Brenda and Brent - Trip Diary

It all started out so well. When we landed in Hobart and walked to the baggage area, I noticed a sign with my name on it - held up over the crowd. Another Internet acquaintance - Tony Blanks - who lives in Tasmania, had come to pick us up at the airport. I know Tony only from another internet group - this time the Oldtools group - which is primarily concerned with older woodworking handtools. Tony knows lots about the history of tool making in Tasmania. More amazing still, since I had given him the wrong arrival time he ended up spending several hours waiting for us. He was still pretty cheerful when we met.

The bad news - Brenda's bicycle was missing. This was not really bad news - we had luggage lost before on this trip and it always turned up.

The good news - Tony took us and 1 bicycle into town, waited while we found a hotel, then took us sightseeing to the top of Mount Wellington. Here is a view of Hobart and area from the top.

The good news - Tony showed up the next morning and drove me out to the airport - if they won't answer the phone perhaps we should investigate in person. Well, the bike was there. Great! We could still head out to start our tour on Dec 24. Tony dropped me and the missing bicycle off at the hotel.

The bad news - when we unpacked the bicycle we found that they had driven a vehicle over the rear wheel. When we arrived in Melbourne from Kuala Lumpur on the way to Hobart, the Quantas check in person did not want to take our bikes in Air Canada bike bags. When we pointed out that we were traveling on an around-the-world ticket and all other airlines had taken the bikes in these bags, she was unmoved - not on our airline you don't. But, when it turned out there were no bike boxes, she relented after getting us to sign a damage waver. She obviously knew more about Quantas baggage handling than we did.

One assumes, from the delay in delivery of the damaged bicycle, that the Quantas employee whose job it is to drive over bicycles in bags was not in until the next day.

The bad news - it cost $230.

Ray Appleby himself signed this receipt - an official receipt we hope to use to collect from Quantas. A very nice guy and very helpful to a couple of Canadians stranded in Hobart with a broken bicycle.

When we got back to Hobart on January 17 and talked to the Quantas people about the damage to the bicycle, the Quantas rep was delighted to inform me that all record of the delayed bicycle had been erased from their computers. He was even happier to inform me that no requests for compensation would be considered if not reported within 7 days of the incident. I don't know why I keep making these people so happy, when I don't really like them at all.

• Tasmania is usually windy. The wind here is a bit stronger than elsewhere. We had experienced some winds in South Africa. The winds were one of the reasons we had not cycled in South Africa. Well, the wind is as strong here - often over 30 kph a lot of the time. One day we were cycling with a tail-wind and clocked the wind at over 40km.

  On this trip to Bruny Island the wind was a cross-wind, probably averaging over 40 kph, that blew all day long.

• Tasmania is usually hilly. After Thailand, which is really flat, we were unprepared for the hills - we had to adjust our expectations of our cycling distance possible.
• In Tasmania, nothing is open on Christmas day. No stores, no restaurants.
• Make that four things, in Tasmania the UV rating is much higher than in Canada. Even though it was cloudy most of the day, and even though we had been cycling in Thailand and spending time outdoors in Malaysia for the last month, we got a sunburn on the trip to Bruny.

It worked for me, but Brenda looked a little sad.

Everywhere we went in Tasmania the locals were friendly, helpful, and interested in visitors. We can't imagine a Tasmanian arriving in Victoria being treated as well.

We spent two nights on Bruny, collecting ourselves and preparing for the rest of our time in Tasmania. From here everything went pretty well. We had no more problems (other than Brent's rear tire shredding, but that's another story.)

We told our travel agent in Victoria - Loraine at Athlone Travel - about our problems with the wheel and with Quantas. She said she knew someone at Quantas in Los Angeles or somewhere like that. In early March she sent us an email reporting that Quantas had decided to buy the wheel! Way to go Loraine!

This is typical of many of the buildings. There are some bigger fancier buildings, usually banks. There are some smaller, plainer buildings - usually associated with trades. There are a few ugly new buildings - 1970s type aluminum and glass about 7 storeys tall.

The downtown is about 6 blocks by 6 blocks and has a beautiful harbour attached. A really nice city. And, just like Victoria, it has street kids pan-handling in the downtown street malls. And, just like Victoria, having purple hair, tattoos and various parts of their body pierced seem to be their main life goals.

They have restored some of the buildings. Restored is a bit misleading though, since most of the original buildings were wooden and burned down a couple of times. Some of the remaining buildings have had new wood parts added. Others are stone skeletons.

As well, they have a few very good displays showing life stories of typical convicts, along with some indications of the rigors of convict life. I suspect that many of these people lived longer as a result of being transported, rigors or not, than they would have at home in England.

The National Park also makes quite a big deal of their ghost walk, but most of the stories are of recent events, not things that happened during convict times. This is the first church built at the site. The roof has burnt off, but the walls remain. This building has a few ghost stories associated with it.

The more skilled had real jobs - woodworking of course being one of the more important, on down the line to just breaking rocks to make gravel.

This unskilled pair just sat around all day in their leg irons.

Here Ruth is busy preparing dinner for the weary travelers, while Paul and I are working our way through the local papers, keeping the women-folk apprised of the important events of the day. Actually Paul is doing all the work - I was just his apprentice. Brenda claims she is busy apprenticing with Ruth on the cooking thing when this picture was taken.

You may notice that it is still light outside. It is 8PM and still light and we are heading out to the ghost tour. How can you have Christmas or New Years and have it light till 10PM - it just doesn't work that way.

We appeared to be the only people still awake at midnight, let alone celebrating anything. These anti-podians seem a lugubrious lot - little sign of celebration unless they happen to be in a bar or a casino. They do almost nothing for Christmas either - except close all their shops to make sure visitors will starve.

You may be wondering how celebrating New Years fits in to the convict theme. It doesn't, I don't think.

That is a skull the Guide has on the table. The guides are a big part of why this park works so well. They are working through a prepared script - but seem to get into their part pretty well. I suspect many are aspiring actors.

At one point in his story about the dissection room he scraped the skull across the table - quite unexpected and quite effective. That is Ruth on the left, with her hand up to her mouth, not betraying any signs of fear at all. You can see Brenda's back - arms folded, no problems here either.

They have other tours with very professional guides that bring the place to life. The park is very well attended - there were about 100 people doing a tour every hour during the day we were there.

Solitary confinement was invented by the Quakers.

What we have then is a method of correction, invented by a religious order, that was used only for the most recalcitrant prisoners. Makes sense, right?

Of course, being a system developed by a religious order, it must include the possibility (requirement) of regular church attendance. Seems like a problem - men in solitary attending a church service. Well, not actually - you simply provide each prisoner with a seat in which he is prevented from seeing anyone but the person leading the service.

The prisoners were led into this chapel one at a time - directed to their seat and required to close the door between then and the next prisoner. Gotta give credit to those Quakers for solving this problem.

This is the view from near the top - you can see it is hilly, but the valley bottom is agricultural, mostly sheep and grains. The trail goes through this type of country for another few sections before climbing onto the plateau you can see in the background - they call it a mountain here.

This is a remote area so the road is gravel. It is also a much cooler area - people reported snow in the rain a couple of days before we got here. It is also windy - there appears to be a pretty steady wind out of the north west at this time of year.

The difference in climate means that there is little agriculture up here - just forestry. That means that almost all the plants are native plants - so very different from what we are used to in North America.

It also means that we had to dress for the weather - cool, windy, a little rain during the day.

Just like in B.C., the Hydro authority is concerned with building dams and generating electric power from falling water. Unlike Ontario, Tasmania never got involved with Nuclear power.

After cycling across this plateau, with the constant 40+ kilometre wind from the west, it amazes me that they have not gotten into wind generators. Tasmania could export electricity to the rest of Australia if it would switch from water to wind. These areas are so thinly populated there could be few NIMBY type complaints.

They could even remove the dams and let the areas return to their natural state. There was a huge controversy here when one alpine lake, Pedder, was dammed and flooded for hydro power. Unfortunately, the ecosystem up here is so fragile it would take many years for the native species to recover from the flooding.

It appears to be an unfortunate feature of this part of the world that there be a west wind most of the time, and that wind carry moisture. As it rises up the west side of Tasmania, clouds form. The clouds dissipate as the air drops down from the plateau, creating quite a dry region on the lee side of the mountain - just like that enjoyed by Victoria.

They say that it rains 300 days a year on the west coast, but is sunny 300 days a year on the east coast. In fact it is so dry o the east coast most of the year that almost all homes have very large cement or metal barrels in which they collect rain water off their roof for use the rest of the year. In these areas even the hotels use rain water. They all have boil water warnings, but most people just use the water with little or no treatment. There is a bit of a drought on now, with most east coast areas having water use restictions similar to those we have in Victoria.

Here a couple of fairly common birds, Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, rest on a grain bale (do they still call them bales when they roll the grain into huge cylinders?).

We left the trail here to head for the east coast then back south to Hobart.

You can see that it is sunnier here, but not a lot warmer, and just as windy. The wind here is usually from the east, not the west. The plants near the shore are shaped by the wind it is so steady.

This entire area (the brush within 30 metres of the water) is actually a penguin colony. The Little Penguins come back to their burrows each evening after dark. We spent a couple of nights out on the rocks waiting to see this, but of course it was dark when they came back so we saw very little.

It is interesting that so much of the animal life in Tasmania is nocturnal. You would think that means there are a lot of predators, but there are none. All the meat eaters here (the Tasmanian Devil for example) are scavengers, not killers. There was one, the Tasmanian Tiger, but it was nocturnal as well.

The Tasmanians and Australians who are visiting Tasmania, spend a lot of time in the parks. They often hike in and camp at natural camp sites - you can camp anywhere you want in these parks, but there are few services in the back areas. The trail to this bay was very busy, both with hikers just out for the day and with people heading out into the back areas.

The locals have taken sun protection very seriously - they all look like they just crawled out from under a rock. I was expecting sun-tanned people in shorts. No way. They walk around with floppy hats, long sleeves, long pants, hiking boots. Of course, the ozone layer is much thinner here and the UV levels are much higher.

Perhaps if we lived here year round, we might take a few more precautions against sun burns. These people appear to be so paranoid about skin cancer they now protect themselves against even sun tans.

Aside from a couple of Wallabies, these are the only wild animals we saw - alive. We saw most of the animals of Tasmania as road-kill at one time or another. Mostly Wallabies, who are reported to leap out in front of cars just before contact. People claim it is very difficult to avoid most of the collisions that do occur. Roadkill appears to be an accepted part of Tasmanian life.

Unlike Canada, where roadkill does not seem to remain on the road for very long, here it seems to last for weeks or months. Some of the roadkill is almost fossilized it has been around so long. Of course, some is pretty fresh looking. Not sure why our roadkill disappears faster than the roadkill here, if it does.

This little brown spiky ball sniffs around the forest looking for ants and things. It makes a sort of rustling sound that Brenda is expert at detecting. Most of the time it has its pointy little nose pushed into the fallen leaves, sniffing out insects.

It is pretty confident of its safety from predators though. If it does notice people around it may stop for a few seconds and roll itself into a ball, but it resumes its foraging very quickly.

These are regularly heard in the lowland areas - the laugh is pretty weird. They seem to sit around most of the day - I never actually saw one searching for food.

They are nocturnal meat eaters, but are too slow to actually catch any fod - they scavenge dead stuff. We did not actually see them in the wild, we had to go to an animal park. They feed them dead rats and things. The devils eat the whole animal - crunching the harder bits up and swallowing them whole. During the feeding the three devils in the one pen either crunched up their rat, or having finished chased the other devils around trying to grab more food. They run sort of slowly, but that may reflect a lifetime of captivity.

While I find something nice about almost all animals, I can find nothing good to say about these fellas. Not handsome animals, they also have a mean disposition.

Tony Blanks works in the Fire Service in Tasmania, the state fire service that is primarily concerned with fighting forest fires. He told us a lot about forest fires and eucalyptus trees.

Amazingly, some Eucalyptus species need fire to survive in the long term (similar to Ponderosa Pine in North America) because they cannot grow in their own shade. In Tasmania, most of the vegetation at all but the highest altitudes is adapted to fire to some extent.

In the right circumstances they grow as big as anything in Canada (not quite as big as Redwoods though). You can see from this picture that an old growth forest (a forest with fully mature trees) is unlike most North American old growth forests. Here there is a significant understory of other trees where there would be only mosses and ferns at home.

It is this understory that makes it impossible for the big Eucalyptus to reproduce - they cannot grow from seeds in the shade of these smaller trees. Only when a fire comes through and wipes out the smaller trees do the big trees release their seeds and the next generation begins. Most Eucalyptus forests have few trees over 300 to 400 years old.

Most native flowering plants and shrubs in Tasmania were not as colourful as this one - usually white or pale yellow flowers.

Like Fern Trees, these plants have evolved a stem that supports new growth. Unlike Fern Trees though, the Grass Trees depend on fire for propagation.

This area was burnt over a few months ago. The fires burned off all the old "leaves" and charred the stem pretty badly. It is however one of the first plants to recover from the fire, sprouting a new head of grass very quickly. The stem can handle most fires and immediately starts the regrowth process.

This one is an old flower stalk - we never did see a grass tree in exactly the correct part of its fire cycle to see the flowering grass stalk.

The fire adaptation stories of so many of the plants in Tasmania is amazing.

The leaves don't look like leaves to me - they look more like succulent leaves. It was a bush about 10 feet tall on the plateau near Great Lake.

Like so many plants here, when it decides to flower it goes all out.

This is the flower of the Banksia.

These are fairly common in most forested areas, usually a couple of isolated plants. Now and then there is a large concentration of them. When that happens, the area is also busy with Honeyeaters - birds specialized to drinking nectar from and perhaps eating insects attracted to these flowers. Brenda knew that each time we passed a concentration of these plants she would get a chance to take a break from cycling and read a book for a few minutes.

It seems to me that the tire failed first along the side wall. The narrow tear on the left actually goes around most of the tire. Then in this one place the failure widened considerabley. This led to the rapid tread wear shown at the top - the outside tread is gone, the green layer - whatever that is - is starting to go.

The Oasis places usually have a pretty good restaurant associated with the gaming rooms. Some of the best food we had in Tasmania was at Oasis run hotels.

This is a meal we got in Orford, a small east-coast town, in a somewhat run down hotel that had a gaming area. Pretty fancy fusion style food, with the fish sitting on top of the (probably 6 different kinds of chopped, steamed) vegetables. Almost modern.