Paul has gone home and I’ve been joined by Mum and her friend R. Together we will walk the Three Capes Track from Port Arthur. But first, we have the pleasure of taking the 1.5 hour drive from Hobart to the Tasman Peninsula where we will spend a night preparing for our hike. The drive…
It’s grey and drizzly when we leave Ross for Hobart. This weather is more like what I experienced on my previous two trips to the island. It doesn’t dampen our spirits though. Oatlands is our first stop. The Callington Mill is prominent and makes a natural stopping point. We tour the grounds (free) and buy…
We arrive in Ross late in the afternoon. Fortunately, the sun doesn’t set here in Tassie until about 7:30pm in October so we have plenty of time to explore. Ross is situated in the Central Midlands. The surrounding landscape is distinctly agricultural and the towns are tiny. Ross is old. By modern Australian standards it…
It was difficult to say goodbye to M&K after our visit. We enjoyed two wonderful nights of brilliant company, lengthy conversations and delicious food (K is a brilliant chef). We even learned some tips for feeding our worms and growing compost at home in our vegie patch. But say goodbye we eventually did. We cruised…
We’d heard about the tulips at Table Cape being in bloom for the spring. Despite being born in Holland, I have never seen tulips. Not en masse anyway. So we drive over from Cradle Mountain to see this spectacularly colourful display. It’s a little early in the season for the tulips to be covering the…
I’ve heard that Cradle Mountain only receives fifty days of sunshine each year and over 290 days of rain. So when we wake to sunshine in Sheffield our destination seems predetermined. It’s about an hour to the mountain from Sheffield and the drive itself is as stunning as the end goal. We rise from green…
I look out the plane window and am struck by how green the landscape is below me. Farmland stretches to the coast. As a Brisbane boy I am struck by how rural it looks. There’s no urban sprawl like around Brisbane. It’s all green pastures and patches of trees. I am excited about the coming…
It’s our final day in New Zealand. After packing our gear into the car we randomly drive to Bethell’s Beach on Auckland’s west coast. It turns out to be a magnificent choice. The beach is so vast the lifeguard tower looks like a small lego structure. Standing next to it we notice it is actually…
We wander around the CBD for an hour or two. It’s not an ugly city but it’s also not that interesting. There’s the same strings of shops and advertising that exist in almost every city we’ve been to, the same chain restaurants and coffee shops, and tourists carrying Lonely Planet guide books. Perhaps the city…
I wake to a heavy dew on a morning just warm enough to avoid a light frost from forming. I walk outside to look at Heidi and David’s alpacas and goats that live in Heidi and paddocks. While curious, the alpacas only come so close to me. But the goats are fairly well climbing the fence…
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