Tasmania Part 1

We spent the day after NYE tooling around Sydney seeing the sites (and spent way too many hours in the Apple store trying to get my phone shit sorted). As per my mother’s demand we checked out the Sydney Opera House which I always thought was one crazy wave shaped building (b/c of the view always shown of it from the harbour) but it turns out it is actually 3 triangular shaped buildings that are completely separate from one another. Also, the outside is made up of a mosaic of white tiles (and I always thought it was a smoothed surface). The things you learn! It really is very beautiful though, and when we head back to Sydney before my Mum flies out, we are planning to take a tour of the inside.

The setting of the opera house is pretty spectacular as well. Not only is it a perfect vantage point to see the Bridge and all the Harbour activity, it is right beside Sydney’s botanical gardens—another Susie Mrk obsession: gardens.  The kind of trees and plants they have is so different from Canada. It’s hard to explain all the crazy species of flora/fauna: some trees are similar to Northern California’s famous redwoods, and others are totally tropical. The garden also just recently built a bat-cave (as in, an actual cave for bats to live in) out of thousands of stones--so badass.

We flew to Tasmania the next day, into its capital Hobart, which is right at the very south of the island. Hobart is actually closer to Antarctica than it is to Australia, which is why its weather is slightly psychotic. Exhibit A: mere moments after leaving our hostel in Hobart the day we arrived, it was so windy my sunglasses flew off my face and down the road into the middle of an intersection, to be immediately run over and smashed by a car! I was sad to lose my sunnies (the second pair of sunglasses my Mum and I had destroyed in 4 days!) but it was pretty hilarious. Honestly, I think Tasmania is the windiest place I’ve ever been, including NZ’s capital which they call “Windy Welly.”

Totally unknowingly, we arrived in Hobart at the most perfect time of year. There is a yacht race from Sydney to Hobart every NYE and all the boats were just departing the day we arrived, so it was pretty cool to watch them all sail off. Also, during the week surrounding NYE, Hobart hosts a big food/booze festival called Taste of Tasmania that showcases all of the best restaurateurs and wineries from across Tasmania (and has bands and weird acrobatic acts etc.) It is so deliciously amazing esp. b/c Tasmania grows every kind of fruit/veg/crop imaginable (including poppies for opiates that are defended by armed guards!) due to its “temperate” weather. And being a big ass island in the middle of the south Pacific, they have really badass seafood (of which Susie Mrk enjoyed, and I did not). We both partook in sampling some of Tas’ delicious booze however!

 Our second day in Tas, we left on a 3 day outdoor adventure to see the West coast and hike in some the National Parks. Tasmania is such a diverse place in terms of geography. There are parts of it that reminded me of Spain (dry and golden), South Island NZ and BC (green hills and mountains), Iceland (rocky, rugged), Thailand (tropical/rainforest) and then parts that were just completely different altogether and hard to explain. They say in Tasmania “if you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes” b/c it is forever changing. 3 seasons in one day kind of thing, and it seems to rain every 5 minutes! We got fun of a lot over the 3 days b/c we were constantly freezing which everyone thought absurd considering we’re from the great cold north! But damn, it was cold (and we didn’t come fully weather appropriately adorned, thinking that everywhere in Aus had to be relatively warm b/c it’s summer-we’re idiots!)

Our first day out in the wild, we saw what I thought at the time was a wombat, but was actually this weird animal called a paddimelon: sort of the cross btwn a huge rat/squirrel and a kangaroo. Anyway, he didn’t really care about seeing us and just continued to sit on his haunches eating his breakfast with his little hands.  He was so ridiculous.

We also drove through this old mining town called Queenstown which is certainly a cautionary tale for what mining and resource extraction can do to a place. Seriously, one of the weirdest towns I’ve been to: a combination of a Northern Ontario logging town, something out of a Stephen King novel, and the setting of a really bad B horror movie where everyone gets killed. Apparently back in the mid 1800s, it was a booming place and really wealthy, but they literally destroyed the entire environment by mining and now it’s just a strange barren wasteland. I think you can buy a house there for 50k (and considering everything in Aus is a billion dollars, that’s a pretty cheap deal, though you really wouldn't want to live there).

Our second day out in Western Tas was both my Mum’s and my favourite. We went to this truly wild and uninhabited beach called Trial Harbour. Honestly, it's the craziest wind and surf both of us have ever seen (no wonder it was the site of a whole bunch of shipwrecks back when England was shipping prisoners over to Tas). You could barely hear yourself think over the roar of the waves and wind. After Trial Harbour we headed off to explore some sand dunes near by. I can't think of another place I've been where the landscape around you changes so dramatically within such a short distance. 

That's all for now! I'm still trying to catch up on all we've done so far which is quite a bit. (We're currently up in Queensland being beach bums in the Whitsunday islands and are going on an overnight sailing trip before back to Sydney. My Mum leaves in 6 days-eek!)