Tasmania

October 17-22

We arrived in our final country before heading back to the United States. Round two of Australia! This time we started in the southern most part – Tasmania – which is an island state of Australia. Tasmania was originally settled by the British as a penal settlement in 1803.

There are some cool animals in Tasmania. We didn’t get any photos, but we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a few of them. So all of the below pictures are hijacked from google images.

Wombats – they’re about three foot long with stubby tails and the google picture is pretty cute. We didn’t see any in real life, but Tasmanians loves their wombats. There were statues of them and habitat groups raising funds for them everywhere we went.

Platypuses – Michael saw one of these swim by while we were fly fishing. Apparently you only find platypuses in the wild in Australia (including Tasmania). Also, platypuses are the only mammals that lay eggs instead of having a live birth. I thought live birth was a requirement for mammals. Apparently it’s not. To be a mammal you have to have a neocortex, hair, and mammary glands. The neocortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for sensory perception, cognition, certain types of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language. The more you know…

Wallabies – the term wallaby is an informal name for any macropod that is smaller than a kangaroo. Michael saw one of these while we were driving with our fishing guide.

Tasmanian devils – unfortunately we didn’t get to see any of these.

I know, I know… but the joke is just too easy and too funny. Plus the cartoon version is much cuter that the real deal:

As mentioned, we got out of the city one day to do some fly fishing at Arthur’s Lake with our trusty guide, Glenn. There is hope that we may be able to get a few more pictures from that day, but for now we’re only working with this:

We should have gone fishing in New Zealand but the timing didn’t work out. So instead we had Glenn take us out on a pretty unsuccessful trip. It was a good chance for me to work on my casting. Lots of practice. Lots of casting. Not a single bite. Plus the weather was pretty cool and even though we had waders on we were chilled early on. But Glenn was a really interesting guy who had some great stories about living in Tasmania and fishing in Tasmania. I think we’re both glad we did it and it was great being more intimately involved in nature, but we both were pretty willing to head back into the city at the end of that day.

About 40 percent of Tasmania’s population lives in Hobart which is the state capital. This is also where we stayed for most of our visit. We loved Hobart.

It had great seafood, a cool harbor vibe and the largest market in Australia every Saturday which we were pumped to check out.

I wish I could say that Michael bought that hat. We didn’t buy anything too crazy, but we did do some replacement shopping. Michael got new jeans and new casual shoes and I got a new purse. The past year had done a number on this poor purse. With broken clasps and broken zippers, it was no longer the super safe and secure travel purse that I started this journey with. Plus I spilled a bunch of sour cream on it which is just really gross.

Thank you for your service.

Besides the market and the harbor, I’d like to give a shout out to two amazing things from the city.

1. The Cathedral Church of St. David which was just beautiful.

2. This spicy Aztecan hot chocolate. It was good enough we went back and bought a package to bring home with us.

We originally were planning on spending half our time in Hobart and half in wine country up the Eastern coast, but we loved Hobart enough that we only spent one night on the coast. That gave us a chance to pick up some fresh mussels and cook in our airbnb. Now, we didn’t have the best kitchen set up. But we MacGyver’d the entire situation and ended up using this hot pan to steam the mussels and cook the pasta pasta. Plus we grilled a bit of fresh salmon.

It was really delicious and quite a feat with the tools Michael had available to him.

Besides our delicious mussels, we also visited a couple of wineries. The best stop was Pooley where we really enjoyed the rieslings.

One of the best parts of the Tasmanian wineries was this guy landing on our windshield:

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He must have come over to check out the great music.

We stayed that one night up in Coles Bay in the Freycinet National Park which we explored just a bit the next morning before heading back to the city.

Here’s me enjoying a drive through the park while Michael is getting killed by the hills on his long run.

The state of Tasmania actually includes the main island along with 334 surrounding islands. We visited one of those islands – Bruny Island. Is anyone else nervous about how easy it would be for me to drive our rental car right into the sea?

After the short ferry ride we were able to enjoy the beauty of this island…

… and the oysters:

Besides eating all of the seafood, we also took some time to check out the MONA.

The Museum of Old and New Art is just a 30 minute ferry ride from the main harbor in Hobart. It is a mostly underground art museum that is pretty controversial. Having been to a few modern art museums, I don’t typically get that scandalized by modern art any more. Usually there is a lot of nudity, often for nudity’s sake, which I don’t think is clever. And then usually there are few exhibits that I think are really interesting. The MONA did have some things that were truly grotesque and shocking. Like this:

This piece is called Cloaca and it is a digestive system. The word “cloaca” is Latin for sewer. The museum apparently feeds the machine food twice a day, the food works its way through machine as food would work its way through a human’s stomach and intestines, and then the machine poops once a day. I didn’t get too close. It smelled terrible and we didn’t wait to see it poop. This falls into the category of “art” that I don’t understand. I just do not get the purpose.

That said, they had some cool stuff, like this machine that tracks a person’s heartbeat and then shows the heartbeat as flashing lights.

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I also liked these:

Random bowl on a chair with goldfish and a huge knife:

A lot of the art was interactive including an exhibit by Jane Baker called The Inward Eye – A Psychoacoustic Journey. It dealt a lot with how you hear and how you process sound. I think.

This exhibit was cool:

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The words are chosen based on words that have the most hits on the internet during a certain period of time.

Then we had several rooms with lights and strobes and other anxiety and aneurism inducing art.

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The below exhibit was just huge pools of motor oil. You know you shouldn’t touch it, but you just want to put your finger in it so bad. It is just so smooth and perfect.

Somehow we both walked away without any oil on our clothes.

And then the main event!

At the bar they had this roulette machine that chooses a beer for you. Seven of the beers come from the same brewery, while the eighth beer is the “bad” beer, which in this case is a Fosters. Australian for beer. Too funny to pass up, Michael took it for a spin.

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That definitely put a light ending on an odd day at the museum.

It was definitely worth a visit out to the MONA island, but modern art makes me tired.

We did get a great travel reminder while on the MONA ferry from one of our favorite people: