Historical Ramblings

Tasmania, 2!

I'm trying to get better about posting as we go along, so these postings will be shorter, but at least they're here!

On Tuesday, the day after the Port Arthur ghost tour, we did the full Port Arthur experience. Port Arthur was a penal colony for second offenders, people who had been deported to Australia for crimes in Britain and then committed a second crime again while here. It was a sprawling town-like area, with an enormous amount of industrial exports, including bricks and ships. It's now one of Tasmania's biggest tourist attractions. It's mostly ruins of old buildings now, but there are a lot of exhibits and museums detailing the lives of the prisoners.

From there, we drove up the east coast, winding our way through the mountains and along the edge of a beautiful, mostly undeveloped, coast. We made our way all to the outskirts of a town called Swansea. Most Tasmanian towns, apart from Hobart and Launceston, are very small. The ones we passed through tended to have a population of around 600 to 800. Swansea was no exception. We found a place about 3 km outside of town that rented stone cabins on the edge of a beach and, after popping off into town for a quick dinner, we had a nice relaxing evening enjoying being several hunderd miles from a real city.

The next day we drove further up the coast and into the town of Coles Bay. Coles Bay is, another, small seaside town. Its claim to fame, however, is its proximity to Wineglass Bay, a beach coastline that was voted one of the ten most beautiful bays in the world. It's completely undeveloped, as it is part of a national park, and to even see the bay you have to do a thirty minute climb to the top of a nearby mountain. It was quite worth it -- pictures will be up soon to prove it.

From there, we drove along the coast, stopping along the vary at various cute seaside towns and resorts and the like, making our way to St. Helens, a town known for its sport fishing and for its location near the Bay of Fires, another beautiful bay so named because the early settlers saw it lined with Aboriginal fires.

From there, we heading toward Launceston, and spent Friday night and Saturday night in Launceston, the second largest city on the island, visiting the waterfront and the local gorge. Sunday, we left Launceston and headed to the North of Tasmania, following a route that's listed in the guidebook as a 'foodies paradise'. Along the roads are a number of small organic food stores and farms. Along the way, we got to visit a cheese factory, a salmon farm, and a honey store. We ended our drive in the small town of Stanely, (another) quaint seaside town, this one bordered by a large volcanic rock formation known as "The Nut". We hiked up "The Nut" this morning, and are now in the town of Burnie as a stopover on our way down to Cradle Mountain, about an hour and a half south of here.

More to come!