Tasmanian sojourn

I had a picture in my head of Tasmania based on my mother’s frequent and fond references to her stop there on her way to (or from, I’m not sure which) the war but in reality it was quite different than I imagined. It was much larger — both the city of Hobart and the island itself — and not as green. But we liked it. We took a day long bus trip which enabled us to see the landscape in general and a few highlights.

Although we didn’t see any tree plantations on our trip we did see evidence of them in the enormous piles of timber being loaded for China right alongside our ship.

The Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary gave us up close encounters with many of the native Australian animals which they were endeavoring to reintroduce into the wild.

The Tasmanian Devil turns out to be even meaner that I realized. They guarded them carefully so no one would get bitten and kept each one in a separate enclosure so they wouldn’t destroy each other.

The landscapes were lovely in this part of Tasmania  full of vineyards and hop fields so I tried to take a few photos for you out the bus window. The hop fields reminded me of my mother, too, because she told us how she picked hops when she grew up near Yakima.

We stopped in the town of Richmond to see the oldest this and that buildings but the most interesting thing there to me was a shop devoted to puzzles. I had only a minute to spare (one has to be back on the bus or they will take off without you and I had already had my turn at being the last one on earlier in the morning) so I popped in and asked the shopkeeper what was the largest puzzle. She pointed right at it and I was amazed:

I surely wouldn’t want to do that one!

Lunch at a winery was fantastic! I didn’t find out until later that it had won the award for best regional restaurant for the past three years. They deserved it. I’m sure that this was the most elaborate desert I have ever eaten!

At the Mount Field National Park Brenda and I did our best to walk faster and thus farther than the group so we got our exercise and saw two waterfalls instead of only one. I’m thinking we weren’t there at the ideal time of year for water volume.

The forest had many similarities to our WA forests but the fern trees were quite different and made for a lovely change.

The long ride back to the ship provided lots more lovely scenes and we concluded that Tasmania would be a nice place to spend more time.