Time out in Tazzie

Whilst waiting for my business visa, I have spent the last week and a bit out in Tazmania taking in the sights. I also took lots of photos which I'll link into this post when I have uploaded them, and as always provide an album link in the "links" panel.

In my brief week I hired a Mazda "fun top" - a silly little car with a pointless convertible roof (it drizzles here daily). But it has a good set of speakers and a tape player for me to play my iPods tunes through using an adaptor, so it met my criteria.

I headed first to the old convict prison of Port Arthur to learn about all the nastyness that went on there. Then I went up the East coast and walked through Freyginuet (sp?) National park, and saw the beatiful wineglass bay. Onwards up the coast, I stopped off in a winery and then into Lanceston to restock on city stuff like food, pizza and pants.

Making use of the great weather I was getting I went via a caving tour onto Cradle mountain, which provided a great full-days walk, with lots of tricky bouldering in icy snow at the summit climb. This kind of strained my ankle, so the next two days involved a boat cruise around Strauhn and the west-coast Huon pine fields + Sarah Island, and some other short walks in the South-West National parks.

Finally, back in Hobart, I've gone on an "Airwalk", wandering around rainforests suspended 30m in the air on walkways, and tomorrow I visit the Cascade brewery before flying back home.

It's been nice to travel and recharge the batteries. I've met lots of cool people on the travels, and with Tazzie being so small, you keep meeting people again and again which is really nice. Plenty of Boags and Cascade (the local brews) has been consumed, although not too much as I've been starting out around 8am most days to make use of the limited sunshine (by 6pm it's pitch black) and opening hours.

The only regretable news is I discovered exactly where the legendary beer drinking pig (pay $1, feed the pig a beer!) was when I had driven over 250km past it. I debated a return journey, but prehaps it was best left as a myth or legend... reality sometimes doesn't live up to expectation !

Anyhow, look back in a few days to see an edited, photed up version of this post ! Back to work soon, assuming the work visa finally gets approved...