Blogs from Tasmania, Australia, Oceania - page 12

3rd Feb: We took the bus from Hobart to Port Arthur. The journey was pretty uneventful, although I did have to endure listening to the conversations of the other passengers. There was one older boke, who was trying to set up an Airbnb account on his phone and he was giving his mate (and the rest of the bus) a blow-by-blow account of what he was doing. My mate thought it was hilarious especially my face as I was sick of listening to him drone on. Also, I am not known for my patience and I really wanted to grab his phone and set up the account for him so that he would shut up. We had a quick stop on the journey, we went to Pirate Bay Lookout and saw the gorgeous coastline. When we ... read more

Our last day at Cradle Mountain National Park. We had high hopes for the day and really wanted to go to Hanson's Peak and Lake Rodway.However, when we took the shuttle bus down to Dove Lake the weather was really crappy, so we just decided to do the Dove Lake Circuit instead. Doing a longer hike, which was on a steep uphill slope in the rain did not appeal and we thought it could be a little dangerous. I think our bodies were still recovering from past exertions, too. A definite sign I am getting old. The weather was pretty miserable, but we hadn't come all this way to sit in the hostel, and we hadn't really spent much time at Dove Lake when we had been there a couple of days earlier. We started by ... read more

We were up early to head to the transit centre to take the bus to Cradle Mountain. The walk was quite slow going as we were like a couple of pack horses with all the food we had bought. We had stocked up in the local supermarkets as options in Cradle Mountain would be limited and very expensive. The bus journey took around three hours and we passed through a few small towns on the way. We were deposited outside the Cradle Mountain Visitor Centre and it was just a short walk across the road to our accommodation. We had a private room, I think we had just booked out a dorm room to ourselves, but I can't quite remember. We dumped our stuff and headed to the shared kitchen with all our food and made ... read more

Today is Australia Day, here down under. Like our 4th of July, this is the day the Australians celebrate their independence - kind of. It is also a very controversial day here as it means the day the British prisoners made Australia a country, but moving and imprisoning the many Aborigines necessary to create this country. Many here are not proud of it and will not celebrate. We in the US celebrate freedom from the British, but we have also a dark history related to those who occupied this land before us. My sweet Barb, ¼ American Indian, understood the mental conflicts. On a happy note, the fireworks outside my window last night were spectacular! Today we started with a tour of the Cataract Gorge, a river surrounded by granite walls. Over the suspension bridge hundreds ... read more

Today I will be catching up on the past two days travels. I was required to skip a day since our tour visited Cradle Mountain, another Heritage Site in Tasmania. We had absolutely no cell or internet service during this time. Yesterday we traveled to Cradle Mountain which lies at an altitude of about 4,000 feet and reminded me very much of an Alpine meadow. On the way, we were stopped 30 km from or destination with our road totally blocked by two large trees which fell on the road only a few minutes before we arrived. While our group expected to be stopped for many hours, to our surprise, one hour after we were stopped, two men in an SUV from a resort down the hill appeared with chain saws and quickly took the trees ... read more