Tassie Trip Tales

Australians call Tasmania “Tassie”, which rhymes with “lassie”, not “snazzy”. Linguists would likely refer to this construction as typical of the “Australian diminutive”. Other examples: they call breakfast “breakie”, Hells Angels are called “bikies”, men with a half set of teeth and diesel breath are “truckies”, and their back teeth are “chompies”. OK, I made up the last one.

But I digress. We have been either working, saying good bye, or relocating seven days a week for several months, and we realized the only way we would actually wind down was to take off for a couple days and get away from everything. After checking on the cheapest weekend flights anywhere in Australia, Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, clocked in at the cheapest and so that’s where we were off to. This is not our “Tasmania trip”. We heard you need a minimum of a week (in fact closer to 2-3 weeks) to see Tasmania and our experience definitely confirmed this advice. We just needed to get out of town and see a little of our new country.

Vacation starts early: we had to be up by 4:30 AM Saturday to get to the Skybus to the airport in time to catch our 6:45 flight. We flew Jetstar, which is Qantas’ low cost airline. Planes reminded me of Sun Country, right down to the leather seats and orange colors. Flight was uneventful for, oh, the first 10 minutes. Then a guy two rows behind us had a heart attack. While the crew and a doctor-passenger were attending to him, another passenger had a heart attack about 10 rows in front of us. There was running, screaming, and multiple oxygen tanks but no beverage/ food service. Despite hundreds of flights between us we have never experienced an in-flight medical emergency – but the odds decided to catch up all at once. The good thing about the flight to Hobart is it’s only 45 minutes in the air, so the fastest course of action was to keep flying. When we landed the EMTs came on, but everyone looked pretty casual and they let us off right away, so my guess is the two people are OK. In all honesty, hats off to Jetstar for handling it all so well.

One things every guidebook says to do in Hobart is go to the Salamanca Market on the harbor, which is held each Saturday morning. Lucky for us our hotel was right on Salamanca Place, so after dropping bags we were right there. The market was pretty cool – lots of local artwork, especially carved wood products. Flying over Tasmania the first thing you notice is how heavily forested it is, and at the market you realize they’ve figured out how to create beautiful everyday items out of all the different trees.

Guidebooks describe Salamanca Market as "funky". Presumably they say that because of the arts and crafts, although as we sat in an outdoor pub and watched the organic food stand yards away, the odors were not just of the apples and locally grown vegetables. Apparently the rejection of pesticides and caged fowl also involves the rejection of such capitalist tools as soap and combs.

We also tried a local specialty: curry scallop pies. Matt verdict: delicious! Marlys verdict: disgusting!

After a few hours at the market it was time for lunch so we took friends’ advice and went to the floating fish shops. In the harbor there are 6 boats tied up, each one with a walk up window and a menu for takeaway. We chose the one called “Flippers”. Marlys, a bit gun shy after the scallop pie episode, stayed with fish and chips. Matt went with the “Bag of Treats”: two each of scallop, crab, garlic prawn, prawn cutlet, calamari, and “seafood bites”, which as near as we can tell is a sort of aquatic mystery meat.

We needed to walk all the food so we went up to the Botanical Gardens, about a mile and half away. When I say up, I mean that literally – from harbor to garden that is the only direction. The gardens were so-so. There are some beautiful areas, but it is still early spring so a lot of blooms and flowers aren’t out yet. The tulips were gorgeous and there were great views of the Derwent River and ocean.

When it was time to leave, we were tired of walking so we went to catch the bus back to town. Interestingly, during the two hours spent at the garden they put up a sign at the bus stop saying, in effect, “This bus line shuts down forever at 5 PM today.” We were there at 4:55 and were a little concerned, as we were a little tired and didn’t relish the though of walking back to town with night falling and the temperatures dipping (despite being down hill). Luckily, the very last bus ever (they were quite clear about this) showed up and because we were the only ones on board, we had the honor of being the last two people to ride it. Ever. As his only passengers, the driver spent the whole ride looking back and talking to us as he careened back down to the harbor area. Helpful travel hint for those of you going to Hobart in the future: if your guidebook says take the #18 to or from the Botanical Gardens – it’s out of date.

Leaving the bus alive we decided to go to Australia’s oldest pub, the Hope and Anchor, which opened in 1807. A pub the guidebooks say is ‘not to be missed’. Well, we missed it. The Hope and Anchor is now without hope - there was a simple printed sign saying “closed” on every window. Disappointed, we walked a block to Montgomery Hotel for our pint (nb: In Australia there are hotels and there are hotels. I’ll explain the difference one of these days). While having our Cascade Premium (brewed in Hobart) someone came in and announced the Myers store was on fire.

Myers is the Australian equivalent to Macy’s. There is one downtown in every major city, and they are true department stores. The one in Hobart was in an 1836 building and apparently quite beautiful. I say “apparently” because the day we were there it burned to the ground. We never went closer than a few blocks to it, but could see the flames roaring above the (admittedly rather low-rise) Hobart skyline. It was still going the next morning.

That night we went to a fabulous Indian place called Annapurna for dinner. All the books said try it and they were right about this one.

To sum up: two heart attacks, one bus line closed down, the oldest pub in Australia shuttered, the Myers burned to the ground. All in all, a good first day in Tassie.

On Sunday we took a trip to Port Arthur, which is about 100km from Hobart down the Tasman peninsula. It was a gorgeous drive, although there was maybe 100m of straight highway. There were magnificent cliffs overlooking the Tasman Sea (next stop, New Zealand) and endless bays and wooded fjords.

Port Arthur was created to house two time convicts or reoffenders. If you were “transported” (which is what the Brits called being sentenced to Australia) and then committed further crimes once here, you were likely to be sent to Port Arthur. It is an absolutely beautiful location, and after it was abandoned in the late 1800s the bushfires burned a lot of the buildings, so now the site is mostly these ghostly ruins. You walk through a church or penitentiary with all of its walls but open to the skies.

We were there for about 5 hours and it was not enough time. The museum has an excellent program on transportation (in the British penal sense), and there are guides and plaques all over the place explaining the various remaining buildings and there purposes. The most chilling building (and there were a few contenders) was the “Secondary Prison”, which was a silent prison. No one could talk, guards included, the convicts had to wear masks over their faces so other prisoners could not see their faces or communicate, and the guards even wore felt shoes to dampen any noise. The chapel, where prisoners spent a few mandatory hours each Sunday, was constructed so prisoners were each in their own box seat and could not see anyone else except the minister. The amount of thought and engineering that went into creating the absolute sense isolation was considerable – and apparently a lot of inmates went insane from the solitude. We could understand why.

Second eeriest place was the island cemetery. When prisoners, guards, wardens, or their families died, they were rowed out to this tiny island about 100m from shore called “the isle of the dead”. The prisoners were almost all buried in unmarked graves, and the island is chock a block with gravesites. You can’t help but walk over them.

While Port Arthur was shut down as a prison, it has still had a tragic history. In 1996, a lunatic showed up with several automatic rifles and killed 35 visitors and staff and wounded 37 others at the site. If you ever read a news report it is an absolutely chilling story. As a result, Australia went from some of the loosest to some of the most stringent gun control laws in the world. They have turned the café, where 20 of the people died, into a memorial garden. It is a very sobering place. There is almost nothing in the official brochures about the massacre (as everyone refers to it) other than to describe the location of the memorial garden and ask people not to query staff about the event – many of them lost friends or family that day. The web site does retell the story under history > 28 April 1996.

After retuning to Hobart we went to Mure’s. This harbor restaurant has great views and supposedly the best seafood in town. It did not disappoint. We ate some of the best fish we have ever had and, considering the quality and service, it was inexpensive too!

Monday was not such a good day. We found out about Lisa’s passing in the middle of the night, so neither of us felt especially excited to be on vacation. We went to the Tasmanian Museum to see their exhibit on Antarctica because most Australian research on the continent is done out of Tassie. Unfortunately, the exhibit was closed that day (see a theme to our trip?). Then it started to rain a bit and so we just spend a few hours sitting in a pub reading.

A flight, a skybus and we were back in bed by 9 that night.

A few final random notes about Hobart:

Cost: fairly cheap, especially when compared with Melbourne
Vibe: arty/organic/outdoorsy/nautical (Taos meets Sedona meets Boulder meets Mystic, CT)
Locals: very laid back and friendly
Definite to dos: boat chippies, Mure’s, Port Arthur, any of the countryside