Hobart

21 - 24 December 2022

View from our hotel room into Hobart.

Our 8:45 AM flight on Wednesday from Melbourne was cancelled, so we got a few more hours sleep and flew out at 10. We arrived in Hobart in time to walk around the downtown area. Hobart has an indoor mall that looks a lot like what we have back home. We had Pho for lunch and a very good Pizza for dinner.

Hotel view at night.

Julie and Anthony searching for Platypuses (yes, we looked it up) at Hasting Caves, alas none sighted.

Thursday, we drove down to Hasting Caves and Hot Springs for a tour of the Newdegate Cave. Julie was slightly bummed that we did not bring bathing suits for the hot springs.

Next we drove to the Tahune Tree Top Adventures. This sky walk was rebuilt after the devastating fires in 2019. The walkway is in pristine condition, but the surrounding forest is still recovering. In the picture above, Julie was on this cantilever thingy that just jutted out over the river. It moved, a lot, so she was holding on tight.

Platypus Walk in Geeveston

Next we checked out the Platypus walk in Geeveston, our tour guide at the Newdegate Caves said we had a 60% chance of seeing a platypus. We had a nice walk along the creek, but still no platypuses in the wild. We stopped for dinner on the way back to Hobart, and had a window overlooking the Houn river.

Julie and Anthony in the MONA

Friday morning we drove to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart. The MONA contains very sophisticated and complicated representations of data and technology as art. This was very challenging as we both like to create meaning from data, but the data here was overwhelming. Julie just thought it was weird, and not very happy.

Later that afternoon we took a pontoon boat to the Iron Pot Lighthouse. We travelled down the Derwent River, past Bruny Island. We went out of the river into the Tasman sea. Pontoon boat may be misleading, nothing like ours. First it was rubber, and second it had 3 350 Yamaha engines (grunt, grunt, grunt). If there were actual pontoons, you couldn’t really see them.

Feeding the Kangaroo at Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary

Christmas Eve, on the way to Bicheno we stopped at the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary. This is the best Zoo / Wildlife sanctuary we have visited yet. We saw tasmanian devils, echidna, wombats and hundreds of kangaroos (one of which Anthony petted, they like it under the chin).

Not much was open Christmas Eve, so we stopped at Micky D’s, aka Macca’s, for a hamburger brunch before our trip to the Wildlife Sancuary.