Touring in Tasmania

My two full days in the Australian state of Tasmania I spent touring: one day to see the Port Arthur ruins; the other day out at sea looking for birds and ocean mammals.

During the period when England sent criminals and rebels to Tasmania, Port Arthur was were they sent one if you were considered very bad, or misbehaved as a convict elsewhere. It sits at the end of a remote and rugged peninsula.

Old Port Arthur guard towers

Port Arthur operated from 1830 to 1877. Generally, convicts sent there worked and lived under harsher conditions than elsewhere. Many died there and their bodies (nearly 1000) line on the Isle of the Dead just offshore. A bush fire in the 1880s, destroyed most of the buildings.

The boat tour traveled to Bruny Island on the southeast side of Tassie. The next land mass south of here is Antarctica.

Our boat was a so-called rigid inflatable, 12 meters long with three 300-hp engines. It is unsinkable, stable in rough water, and capable of 25 knots loaded.

One of the tour boats near one of many caves

In wind gusts the crew estimated at 80 km and choppy seas, we boated around the south end of South Bruny National Park. Lots of bouncing and sea spray--imagine the big slide at a  water park.

The shore is rugged cliffs with many caves.

This day we got a ringside seat to a forest fire started by some idiot hikers. (To put it out, they kicked the embers over a cliff.) The day I was there, helicopters were on their third day of water-bombing.

We came close to a small colony of New Zealand fur seals.

My hotel in Hobart sits on the waterfront. Part of it goes back to 1846. It lies among a long line of buildings constructed from the 1820s to 1880s.

This block of trendy Salamanca was built by convict labor in 1828 as a temporary residence for new convicts.

The city of 200,000 lies on both sides of a deep inlet where the Derwent River joins the sea. Steep round hills rise from the water, like San Francisco without the earthquakes. While the city is about the same distance (42 degrees) from the equator as northern locations such as Chicago, the area is relatively warm in winter because of the ocean. It does not go below freezing in winter and the summers are hot.