During the time I’ve been in Sydney, I’ve become very familiar with its famous harbor that is seen in postcards and movies the world over.

But every year for several weeks at a time, the whole harbor is lit up like a firework. Every night, from the Chinese Friendship Garden to Darling Harbor to Circular Quay, all the way up to the Sydney Opera House, colorful neon lights illuminate the night. The city’s many tourist attractions take on a whole new personality during this time of the year, and I happened to be there to witness it.

You’re probably thinking “Hey Dalton, with all these posts about the Tasmanian landscape, why didn‘t you just stay there?” Well I probably would have, except that I have so much more of this amazing continent to see. And with it being almost winter in Australia now, I feel that I did the right thing in escaping the freezing Antarctic winds when I did.

But anyway, during early April I went with a tour group to Freycinet National Park, where I saw the famous Wineglass Bay. Here are some pictures:

After the tour was over, I realized it was high time for me to rent a car and go on some unguided Tasmanian adventures of my own. So I spent two days on the road, seeing what I could see.

To end my two-day roadtrip, I visited the Trowunna Wildlife Refugee to finally get some exposure to the unique fauna of Tasmania. But this photo journal has gone on far too long, so I’ll put a pen in it for now and save that tale for another day.

It’s amazing how hospitable everyone I’ve met is. During my stay at the Nook Backerpackers hostel in Hobart, a Japanese girl made a traditional Japanese meal for all the long-termers at the hostel and she invited me. The French workers here are all very friendly to me, especially after they learned I could speak their language. A Filipino I met offered to be my reference for future work in Australia and accommodation, and an Argentine guy told me if I’m ever in his country I could stay at his place and he’d be my guide. I’ve never met so many hospitable people at one place before.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity that comes from traveling that I haven’t seen many travel blogs mention is networking. When it comes to traveling, it’s very easy to depend on the kindness of strangers, and you never know who you’re going to meet next. I have a unique opportunity to meet people from all over the world in these hostels, from almost any country that I would like to go to, and they’re all so generous and hospitable. It’s pleasant to think that I may meet up with them again someday during my future travels, and that no matter what country I go to I can easily meet all kinds of wonderful new people.

How much of Tasmania’s natural beauty did I capture with my camera? Probably not enough. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of seeing these places with your own eyes, smelling the cold salty air and feeling the currents of the Antarctic.

Hopefully with this collection of photos, I can encourage at least one person to come here and see it for themself.

During my drive to Port Arthur we stopped at several points around the neighboring Tasman National Park, all around the Tasman Peninsula dangling off the southeast corner of the island. Like the Great Ocean Road drive, I saw the wondrous effects of nature when land and sea meet and are left to operate on each other for countless millennia.

Or in other words, I saw a lot of big cliffs and rocks. Check it out.

This last picture is featured frequently on Tasmanian postcards. It’s a landmark called “Tessellated Pavement” at Tasman National Park, on the shore of Pirate’s Bay. If anyone tells you that geometric patterns do not occur in nature, they are wrong. This formation formed naturally through weathering and through salt crystals collected in the bedrock.
Whenever the sea washes over the bedrock, abrasive sand carried by the waves is channeled through joints in the bedrock, causing the joint system to erode faster than the rest of the rock.

If you ever find yourself in this part of Tasmania, I suggest dressing warmly. These photos may look like some South Pacific tropical resort, but it’s not. A lot of these locations are far off the main road and difficult to find without a guidebook. I highly suggest doing a lot of research before coming out this way, you never know what kinds of wonders you will find.

Greetings!

To anyone who’s wondering where I am, I am currently in Sydney looking for work, and I’ve been here since the 15th of April. I had so many experiences in Tasmania and I’ve been so busy looking for work recently that I haven’t made a lot of time for updating my blog. As one might say, it’s important to live in the moment, especially whilst one is one vacation. But now that things have slowed down, I plan to finish the numerous blog drafts that I started weeks ago!

I had so many wonderful experiences in Tasmania that I haven’t talked about yet, and I am currently working on summarizing all the experience and photographs into tidy little blog posts. Look forward to seeing much more about the natural beauty that is Tasmania in my upcoming posts, as well as more of my commentary on my day-to-day life here in Australia.

During my stay in Hobart, Tasmania, I came across a group of backpackers that wanted to go see Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula. Port Arthur is the remains of an infamous prison in Australia and a UNESCO world heritage site, for it plays an important role in the history of the transportation of criminals by the European empires.

My trip to Port Arthur marks my very first experience driving on the left side of the road, which wasn’t nearly as difficult as I anticipated. While I was certainly nervous, especially driving through the city, I quickly adapted and it started to feel just like driving back in America, albeit while looking in a mirror. The group I traveled with, two Dutchmen and a Frenchman, sought to rent a car and drive to Port Arthur. Because I was the oldest, it would have cost less if I was the driver, so I agreed to do it.

Port Arthur is a world heritage site, and for good reason. What remains of the site provides a good insight into the lives of male convicts transported in the British Empire during the mid 19th century. Opened in 1830, male convicts were sent to Port Arthur to chop lumber in order to rebuild the British fleet after the Napoleonic wars. The old buildings were built along reclaimed land in a beautiful, isolated bay at the south-eastern tip of Tasmania, surrounded by tall trees and mountains and oceans on all sides.

Thieves and criminals from all over Britain were sent to this port to work the wood, and those that were disobedient were brutally flogged. There was even a boys school in the area, overlooking the prison. Boys from the worst slums in London were transported to Port Arthur to attend this boys school in the hopes that they could be turned away from a life of crime and be taught an honest trade. The boys school operated for about 14 years before the transportation of minors became illegal. The British empire viewed the school as a success – but no doubt the reality of it was quite different.

As for the men, the maximum number of lashes received during a flogging was a staggering 150. This practice proved ineffective; according to our tour guide, after one hundred or so lashes the nerve damage in the men’s backs would be so great they wouldn’t be able to even feel it anymore. These punishments were inadvertently hardening these men, and therefore it was necessary to create a different means of punishing the disobedient.

A separate prison for solitary confinement was built to punish the disobedient. The prisoners there were to wear a robes and masks that concealed their identity, and numbers were to be used instead of names. Sunday service at the solitary chapel was mandatory; the pews were built in such a way that high wooden barriers covered the periphery of the prisoner, so that they couldn’t see those around them, only the preacher up front and the security guard.

As one might expect, the practice of solitary confinement led to an insane asylum built beside the prison. The insane were treated quite well and could live out their days in relative peace – quite different from the infamous madhouses that were operating in London around that time.

Port Arthur developed such an infamous reputation, that a convict, after hearing about his destination, famously jumped off the prison ship before arriving, and refused the life preserver offered to him. The sheer isolation of the prison led it to develop the reputation of being inescapable, but that didn’t prevent people from trying. One of the most well-known cases was that of a prisoner who wore kangaroo hide as a disguise to make his way past the guards. The guards, wanting to supplement their meager rations, pointed their rifles directly at him. This led to the prisoner throwing off the disguise and surrendering, to which he faced the maximum punishment of 150 lashes.

We also took a boat around Port Arthur bay and saw the scenic Isle of the Dead. Everyone who died on the island was buried there. Officers, prison staff, and their family members were given quality grave markers with names at the top, while the prisoners were buried in unmarked graves down below. The prison priest reckoned that the men had lived such wicked lives they were going to hell anyway, so there was no point in honoring their passing.

After half a day at Port Arthur, we took a long drive around the Tasman Peninsula National Park. I took some beautiful pictures, which I will post in a later entry, for there were still more convict sites to see.

A few days later I traveled to the Cascades Female Factory, an accompanying part of the Port Arthur UNESCO site. Unfortunately this site was not nearly as well maintained as the Port Arthur site, and by that I mean it wasn’t maintained much at all. All that remained of the historic prison was three of the five plots of land and one of the original buildings.

What exactly is the Cascades Female Factory? Well, female convicts weren’t sent to Port Arthur; instead they were sent to the Cascades Female Factory at the edge of Hobart, beneath the shadow of Mt. Wellington. The purpose of these female factories was to rehabilitate female criminals in the hopes of turning them into domestic servants. Even though there wasn’t much of the history left in the buildings, plaques were placed around that gave examples of some of the women who were sent here. There is no doubt that this place, much like Port Arthur, had a very dark history of its own.

If you’re ever in Tasmania I recommend taking a look at these places and exploring the history behind them. I spent a lot of time at these convict sites, but the history is so extensive and many of the stories of these convicts have been left untold.

I’ve been learning how to eat inexpensively during my stay in Australia. Long term hostel-goers often cook cheap pasta or rice meals, and I have been learning from them to do the same.

My goal is to learn how to make meals that are tasty and nutritious, but also inexpensive and requiring few ingredients. While I would love to just buy tons of vegetables and seasonings and go all out, I am cooking in a shared kitchen and there’s only so much storage space for ingredients. Therefore, I prefer to go simple.

My breakfast will typically be a bowl of corn flakes or a slice of toast with honey or Nutella spread. Sometimes I have gone full British and prepared some beans to go with the toast as well. I will often take advantage of hostels that offer free coffee and tea, otherwise I will just pick up a coffee from the nearest convenience store.

As for lunch and dinner, I try to be a bit more varied.

Because it’s so easy, I learned how to make pasta here right away. My pasta dinner usually consists of three servings made from $1 pasta, $3 pasta sauce, $5 sausages, $3 cheese, and a $9 bottle of wine. So I can have roughly three meals for $21 Australian, or about $15 American.

I make a rice meal with similar ingredients as well. My rice meal is simply Uncle Ben instant rice for about $4 a package, all purpose seasoning, and the same sausages sliced and thrown in. Or if you want to go even cheaper, substitute the sausages for a $1 can of tuna.

If you’ve never prepared uncooked, linked sausages before, there’s a way to do it. Boil the sausages first, keeping the wrapping paper intact in order to hold the flavors in. Boil until the sausage turns gray, then remove from the water, remove the paper, slice up the sausages, and fry. It’s very easy!

When I don’t want to use the stove, I will often make wraps instead. I can make wraps for days with the tortilla wraps from Woolworths, lettuce, cheese, a half kilo of roast beef, and mustard. Sometimes I’ll change it up and use scrambled eggs instead of roast beef.

Or if I just don’t want to cook anything at all, Dominos sells personal sized pizzas for $5, or about $3.50 American.

The Woolworths in Launceston sold kangaroo sausages known as “kanga bangas”. I’d be very interested to know what those taste like, and I’d like to buy them next time I see them. Might as well eat kangaroo while I’m in Australia, right?

It took me a week but I finally arrived in Hobart! A large harbor town of over 200,000 inhabitants, this city is very much the economic and cultural center of the state of Tasmania. The mountains are sea surrounding the city are exceptionally gorgeous. I have probably made this comparison before, but southern Australia and Tasmania increasingly remind me of Alaska, and Hobart is no exception.

I have lots of pictures from my stay here. It’s said that a picture’s worth a thousand words, so like in my earlier posts I‘m going to be mostly showing off a lot of my pictures, to let them speak for themselves.

During my stay I learned of a park that sounded very beautiful. Always on the hunt for breathtaking sights, I set out in the morning to find this park north of the city center. After an hour hike through a park called the Queen’s Domain, along a path lined with memorials for countless soldiers, I finally arrived at the famous Tasmanian Royal Botanical Gardens.

The Botanical Garden looks like the setting of a 19th century Impressionist painting. Situated along the slope of a sunbathed hill near the sea, the garden is filled with trees and flowers and plants from all over the world. While not quite as impressive as the gardens of Melbourne in my opinion, I still found this to be a charming place where one might enjoy a picnic with some loved ones.

My personal favorite area was the Japanese garden, complete with meditation areas and trees found only in Japan. The plaque at the entrance described the history of Japanese meditation gardens and how they were built: the smooth stones represent permanence, the seasonal deciduous trees represent the fluctuating nature of the world, and the coniferous trees, which are less affected by the seasons, represent consistency. Lots of nobles had gardens like this in Japan, and constructing them is a centuries-old art form. While the Japanese garden here may dull in comparison to one that an emperor might own, it was still a charming location to relax under a tree and enjoy the afternoon.

Mt. Wellington is among the tallest mountains in Tasmania. Known as “kunanyi” in the Tasmanian Aboriginal reconstructed Palawa Kani language, this peak overlooks the city of Hobart and its bay and is celebrated for its spectacular views.

But my Mt. Wellington experience was quite different. I took the hostel’s free bus tour to the top of the mountain on a whim, on a cloudy day when I originally intended to stay in. So as a result, I got to experience a fog covered summit with limited visibility that looked a lot like the wilderness of Norway, or so said the Norwegian girl in my tour group.

The summit was well above the treeline in terms of altitude, and I saw a lot of unique plant life up there. I’m not sure what these plants are called in the pictures but if anyone reading this knows then feel free to let me know in the comments.