The cells have meagre slits for windows, high up near the ceiling and some contain sepia photos of inmates and a chilling record of their 'crimes' which often amounted to nothing more than petty larceny, and their punishments, which could include lashes, and up to a month in a tomb-like isolation cell, which was kept in perpetual darkness ( I lasted about 2 minutes inside here), and it feels as though you have been buried alive.
Our next move was a place plucked straight off of Airbnb, which advertises peoples' spare room, shack, shed or spare house for rent at a reasonable price (reasonable until Airbnb add on their 10% of course). For the same price as a budget holiday park cabin, we bagged a whole 1950s holiday home in Bicheno for a whole seven days. It's a chance to spread out in what feels like a proper home, full of odd pieces of cast_off furniture, dog-eared paperbacks, and a huge rusty woodburner. The place is on a big plot hidden up a dirt track on the edge of town, just across the road from the beach, and is the perfect place to cook up a stonking roast dinner, which has been on all our minds for quite some time. Bicheno itself is a beautiful fishing village half way up the east coast, which besides having a resident colony of seals and a pretty impressive blowhole, has its own colony of mini-penguins who waddle ashore onto Redbill Beach every evening at dusk, and trudge their weary way uphill to their burrows in the dunes at the back of the beach. The only downside to the place is the lack of any discernable internet (which I'm sure we can do without for a week), later on we discover that you can reap 20mins free Wifi if you park close to the village green at just the right angle, and another 15mins at the local library (woo hoo), if you need more than this you can use the knackered, sticky machine in the greasy spoon across the road ( but truthfully you should probably should get out a bit more).
The whole of the east coast so far has been a non-stop succession of stunning photo-ops, (I think you could be snapping away most of the time round here) and has to be one of the World's top scenic drives (well, the bits I've seen so far that is) - The coast on this side of the island is a seemingly endless succession of broad white sand bays, edged with enourmous pitted boulders which have split and cracked into bizzare bone-like shapes. - These monster rocks gradually acquire over time a strange powdery coating of orange/scarlet lichen which gives the Bay of Fires on the north east coast its crazy name. Bicheno is also a perfect place to explore the extraordinary red-coast of the Freycienet Penninsular, and after a couple of days poking around the place, we all follow the well worn tourist trail for an hour and a half up the mountain to get a view of Wineglass Bay which, as its name suggests, is a perfect crescent of white sand surrounded by saw-toothed peaks called The Hazards which are casually strewn with truly enourmous and precariously perched boulders (some the size of a bungalow), which all appear to hang by a thread and force you to keep turning your head upwards to check that they haven't silently slid towards you. The only minus during our time in Bicheno was our ill-timed visit to Douglas Apsley National Park (drizzle plus wind), which apart from a pretty underwhelming waterhole (well puddle really) didn't seem to have much to recommend it, and by the time we found the puddle, the rain was starting to come down in earnest and as we all know, scenery in the rain is one of the dullest things on Earth. Taz has very temperamental, British-style weather, and you can frequently get all four seasons happening at once, if you manage to get hold if a fine, sunny day it's best to get out grab hold of it, before it all starts going downhill.
Our strategy (this makes it sound planned, when it is so not planned) of renting cabins and holiday cottages, then day tripping around from there, seems to be working. The topography of Taz is such that nothing on the island is more than a few hours drive away, well make that 4 hours, as most cross-island roads are very steep and very wiggly (I reckon Taz is roughly the size of Ireland and twice as mountainous). Our next stop is a block of apartments perched on an island in between the north and south lanes of highway A7 in Launceston (Mmm... sounds lovely!). We were all pretty sceptical when we eventually found the place, - once we had threaded our way through the mad labyrinth of Launceston's one way systems, - which required a nifty high-speed exit from the fast lane of the highway straight into the car park! From the outside the place resembled Norman Bates Motel, but once you get past the unpromising and slightly forbidding exterior, you quickly realise you have more space than you can shake a stick at; two (yes two) bedrooms and a fantastic view across the city and the Tamar River valley. We were planning a trip into Launceston tommorrow to replace some of our clothes, which have been shredded by over 9 months on the road, but I don't think I can face all that one way traffic; better idea is to head north up the Tamar Valley toward Beauty Point, where they have platypus, echidnas (large chubby hedgehogs) and the World's only seahorse farm! This sounds much more like it.