Avontuur

Note: Click on images to see them a bit larger.

When we were in Australia ten years or so ago, we had some time in Sydney, then visited Cairns (including the Great Barrier Reef and the Atherton Tablelands) and the Outback (Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, the Olgas) before heading over to New Zealand. One of the things we’d wanted to see but didn’t have time for was Tasmania, so that’s where we went after Sydney.

We have so many great pictures that I’ll have to let Tasmania speak mostly for itself. We flew into Hobart early in the morning, and got to see something from the plane window I hadn’t seen before: a fully circular rainbow. Even at first glimpse, Tasmania is so beautiful that I was taking a bunch of photos out of the plane window.

After checking into our hotel, we had a tour of Hobart that turned out to be mostly a tour of nearby Richmond: a town with an historic prison (Tasmania was settled mostly as a place to house convicts) and a bunch of craft shops.

On our second day in Hobart, we had a tour to Port Arthur, which we’d thought was a town but which turned out to be the ruins of another old prison: if you were a criminal deported to Australia, you were free there, but if you then committed further crimes, this is where you were sent. It was a hellish place, especially the Silent Prison where prisoners were not permitted to talk, hear speech, or even see each others’ faces, but it’s hard to imagine a more paradoxically beautiful setting. On the way there, we stopped to go look at the Tasman Arch, also.

In Penrith, the weather changed every half hour; in Sydney, it was clearly too warm for winter and too cool for summer, but in Tasmania, you can see it was clearly and unmistakeably spring, with flowers everywhere, and baby lambs and ducklings wherever we went.

The pictures actually remind me a lot of the ones we took at Blarney Castle in Ireland – hard to believe this was such a hellish place.

Tasmania didn’t get any less photogenic once we left Hobart – I think I’d better continue on with a separate entry.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under photos, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.