Tasmania

Scenery in Tasmania is fantassietic! We have been on the go trying to see as much as possible all week and have had no time to update.

We arrived here last Saturday and were met by Tony at the airport. He then brought us into Hobart, parked the car, handed us the keys to both car and house and off he went - isn't Homelink a wonderful thing, such trust! Tony and Val have a lavender stall at the Salamanca Market which is on every Saturday so of course we had to go there. I think it took us about 2 hours to have a look and of course relieve ourselves of some dollars. Hobart is a nice city - easy to get around. It seems to have retained more of the old buildings than either Sydney or Melbourne.

Opossum Bay is on a tiny penninsula about 40 minutes from Hobart. The views are beautiful when the sun is shining. Unfortunately, on Sunday, there was little to be seen but mist and rain and Tony's plans to showcase Mount Wellington from halfway up Mount Nelson came to nothing!

Monday was better! We headed off to do the touristy bit about convicts in Port Arthur taking in some scenery on the way. This was a very interesting trip - most of the roads and bridges were built by convicts, a fair few of whom were Irish. The British influence on the whole of the island is very obvious and particularly at Port Arthur Historic Site. Our tour included the museums, all the remaining historic buildings and a cruise of the bay where there is the Isle of the Dead - the convict cemetery - and Point Puer Boys' Prison. If you were a convict in Port Arthur, punishment for misdemeanours was definitely on the cards, reward was also a possibility but convicts were more often punished than rewarded! It is described as "a machine to grind men honest"!

In the museum we were each given a playing card to associate us with a particular convict. I was Charles Hogan, hairdresser, 27, from Stanstead, Essex, England, convicted July 1877 for picking pockets. I was sentenced to transportation for life and sent to Port Arthur to mend my drunken ways! I was put to work in the cookhouse and became a barber and hairdresser, the conditions there making it desirable to have short hair - lice! Fortunately, I was never punished while at Port Arthur nor did I have to work in quarry, timber or chain gangs. After leaving the settlement I worked as a leech gatherer in the hospital in Hobart - was the latter not worse than the former?

Jim was much more fortunate - he wasThomas Dickinson who was an overseer, a little lord in his own kingdom! He was described as being good at escaping which I thought was interesting as he didn't really escape. In fact it was extremely difficult to escape as the Tasman Penninsula is connected to Tasmaia by a very narrow strait called Eaglehawk Neck which was guarded by ferocious dogs. The only means of escape was by swimming and convicts were persuaded that the seas were shark-infested!

There were many interesting features on our journey to Port Arthur. At Eaglehawk Neck there was a tesselated pavement. This is a bit like the Giant's Causeway, only not 3 dimensional. It is formed by the erosion of the different kinds of rocks deposited after the ice age. We also saw the Tasman Blowhole, the Tasman Arch and the Tasman Devil's kitchen. The whole journey there is very scenic. I tried to add photos as proof but it takes forever here and I have to pack for the next leg of our journey. We fly to Auckland this morning. More whenever I get the time and the facilities!