We arrived in Hobart,
Tasmania a little before dawn. As the ship tied up to the dock and the sun rose
over the Tasmanian hills a children’s choir from Hobart
serenaded us with Australian (ie. British) songs. It is only appropriate that young children should have been forced out of
their beds in the middle of the night in order to provide us with a brief interlude of entertainment. Actually, the Hobartians
know a good thing when they see it…..this is our last stop in Australia,
so our Australian money is of no further use to us and people are spending their Australian dollars like….well, I would
say like drunken sailors, but a that would be an understatement….spending like drunken cruisers is more like it. We
were wandering about the town saying “I have $80 AUS what can I buy for that?”. We finally settled on a t-shirt
(Pam’s), an Australian hat (mine), a bottle of Wolfe Blass Australian champagne (ours), a book written by a local Tasmanian
author and personally inscribed by him to Pam that was being sold in the Salamanca Market….think upscale flea market
(Pam’s) and a few bottles of Cascade Lager….the oldest brewery in Australia (mine).
Our tour consisted of a
trip to Richmond, Tasmania….a modestly cute little town in the hills outside Hobart….it’s main claim to
fame is that it has the oldest jail (spell that as Gaol) in Australia and that the town clock was misappropriated from another
town in England…..apparently the clock was built for Richmond, England a suburb of London, but a little mix-up in the
shipping instructions had the clock delivered to Richmond, Tasmania and once they had possession of the clock they just decided
to keep it. After learning of all the glories of Richmond we headed out to the Bonorong Wildlife Park….where the wildlife
had a little more life in them than the wildlife in Melbourne….at least they weren’t all hiding in the shade.
The tour guide kept telling us of all the deadly things in local environment, but we told him this was our 10th
day in Australia and we’d heard
all the stories of snakes and spiders and things that go bump in the night before. He seemed truly disappointed….the
Aussies take great pride in the fatal nature of their country…..in fact, the definitive history of Australia by Robert Hughes (which I’m reading on this
trip) is titled: The Fatal Shore.
….but again I digress…the
Bonorong Wildlife Park was fairly interesting. You get to see many Australian species and a whole lot
of kangaroos. But one quality moment was while watching one of the park employees (a young attractive female employee) handle
a wombat. She got bit by the creature…not too bad, but still a bite by a wild animal….she acted like it was nothing…”no
problems, I’m used to the little bites”. But 10 minutes later we saw her at the park snack bar talking to another
employee (also female), where she said “the little Wally gave me a right proper nip”…..to which her companion
replied “Oh, yeah, you should see the bit of a nip that I got yesterday”….which escalated into a ‘you
show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ contest of each one pulling up a trouser leg or a sleeve to display their
bite marks. I suspect that with a little encouragement and maybe a pint of beer, the two ladies would have stripped to their
knickers in order to prove which one was the most wombat-bitten woman at the park. The Aussies do like a bit of competition.
As I type this we are sailing
out of Hobart, Tasmania into the Tasman
Sea and after two days at sea will be in the Fjordlands of New Zealand. We just felt a few bumps in the ocean…..hopefully,
that is not the start of a rough night at sea.
….more later as time
permits.
