On the Bottom Half

Garggh Garggggshg Thahsfh

I think that's what a Warner Brothers Tasmanian Devil sounds like, but it's hard to transliterate. Haven't seen any wild ones yet, but I'll post a picture of the penned ones a little later.

As you may have guessed, I'm now in Tasmania! Hobart to be precise. I took a cheap flight with JetStar on Sunday morning, which Bruce so kindly woke up early to get me to. I spent the day wandering the streets of Hobart, soaking in a little of the atmosphere, then got a monstrous headache and vegged for the evening.

It's a very beautiful state, like the others I've so far been to, but more ruggedly so. The moutnains really are mountains. In fact yesterday afternoon, I was on top of one called Mt. Wellington, which features starkly on the northwestern skyline of Hobart. The peak is about 1200 m ASL and the drive up is really hairy! I wanted to hike the thing, but I was with a group of other travellers, one of whom had a car. We first drove a couple of hours southwest to the Tahune AirWalk, which is a suspended walk way about 30 or 40 m above ground in a sclerophyll gum tree forest. There were stands of swamp gum and stringy bark eucalyptus that were 80 m tall!

On the drive back to Hobart, we stopped at various little lookouts and walks, one of which featured a 'Big Tree' - a swamp gum that was 6 m in diameter, 87 m tall, and it weighs 405 tonnes. Big tree... From there, we drove back to Hobart via Mt. Wellington. I'm hoping to post some pictures of these adventures a little later, but the ease of internet access has now left me as I'm in hostels again.

Today was supposed to be a trip to the Australian Antarctic Division, but I was occupied with some other important stuff, so I'm going tomorrow instead. Hopefully then I can hit the Cadbury Chocolate factory, as I've always wanted to meet an Ooompa Loompa. Port Arthur's probably next, which is an old convict establishment, supposedly haunted... BOO! There's an interesting phenomena that I've observed here with the glorification of 'the convict'. I don't understand this because convicts don't usually factor too high on my 'to care about' list, so I'm hoping to learn a little more about it and why the glorification happens. There's tons of wilderness stuff that I'm looking forward to doing, so I'm thinking I might try to find a job and work here for a while.

Update complete!

posted by Kyle @ 20:02