New Zealand. Our next destination lies some two thousand kilometres away across the Tasman Sea. Australia seems far enough from home already, but this three hour flight emphasises quite how isolated New Zealand is from the rest of the world. It really is a long, long way away. We arrive in Auckland - New Zealand's biggest city by far, and home to a quarter of the entire country's population - in the mid afternoon, and once again first impressions are not entirely overwhelming. Many, if not most, of New Zealand's visitors come here for the country's extraordinary landscapes. Having watched P [View Full Entry]

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Courtesy of Qantas (who serve Byron Bay Cookie Company cookies on their domestic flights, making them clearly the world's best airline) we are whisked from Melbourne to Sydney in an hour and twenty minutes. Melbourne and Sydney, which a cursory look at an atlas would suggest are neighbours, are in fact over 700km apart, the same distance from London to, say, Hamburg. The route takes us over the very mountainous terrain of the Australian Alps, at the far southern end of the Great Dividing Range. The Alps are home to mainland Australia's highest peak, 2,228 metre Mount Kosciuszko. As we desce [View Full Entry]

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We're back in Melbourne for a couple of nights. Just enough time to do two things. First to go back to Fitzroy, Melbourne's answer to Soho, full of cafés and independent shops. We find it impossible not to pay a visit to a fantastic little place on Brunswick Street, the Chocolatería San Churro, which does plates of delicious fresh Spanish churros served hot with a big bowl of melted chocolate. Heaven ! Well, we need something to fuel all our walking... The second is something so natural, so obvious for any visitor to Melbourne that I hardly need to even say [View Full Entry]

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A little further along the Lyell Highway we come to Lake St Clair National Park, which lies immediately south of Cradle Mountain and is where the Overland Track ends (or begins, depending on which way you walk it). It's pretty late in the day by the time we arrive, so we opt for a short walk along the shore of Lake St Clair. Compared to that of its twin park around Cradle Mountain, the scenery here is less striking, but this walk is going to give us our best opportunity yet to see the animal at the top of Alex's Most [View Full Entry]

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Tasmania’s west coast is at the heart of the state’s mining industry. Unlike mainland Australia, Tasmania didn’t see much of a gold rush, but what it lacked in gold it more than made up for in other - perhaps less exciting, but arguably more useful - metals. Zinc, iron, tin, copper…As a result of this, this part of western Tasmania is crisscrossed - rather incongruously - by a freight rail network that was (and occasionally is) used to transport ores to the coast, from where it was shipped to the rest of the British Empire. This part of the state is [View Full Entry]

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We spend the night in Deloraine's YHA hostel, a rather regimented place - not quite necessary, since we were the only people staying there - where the somewhat eccentric owner felt the need to post signs absolutely everywhere, of which my favourite was "beds are for sleeping in, not on". Still, the hostel's quiet location at the top of a small hill gave us fabulous sunset views, with Tasmania's rugged central mountains silhouetted against a truly technicolour sky. That and not far off a century's worth of National Geographic back issues made for a nice peaceful evening. Deloraine is a quai [View Full Entry]

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A drive north from the Tasman Peninsula, stopping briefly to pick up some tasty local smoked fish, takes us through an uncharacteristically dry part of Tasmania. Brown, not green. After nearly a week in the green south of the island the change is quite striking. National park to national park. Peninsula to peninsula. Our destination is the Freycinet National Park, which occupies practically the whole of the Freycinet Peninsula, itself named after yet another French navigator, Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet - two names were just never enough, were they ? The peninsula offers several wa [View Full Entry]

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Off the ferry in Kettering, we return to Hobart - which we cross in a matter of minutes (London, you have a lot to answer for) - and head eastwards, passing through the town of Sorell where we pick up a large bag of fresh Tasmanian scallops for dinner. Our destination is yet another part of eastern Tasmania's convoluted coastline: the Tasman Peninsula. Connected to the rest of the island by the wispiest of isthmuses, the Tasman Peninsula looms large in Tasmania's history, as well as its present. We've managed to find a wonderful place to stay in the small village [View Full Entry]

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For such an awkwardly positioned, small island, Tasmania has had a remarkably cosmopolitan history. The island was discovered - "discovered" by the West, that is, since an Aboriginal population had thrived there for centuries already - in 1642 by a Dutchman of all people, a certain Abel Janszoon Tasman. Tasman may have given his name to the island, but not until several hundred years later. For over two hundred years until 1856, the island was known as Anthoonij van Diemenslandt or Van Diemen's Land. This name, although pretty much unknown nowadays, certainly was not unkno [View Full Entry]

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Bass Strait, as I touched on in earlier entries, is a particularly nasty piece of work. Australia's southern coastline is a treacherous place at the best of times, but the Strait's tally of sunken ships is, perhaps, second to none in this part of the world. The first European to lay eyes on this stretch of water was Matthew Flinders (him again... - he appears to have given his name to most places in Australia) in 1798. He named the Strait after the ship's doctor aboard his vessel, one George Bass. The Strait owes its troublesome disposition to its position, bang [View Full Entry]

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