Virgin Blue pricing: I love the way that Virgin Blue does pricing of its seats. There’s none of this “here’s a deal that’s only good for 2 hours—oops, you missed it, sorry, now it’s $800” crap that the US airlines do. They sell x # of seats at y low price, and when x = 0, the price goes up. Generally, this means that you can wait a few days on purchasing a ticket and not get royally screwed. I feel so much less pressured by that sales tactic than the way that US airlines price their seats, which you need a PhD in economics to understand. Also, since GST (general standard tax, I think) has to be included in everything, the price you get quoted on an airline’s webpage is the price that you pay.
Friends from the US: Jeff and Yeva (Cisco folks) were in Australia for a couple weeks for work and were staying on LJ’s couch (or, more specifically, the sleeper sofa mattress, which they moved to the floor). LJ, Jeff and Yeva were supposed to meet Eddie at a rugby league game tonight, but through a series of snafus, including Eddie deciding that there was a game on that wasn’t actually happening and Eddie’s brother’s house blowing a circuit breaker, they never made it to the game. Instead, we played a couple rounds of Spades (LJ and Yeva won over Jeff and me both times, although the first time was reasonably close) and went to bed.
The first day: Today was the start of our great Tasmanian adventure. Our flight this morning (a QantasLink flight) was 15 or 20 minutes late, but it didn’t matter all that much since we didn’t have any place we needed to be. On the plane we worked out where we were going for our 5+ days here: a circuit of the country through the north midlands, down to Hobart area, and up the coast and back to Launceston to leave on Friday. (If you look at a map of the island, you can see where we went.) We picked up our luggage from the baggage trolley that brought it from the airplane (yes, we did get it straight off the trolley that came from the plane, since the airport in Launceston was that small—only a couple flights a day each from VB and Qantas) and got our rental car. Before we left the airport, we called and booked a room at a pub hotel in Deloraine (listed in The Rough Guide to Australia, our trusty resource for all our traveling), in the northwestern part of Tasmania, and headed out that way. I really wanted to see some of the caves, so we went to King Solomons Caves out towards Cradle Mountain National Park. The cave was pretty small and could have been pretty lame, but the guide was really cool and fun to talk to. He reminded me a great deal of Barry (a shout out to ya if you’re reading this) from my days at Glaxo Wellcome (back before it became Glaxo SmithKline). I totally geeked out and started writing mass transfer exam problems in my head, involving the growth rate of stalactites and the diffusion of calcium carbonate from water in a flooded cave to the structures. (See, Rob and Kristi? Even when I’m on vacation I’m working. *grin*) I was fascinated by all the research being done to try to preserve the caves in a more natural state, including a Ph.D. dissertation project on how the incandescent lighting is negatively impacting the cave formation. Then we drove off to Devil’s Gullet to see the scenic vista of the valley, which was stunning. *ASIDE: I’m going to be using words like “stunning” and “beautiful” an awful lot in this post, but I just can’t help it. Tasmania is a very wild and beautiful place. Mere words and pictures don’t do the place justice, but they’re all I have to work with.* We could see out over the valley towards where the sun was setting behind some clouds. Unfortunately, the sun was completely covered by the clouds but we still got some cool pictures. The clouds at the horizon were redder than I ever thought possible. On the way back down the gravel road, we saw a number of wild animals. Okay, only LJ saw most of them, but I saw the first couple. After saying that the rabbit we saw crossing the road was lame, we saw what we think was a Tasmanian devil. We saw another one (or maybe it was a quoll, which I’ve put up pix of before?) where the gravel road joined the paved one and then LJ saw a number of wallabies along the side of the sealed road. *ASIDE: Sealed is the Australian word for “paved” when describing roads. Bitumen is what they call asphalt. Unsealed roads can be of any quality of dirt and/or gravel road.*
Cradle Mountain National Park: We got up plenty early enough to head to the park—downstairs for breakfast by 8:30 or so and out the door around 9. (This pattern of getting up early is something that is not common for us on our vacations, since neither of us is much of a morning person. *ASIDE :At this time, the laughter you here at how much of an understatement that is—that LJ and I are not morning people—is our poor parents remembering the 18 years that they raised us.* The worst was our trip to the southwest national parks in the US, when we kept getting up later and later each day because we kept getting back later each night. We were getting up around noon by the end of that trip, which doesn’t leave much daylight to see things.) After picking up lunch and snack foods from Woolworths (oddly enough, here in Oz it’s a grocery store, not a department store, which is what I remember it being in New York), we headed out for the park. We took some really cruddy gravel and dirt roads on the way. Here in Tasmania, the roads are underdeveloped enough that even dirt roads can make it on the big map of the place. The same thing occurs with towns—the “blink and you miss it variety” towns, places like Ward (for you Boulderites out there) and something smaller than Beulaville on the way to Wilmington (for you North Carolinians) get a decent-sized dot on the map. We spent the afternoon hiking around Dove Lake, with Cradle Mountain as a backdrop the entire time. The weather here is rather odd, with the powerful sun warming things up greatly but the cold wind blowing strongly in the shade.
On the drive home, we saw the most beautiful moon—it was huge and just peaking through the clouds with their pinkish tinge from the recently set sun. I couldn’t get a camera ready in time, or else I’d have a picture of it. A similar thing happened with the Tasmanian devil we saw on the way home. We were driving on a B road (more about the lettering system later) when we came upon one on the road. We followed him while I was trying to get my camera ready, but he disappeared before I could get to the camera. It’s still really cool just to see them in the wild (and to manage not to hit them with the car). They look a lot like pissed-off possums with furry tails. J
Driving and Mount Field National Park: Today was a driving day. In America, that would mean having to drive for hours to get to the next place we planned to see/stay. Here in Tasmania, since the island is so small, we drove for only two hours, but we went from the northwest to the southeast. We ate lunch in a little town called Bothwell at a pub—the lime chicken was magnificent. *ASIDE: Pubs and hotel restaurants are the American equivalent of the local diner: food that varies from edible to really good for a reasonable price.* We spent a few hours walking around in Mount Field National Park and stopped at three waterfalls: Russell Falls, Horseshoe Falls, and Lady Barron Falls. (LJ’s a really big fan of waterfalls. I think they’re pretty cool, and they definitely are a challenge to photograph, bit I’m just not obsessed with them the way that he is.) We saw heaps of cute wallabies—four of them! The first two we saw individually in parts of the forest (they may actually have been pademelons, but I’m not sure of the difference between those and wallabies), while the other two were next to each other near a fence right outside a campground area. I think that the second two were mother and offspring, but the smaller one looked close to fully-grown. Wallabies look an awful lot like big, bouncy mice, but they have some very cat-like motions (like the way they put their paws to their face). I’m happy that we’re getting to see some real wildlife outside zoos.
Tasmania is a beautiful, unpeopled place. The major highway through the country is two lanes in most places, with a few stretches of three and four lanes for passing purposes, much like parts of I-70 further out in the mountains of Colorado. I really love this place. I’m glad that we decided to come here for our weeklong vacation.
Tonight started our multi-night trend of Italian food for dinner. We ate at a little place called La Porchetta, a chain place that was located on Elizabeth St. near our hotel. *ASIDE: Italian food seems to be one of the safe cuisines to eat here in Oz. A great deal of the various Asian foods—Chinese, Thai, Japanese, etc.—are too authentic here for my liking, since we’re so close to where the foods come from.*
No chocolate or fudge? Denied!: First thing in the morning, I tried to book us on a Cadbury factory tour, but (probably due to the Easter holidays) they were all booked up. I then found info on a fudge factory tour at the Female Factory Historic Site. The tour was listed as starting at 10:30, according to the Oct. 2003 The Rough Guide to Australia, but when we got there, the tour had actually started at 9:30. We looked around the site a bit—it was where female convicts were used to do various factory-type jobs, like sewing and other crafts—and then left.
Mount Wellington: Mount Wellington is the mountain that sits just outside Hobart. From the top of the mountain, there’s a spectacular view of Hobart and the bays and harbors surrounding it. We drove up Mount Wellington to see Hobart from above. The view was as spectacular as promised, but the wind was HOWLING up there, so we couldn’t stay long. I wish it hadn’t been so windy. I really wanted to break out the tripod and take a panoramic view of the city, but there’s no way I could do that in the gale-force winds. (I’m NOT kidding—the wind chill had to be on the order of tens of degrees, even in Celsius.)
The Tahune Forest Airwalk, also known as fear forged in steel: We headed down out of the mountains and off towards the Hartz Mountains National Park and the Tahune Forest Airwalk, a steel scaffolding suspended way too many meters off the ground. I was very apprehensive beforehand, and it only got worse up on the walk. The Airwalk is a steel catwalk at least tens, and possibly hundreds, of meters off the ground with sides that are probably about 1.3 meters tall. I was doing okay until I looked down through the grating that formed the walking surface of the scaffolding. They had covered it with chickenwire for better footing, which did NOT inspire confidence. *ASIDE: We came across the chickenwire again and again in the Tasmanian national parks, on the wooden boardwalks that formed parts of the trails we took. It’s a pretty smart idea for traction, but I just don’t see it as being a structurally sound part of a really high catwalk.* I was fighting panic from that point forward until we reached terra firma at the end. The wind picked up when we rounded the corner and got to the Cantilever, which utterly freaked me out. LJ could barely convince me to go out on the Cantilever, and even then, I stood at the end for only a few seconds. *Editors’ note: the Cantilever is a long steel scaffolding that is not supported directly underneath by ANYTHING, just like a cantilever. I wouldn’t necessarily have remembered that ahead of time if it hadn’t been for a talk I attended the week before on microcantilevers (again with the mentally working while on vacation).* During the walk, I was thinking about the Long’s Peak hike and realizing that that hike was much scarier (and that I wouldn’t have done it if I had known beforehand just how scary it would be), but the difference for me was that I wasn’t conquering any massive mountain or performing an arduous task by walking the Airwalk. An out-of-shape old person (no offense meant to all the lovely out-of-shape and/or old people I know *grin*) could walk it with no problems (as long as they weren’t afraid of heights). After coming back from the Cantilever, LJ told me that he was unsettled by it, but he knew he couldn’t show his discomfort or I wouldn’t go out on it.
Hartz Mountains National Park: The whole place (or what we saw of it, anyways) was only covered in dirt roads. After driving 8 km in, we got to the first lookout point, where we made the crucial mistake that would alter the course of our next 24 hours. (Melodramatic enough for ya?) I saw on the map that there was a waterfall only a couple more k’s up the road, so, based on LJ’s obsession with them, I suggested we go see it. Suddenly, a large rock jumped from the side of the road and bit the car! No, seriously, a couple kilometers up the road, the car was jolted with a large bang. I shouted, “LJ!” (much more out of fright than out of anger at him) and we pulled over. Getting out of the car, we heard the front tire whistling out air from a large dent in the rim. The back tire was banged up, too, but it appeared to be holding air. We looked back and saw a large rock on the side of the road that LJ had banged against, much like someone might hit a curb, only the rock had lots more sharp points than a curb. So there we are, in the middle of a very undeveloped national park, with few people around, on a bumpy dirt road in a rental car that is not supposed to be taken off sealed roads and is now broken 10 driving km from the nearest sealed road. We were in a bit of a spot, to say the least. LJ did a three-point turn and went back to the parking area for the first lookout, where he changed the front tire. (I took pictures, at his request.) We had a full-size spare, which made life heaps nicer, since we could drive on it with no problems. A car pulled up and I thought they were going to offer to help, but they were just stopping to see the lookout. (Stupid tourists. *grin*) We had to turn around and leave the park then, rather than waiting for the sunset (it ended up being overcast, anyways), driving back over the 8 km of dirt road to the sealed road. LJ was pretty mad at himself for hitting the rock and was concerned that it would cost him hundreds of dollars in repairs. We decided to wait until the morning to head to the rental car place at the Hobart airport, in part to see if the banged-up back tire had a slow leak.
More Italian food: We wanted to eat at La Porchetta again, but it was too crowded so we ate across the street at another Italian place. The lady there who waited on us turned out to be ethnically Dutch but she had lived in New York City for many years before moving to Hobart. That’s one heck of a change! She may have gone from the largest city in America to the largest city in Tasmania, but they are worlds apart.
Aussie kindness in action: Today we got up a bit late and headed for the airport. LJ put on a collared polo shirt and nice shorts, to play the part of the serious young professional with minor car troubles. (Yes, Betty and Larry, your son can come across as professional when he wants to. *grin*) Last night we had washed up both the car and the tire so it wasn’t so obvious that we were off sealed roads (although I’m sure that if they looked carefully, they could tell). LJ wasn’t going to lie about how the accident happened—he just wanted to give them very few reasons to ask how it happened. We went in to the Avis counter, where a young redheaded bloke came out and looked at the tire. He told us to drive over to the Avis maintenance facility nearby, where an older mechanic pounded out the dents in the busted front rim and mounted a new tire on it. Since the spare was a full-size, he left it on the car. He didn’t do anything to the slightly bent back rim. We drove back to the Avis counter in the “terminal” (I use the word “terminal” lightly, since Hobart is a pretty small airport—think the size of the airport in Jackson, WY, for those of you who’ve made a ski trip out there), where apparently the guy didn’t even ask LJ to fill out an accident report. The older mechanic had spoken to the young guy and told him it wasn’t needed. The young guy asked if he could put $20 on the bill for pounding out the rim, to which LJ responded with, “Whatever you think is fair,” while on the inside thinking that he really escaped a huge cost. I am SO glad that we paid for the rental car insurance, because I doubt they would have been as nice if we didn’t have it. If we knew those guys’ names, we’d be sending them Christmas cookies for the rest of eternity. LJ was MUCH relieved by that experience.
Tasman Peninsula: The car crisis now resolved, we drove off to the Tasman Peninsula, where we saw some really cool rock formations called the Tessalated Pavement (a bunch of rectangular patterns carved in rock near the water’s edge), the Tasman Arch, the Blowhole and the Devil’s Kitchen (all old arches or fallen arches carved by the sea). We left and headed up the A3 to Bicheno, where we’re staying for the next two nights.
Tasmanian road lettering: I said I’d come back around to this topic, and so here I am. Tasmanian roads are pretty old-school when it comes to how developed they are. “A” roads are the top-notch, best-maintained roads, what would be the equivalent of our interstate highways in the US. My guess is that only 5-10% of them are four-lane—many don’t even have the lane lines at the shoulders, or even shoulders. The one we drove up the coast to Bicheno was more akin to the winding mountain roads up towards Estes Park, Colorado, than a highway. “B” roads are mostly sealed, but both “A” and “B” roads can be unsealed. Our map showed an unsealed “A” road in the center of Tasmania, but what good is an unsealed highway? “C” roads are a real crap shoot and have an annoying tendency to suddenly switch from sealed to dirt on a moment’s notice. I’m shocked whenever we run across a four-lane, well-marked, divided highway. I think we’ve driven 30 km of that since we’ve been here, which may very well be all of it.
Parking Tasmanian style: At the trailhead for the Wineglass Bay hike today, there must have been only 30 cars in space for about 45. It seemed almost as if each car tried to park just as far from each other as they could without leaving enough space for another car. When we looked at the marked spaces in another car park, it almost made sense—the spaces were huge compared to normal spaces. Maybe the lack of people means that spaces don’t need to be narrow in Tasmania. We drove around the whole car park and came to the end, where someone had just parked leaving a huge space on either side. LJ asked the lady if they could move their car over, but when her husband came back to do it, he ended up parking the car even worse! We gave up and made another space at the end of the opposite row. (I wish a pox upon those people and all their non-parking brethren. *grin* They really piss me off.)
Freycinet National Park: I guess I should talk about Wineglass Bay if I’m going to mention it. Wineglass Bay is a very popular and reasonably famous view in Freycinet National Park, which is located on the east coast of Tasmania, in a really beautiful coastal location.
Today we did our first long hike. We spent almost 5 hours hiking, with a short lunch break in the middle. I had forgotten that the Easter holidays would mean that there would be lots of little kids and their families hiking, too. The hike to Wineglass Bay lookout and even to the bay itself had way too many people on it for my liking. The view of the bay from the lookout is pretty awesome (check my Pbase page to see for yourself). The water changes from pale jade to deep blue from the edge of the beach to the sea. We ate lunch on some rocks down at the beach. Hiking up to the lookout and down to the beach, I got warm enough to get down to one layer (a long-sleeve Capilene shirt and zip-off pants shorts—convertible pants are one of the best inventions ever!), but sitting still for lunch, I got cold and had to put the legs of the pants back on. When we started on the leg towards Hazard Beach, the number of people dropped off noticeably. We saw only a few other groups on the beach, and very few people on our last leg back to the carpark (only those people who passed us or we passed—none going the other way, since we were in the range where people did the full loop). We took sunset pictures of the Hazards and then drove back to Bicheno.
Tasmania rocks: I love Tasmania. I really don’t want to leave. The landscape is rugged yet beautiful and the people are sparsely distributed across the island. I keep calling it “the country of Tasmania” because it’s one standard deviation or more outside the norm for Australia, which is itself a couple standard deviations from the US. If Australia weren’t so far from the US, I would move here in a heartbeat.
Significant travel delays for the first time in Oz: Today our VB flight from Launceston in Tasmania to Melbourne in Victoria was late—1.75 hours late, actually. (The delay was longer than the flight itself.) Mechanical problems somewhere caused the problem (it’s always “mechanical problems”, isn’t it?). The Launceston airport is even smaller than the Hobart airport. VB only has this flight and then one at 20:50 tonight, while Qantas has only four or five flights all day. Thanks to the travel delay, we missed seeing the Twelve Apostles at sunset. The timing for sunset would have been just about perfect if the flights were on time, but that, sadly, wasn’t to be. We’ll still get to see them tomorrow, but during the daytime rather than at sunset.
Since today was Good Friday, not many places were open for dinner in this tiny little town of Camperdown, inland from the Great Ocean Road but close to the far end of it in terms of east/west geography. We got a pizza at a little place just up the road and took it back to our hotel room (which, by the way, was rather swank for only AUD$80 a night). This pizza was close to an American pizza, probably because LJ had asked for extra cheese, although there still wasn’t enough tomato sauce on it. I was very content sitting in our swank hotel room, eating an almost-right pizza and watching a rerun of “The Simpsons” (for you Simpsons fans out there, it was the one with Homer as Mayor Quimby’s bodyguard and the Mob milking rats for school milk). Sure, I could be learning more about weird Aussie sports like footy, but sometimes you just need a slice of home (one with extra cheese). J
Great Ocean Road sights: Today we drove the Great Ocean Road (or at least the interesting part). We got up and got some yummy rolls and chocolate chip cookies at a local bakery for breakfast. (Disclaimer: my parents DID raise me better than that and taught me to eat a good breakfast, so my poor food choices are no fault of theirs *grin*), some sandwich stuff for lunch at the grocery store, and headed out. We stopped at a cheese-making place for some cheese-tasting and then continued south to the road. I took heaps of pictures of all the spires and arches, like the London Bridge (which actually has fallen down, back in 1991 or so) and the Twelve Apostles (of which there are only really nine or so—not sure which ones are missing—maybe Peter, Paul and Mary? For my religious relatives out there, I’m only making a joke here). The lookout points were simply PACKED with tourists of all varieties, but most of them Asian. The Japanese, especially, take pictures next to any tourist site sign they can find, like the ones that tell you where you are (e.g., The Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road). I haven’t really figured out why they do that (maybe to look up the names when they get home?). I was unhappy with the numbers of people, much like at the Wineglass Bay Lookout in Tasmania (only there were a lot more here), although in this case I was prepared for it to be crowded. The sky clouded over so I wasn’t too sad that we were staying in Melbourne that night and wouldn’t see sunset along the road.
The drive back to Melbourne was long. We were a couple hundred km from Melbourne when it started to get dark and the first bit along the Great Ocean Road went way too slow—stupid tourists who can’t drive on curvy mountain roads (LJ does not suffer from that problem, having spent time driving in the Appalachian Mountains to visit relatives). We stopped to see a lighthouse along the way (I was planning to take a picture for you, JB), but the weather turned grey and rainy when we got to the carpark—which was still a couple km walk from the lighthouse—so we gave up and headed for home. Rain fell as we made the long drive back to Melbourne. We were getting all traveled out, so we grabbed Subway for dinner and just checked into our hotel.
Easter in Melbourne: Happy
Easter! LJ and I had a miscommunication
about when we were leaving Melbourne—LJ had thought we were leaving Sunday
morning, and really wanted to (he was sick of traveling)—so he wasn’t very
motivated to do anything today. I kinda
wanted to see Melbourne’s city centre, but I didn’t want to force him to drive
into town and deal with traffic, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to see,
either. We got a late start and did end
up driving around a bit on the east side of Melbourne and then had lunch at
another La Porchetta (the Italian chain we found in Hobart). After lunch, we drove out to the Organ Pipes
National Park, a tiny little park north of town. We had a relaxing, lazy couple hours walking around the park and
took a few pictures. We went back to
the car and were at a loss for what to do for the next few hours when I said
that I really just wanted to hang out in a bookstore. (That’s something that I do when I want to kill a couple of
leisurely, stress-free hours.) LJ found
a mall on the map and we went there to find a bookstore. There was a bookstore, but, unfortunately,
with it being Easter Sunday, only the movie theatre at the mall was open. “Starsky and Hutch” was playing, which LJ
wanted to see, so we bought tickets from a nice teenager who was thrilled to
meet real live Americans—she was off to DC for some youth summit in our
summer. We had time to kill before the
movie, so we grabbed the deck of cards that LJ bought for his dad (shh! Don’t
tell anyone tell Larry that the cards are used! *grin*) and played a few rounds
of Gin Rummy before the movie. * Editor’s note: Okay, so I realize it’s
a bit lame to go to a movie when you’re off on vacation, but we didn’t really
have any other ideas. By that time of
day, we really didn’t have time to go into to town for dinner or anything,
since we had an 8:30 flight that night.
If we had known that there was a game going on at the Melbourne Cricket
Grounds—saw the footy coverage later that night on TV in Melbourne—we would
have gone, but without any knowledge of that, I think a movie was an outstanding
choice. J* We caught
our flight back to Sydney without any delays or problems, except that our VB
crew was way too cheery and happy for a Sunday night flight full of kids. Since it was Easter Sunday, the plane was
packed with kids and their parents returning from holiday.
From what I read, Melbourne is really more of a place to
live than to visit. The Rough Guide
to Australia just didn’t have much interesting stuff listed in it for
Melbourne. Melbourne’s not like Sydney,
with the Opera House and zoo and other things, or Cairns, which is a tourist
destination with scuba diving and the rainforest. Melbourne’s more of a place that you go and work and hang out and
drink and live for a while (isn’t that right, Neil?). Maybe someday I’ll get to do that, but not on this trip to Oz.
Gooey goodness has crossed the Pacific: Krispy Kreme is here in Oz. Last night at the Central Station, coming back from our trip, we ran into some girls coming from the Royal Sydney Easter Show (a HUGE fair-type event held at Olympic Park for ~10 days around Easter) carrying a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. I was getting a drink from the machine, and when I came back LJ said, “Guess what they have from the Easter show?” I looked down and saw the distinctive white box with green dots and said, rather incredulously, “Krispy Kreme?” When he said yes, I was half-tempted to offer them a serious amount of cash for a donut. This thought leads me to:
Some things I want when I return to the US: A Krispy Kreme donut (or four); Bojangle’s iced tea; good American pizza (like the Old Chicago’s Original Seven or Meat Me); a Boulder microbrew (BJ’s or Mountain Sun); to drive my own car on the right side of the road; to see my kitty cat, Athena, and my loved (or at least liked *grin*) ones (you know who you are).