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February 25, 2010
Greetings from Tassie,
Yesterday (Wednesday) we met our friends Gordon and Wendy Haywood and flew from Melbourne to Hobart, situated on the southern end of Tasmania. Only a short flight of just over an hour but a completley different landscape reminding us very much of the south island of New Zealand. We will be spending the next 7 days circumnavigating this small but very beautiful state of Australia. We picked up our rental cars at the airport and headed into town. While the temperatures here are typically lower than the mainland it was still warm (low 20s) with perfectly cloudless skies.
This morning we took off again with perfect weather to visit one of the most popular tourist spots in these parts - Port Arthur, the former penal colony where in the 1830s they built a prison to house repeat offenders - those who had previously been sent from Britain to Aus and had committed further crimes. This prison continued to operate until about 1877 at which time it only housed the elderly and those who couldn't be looked after elsewhere. Eventually it was abandoned and later largely destroyed by fire. Despite the spectacular location, the life of the inmates was pretty bad. The intent was to attempt reform in the form of hard labour, torture and isolation, something at the time thought to be the right approach but inevitably failed miserably with most who left the prison returning to crime.
We couldn't have wished for better weather this day with temps in the mid 20s and cloudless skies making for a great tour of this wonderful spot. Tasmania is considered to have the worse ozone depletion problems, even worse than Oz and we were told to be very careful and always apply the sun block. Today was a good example as even after using a number 50 the sun still managed to do some strategic scorching.
Tomorrow we are off again heading north up the eastern coast of Tasmania towards our destination of Coles Bay on the Freycinet Peninsular. Before leaving Hobart and if the weather remains good we will drive up to the top of Mount Wellington, an often snow capped peak of nearly 1300 m, and hope to have a spectacular view over the city. More later - stay tuned!
David and Barbra
