Tasmania - our "natural state"

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Not very restful night of sleep - waking every ten minutes concerned about over sleeping and missing our flight. Woke at midnight to thundering tropical rain (usually one of my great joys) and spent the next few hours concerned that our little access road to the outside world would be flooded and prevent us from accessing the airport, even though it adjoins our suburb! I booked our taxi online for the first time and so was also concerned that this system may not work and no taxi might appear. At the appointed hour (4am!) our turbanned taxi driver appeared through a break in the rain. He was extremely friendly and chatty and we both felt embarrassed that we were almost completely unable to understand anything he was saying in his beautiful singsong accent. Didn't want it to develp into that Catherine Tate sketch where she endlessly asks accented people to repeat themselves....so we both struggled to grab hold of any single word we could make out and tried to formulate suitable responses based around that.

Arrived at the airport unhindered by floods at 4.15am with very comfortable margin for a 6am Virgin Blue flight and the torrential rain of the night before eased off and the clouds opened up to allow us a beautiful smooth departure with spectacular views of our beloved tropical city. Soon afterwards we broke out our breakfast rolls - crumbed chicken, avocado, lettuce and "kewpie" mayo for me on a fantastic Pumpkin seed turkish roll (from Woolworths Bakery in Abbott Street - amazingly good bread for a supermarket!) and pickled pork, boiled egg, mustard and finely chopped dill pickles for Eric on a Baker's Delight Tiger roll. Happily breakfasted, we spend the next couple of hours looking out the window hoping to catch an aerial view of the widespread flooding in Queensland. Surprisingly we see none until our approach to Brisbane, where the Brisbane river is vast and we see streets and houses still swallowed up by water. I have made the marathon 1800 km drive from Cairns to Brisbane on numerous occasions, mostly in my late teens in the company of people who thought it was best accomplished as a non-stop, drive through the night ordeal, and I remain extremely grateful when I am able to arrive there completely safely in under two hours!

Only ten minutes downtime at Brisbane airport before reboarding for the leg to Hobart. Another smooth, happy, uneventful flight with clouds below us the entire way, ending with our first landing at Hobart airport. We easily bypass the attention of the gorgeous fruit sniffer beagle and the numerous policemen standing around do not seem interested in us either - phew! Not quite as smooth and happy is the fact that the baggage carousel stops rumbling round and one of our bags has not emerged. Eventually I managed to locate the "baggage blues" service desk where the attendant taps briefly on his keyboard and announces that my bag has gone to Sydney, and will arrive on a flight in the late afternoon, initiating us into the apparently large club of people whose luggage has goes missing while flying. Amusingly, the piece of paper he hands me is headed "Property Irregularity Report".

With the promise of my bag being delivered to our accommodation when it arrives, we hop onto the Shuttle bus from airport and check into our first accommodation Transit Backpackers . We have a "queen room" and it is entirely adequate - queen bed with a good, flat firm mattress, nice sheets and towels, a couple of bedside tables and a lamp, a chest of drawers, a small tv and an opening window. $70 per night. The overhead light in the room does not work, but we are not really bothered - we have a bedside lamp and we don't need much light. We drop our luggage and head out for an orienting Tasmanian beer while we wait for my bag to arrive. It is splendidly grey and drizzly. We walk a couple of blocks to the Duke of Wellington Hotel. and have a Tasmanian beer to orientate ourselves.

Note: there are two main Tasmanian Beers - Cascade and Boags - and apparently most Tasmanians have an allegiance to one or the other. We like them both, prefer Boags but will happily drink Cascade Draught or Pale if circumstances dictate.

Afterwards we head back to our room, eat the lunch we had packed for the flight (pickled pork for both of us this time, both with dill pickle and mustard and mine with a dollop of wonderful eggplant and tomato relish a colleague gave me for Christmas - thanks Mark!). We are at first perplexed by a very strange, loud, repeating "glunk glunk glunk" sound coming from outside our window. We hear it numerous times over the next couple of days and it becomes obvious it is coming from a stormwater drain down there but exactly what it is, we never discover. While Eric is downstairs taking receipt of our detoured suitcase, the overhead light comes on by itself (seems there must be a no lights prior to 5.10pm policy in place??) and we head out into the world again. We have word from an old friend that he will be attending the MONA FOMA festival at Salamanca that evening, so we wander that way to catch up with him. Along the way we stop to admire and phototgraph many splendid old buildings, some shabby and some very fine. We wander along the waterfront until we come to the Isobar - a pretty stylish, light and clean bar with a beautiful view of the houses climbing the hill on the opposite side of the bay. While we sit there we get to see a beautifully rigged timber sailing ship come in to dock, and the incredibly cute red "Captain Fell's ferry" chug home to rest for the night. We catch up with our friend (fantastic to see you again Tom - you are looking so relaxed and happy!) and then we decide to wander down to the dock and investigate the fish and chips in the sunset (8.30pm!). There are 4 seafood selling punts moored at the dock, one of which only sells fresh seafood and is closed. the other 3 all have wonderful looking menus and the prices are most reasonable. We decide on Flippers (not only because it is shaped like a whale). Eric has a piece of battered Couta and I order a piece of crumbed Trevalla, a fish I am always reading about but have never tried). I find it very unsettling passing money back and forth from the dock to the punt over a small expanse of water!

The fish is fantastic. The couta is moist, with a robust flavour and a little unexpectedly, a large number of long bones running through it. These are easily dealt with, though. The Trevalla is a tasty, firm textured fish which reminded me of Spanish Mackeral. We stop in for a quick look at the Lark distillery (didn't see our Junior Masterchef though) then wandered our weary bones back towards our backpackers. The streets are surprisingly deserted, with only a rowdy but unthreatening group of teenagers every now and then. We make a final beer stop at the Shamrock Hotel in Liverpool Street. This turns out to be a friendly,old fashioned, intimate little "local" style pub with husband/wife/daughter (I assume) team behind the bar, where all the patrons seem to know each other and where loud, good natured silliness seems to be the order of the evening. After a while a couple sitting at the bar invent their own language, and commence saying nonsensical things to each other and to us at high merry volume. We decide this is our cue to go to bed (and really, it should be their cue as well but we leave that up to them).

We stroll the remaining couple of blocks to our hostel and discover that the door has a key and a numerical keypad, which we were told nothing about. The key alone will not open the door. We try to approach the backyard from the left and right side, hoping a door will be unlocked around the back, but find both driveway gates locked. We return to the main door and start knocking to attract the attention of the other residents we can see inside, initially with very little effect but after a while, an obliging fellow approaches and opens it for us. We tell him we don't have a code for the door and he tells us it should be written on our keytag, but "probably no-one mentioned that to you - that happened to us the first night too."

Safely back in our room, we have a glass of red wine and fall into bed. It has been an extremely long day since our 3am wakeup, even if it is still actually an hour earlier here than the 11.30pm it says on the clock....

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Photos

Gorgeous Hobart buildings
I loved this building - such pretty glass! It glowed and sparkled in the sun like a faceted crystal.

Wonderful public art piece in the otherwise ghastly Elizabeth Street Mall.
The plaque says "Malcolm waits patiently outside the shops"