Down Under Down Under
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 6 ~ 27 Dec - Hobart and Bruny Island
We've booked a tour to Bruny Island. It looked like a good day trip from Hobart when we were doing our planning, but even nearly a year ahead, spaces were getting short, and Maria Island which we are also interested in had no tours left at all. The company we're going with, Tassie Tours, describes it as "Arguably Tasmania's best day trip!", so let's hope they're not exaggerating.
A minibus will pick us up a short walk from the apartments, and as we leave we're a little surprised to see a rainbow when there's no longer any sign of any rain, though there was a bit earlier. It must be some condensation that's too fine to form a visible cloud or something. Pretty anyway.
In the bus, our tour leader, Gino, gives us a bit of a briefing on the day ahead.
A short RORO ferry ride will take us to the island.
Our first stop is to pick up some local snacks at the oyster farm. We'll eat them later.
Bruny Island consists of two parts joined by a narrow isthmus called "The Neck". At the northern end, there's a steep hill with two hundred steps up to see the view in all directions.
At the top of the lookout there is a memorial to an Aboriginal woman called Truganini and to the Nuenonne people who inhabited lunawanna-alonnah as they called it before the European settlement. This is so important that we completely neglect to take any pictures of it.
Our oyster-eating spot is this rather fine beach. It's called "Adventure Bay" but I'm not sure how adventurous we're going to be.
So this is what we bought. I can't offhand remember the price, but Currensea tells me about every penny so I can reveal that this is £9.49 worth. You'd be doing well to get that price in Blighty.
I shall enjoy.
Jo and Meta, of course, aren't partaking of the oysters but still having a fine early lunch on the sand.
Ooh! Not a good picture but it's the first echidna we've seen. It's full zoom on my 100-400 lens and I think the auto mode got it wrong but I didn't have time to check or take another picture, let alone manually override, as we were driving past too quickly.
Another short walk, on the Mavista trail.
We spot a wallaby!
He doesn't seem too afraid of the two of us, perhaps because we're on our own and fairly quiet. We've got quite a bit ahead of the other walkers, not because we're trying to escape but because they are just slow! I mean, Amanda's idea of a brisk walk is most people's idea of a flat-out run, but we're pootling even by my standards and still leaving everyone behind. I doubt that he's going to be hanging around for the mob.
Ah, ok, we can take a hint.
The Bruny lighthouse is the furthest point of our visit. It's not the southernmost point of the island but it's the most extreme point that's useful for boats wanting to come in to the Derwent Estuary (and then to Hobart). We won't be able to climb it although that is a possibility at the right time.
You can see the sign at the bottom that basically says, "Not you, plebs!", but we can't have everything.
It was built by convicts in 1836, and operated until 1997. Originally the lamp was lit by sperm whale oil (a pint an hour, we're told), and cleaning the residue was one of the lighthouse-keeper's less pleasant jobs.
It's now been supplanted by a modern electrical jobbie on a headland a bit further out. If it's like other such replacements we've seen, I expect it's a tiny little thing that's totally useless as a tourist attraction, no matter how good it might be at warning sailors of dangerous rocks.
We'll take a selfie anyway.
And admire the local vegetation.
We will now mostly reverse the route we took to get here, but this time, we will be able to fully avail ourselves of the retail opportunities. (On the way, we stop for lunch and a coffee at a cafe so unexciting that I don't seem to have taken any pictures of it.)
The chocolate is expensive and we can't see any immediately visible justification. They're not offering samples, so we're disinclined to splash out blind. We buy a couple of small bars but nothing fancy.
Here at Bruny Island Honey, they are offering samples, but we're not the world's biggest honey consumers: it's very fortunate that its shelf life is almost infinite, because a jar lasts us a long time. Of course, by 'long' time, we don't mean five and a half thousand years, which is the oldest honey yet discovered!
The Internet abounds with tales of millennia-old honey found in Egyptian tombs still being fresh and edible, but they are just tales. This ancient honey is really little more than chemical and pollen traces.
The ice cream is nice, though.
Cheese and beer? Ah, now you're talking!
In the shop section, there's a bit of a queue, but it's worth it. We'll definitely try some cheese, thank you very much, and buy a couple of our favourites.
And, bold adventurer that I am, I will buy some beer without even sampling it first.
The company website is worth a look.
After this, it's back to Hobart.
Well, the tour hasn't been bad as such, but it wasn't really what we were expecting, which was much more the natural environment than the artisanal producers. Our next trip to Maria Island will be self-guided, because all the tours we could find were fully booked; but maybe that won't be such a bad thing after all. We shall have to see.
We get dropped a short walk from the apartment, and in the square at the front of the building, there's a stall selling boaty clothing, including some warm-looking jackets. As we're now expecting to be distinctly chilly in Cradle Mountain for the second part of our trip and I haven't brought anything much heavier than a fleece and lightweight waterproof, it seems worth some investigation. I find myself a woolly hat and a rather nice Musto Snug, ironically from a UK manufacturer! [And despite the cost of transporting it around the world, I later find that I've paid a bit less than I would have in Musto's own online shop back home.]
It's still sunny here, though, so I'm not wearing it yet.
Back at the apartment we have some wine named after its latitude and then we're going to have a little stroll around the marina and race village.
Just outside the apartment building, we look across at the lights installed for the Taste of Summer.
Then looking back up, we can see Meta and Jo at their window.
Into the race village.
There's not really a lot happening right now. People mooching around or watching a not very interesting video screen
The first yacht is expected to cross the line in the early hours of the morning when we'll be asleep. The race is not a simple first-past-the-post, although winning the so-called "line honours" is still a good thing. There's a handicap rating system that is used to decide the overall winner, and to my surprise, I find that it's a secret! Wikipedia's article for the International Rating Certificate, which is what Sydney-Hobart uses, says, "The IRC rule is not published, meaning the only bodies capable of calculating an IRC rating are the [rule owners]. This prevents designers from attempting to design 'to the rule'."
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