Sunday 18 January 2015
This morning we started with the “Farm Gate Market”
and bought some different types of mushrooms that we have not previously tried,
fresh apricots and other veggies – the normal green type of kale for Drew, not
the red variety I grow. After sampling
these we discovered that some types of mushrooms we enjoy and some we don’t,
and Drew prefers the Red Russian Kale to the normal crinkly green version. The
fresh apricots were divine!
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| Hope and Anchor Tavern |
We walked around inner city Hobart and looked at
many of the old buildings. It is amazing
just how many of the old buildings and their facades have been retained in both
the inner-city area and nearby suburbs. St David’s Park is built on the site of
a former cemetery – many of the head stones have been incorporated into walls
within the park, an interesting way of continuing its original purpose. At the back of the current Tasmanian Museum
is an old-style good lifts, presumably from its former life as the Bond Store.
We walked down the city mall and I showed Hayden the “Cat and Fiddle
Arcade”. In the City Mall there was an
artistic water fountain made in the shape of a fish with the water coming out
of the top of its back.
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| Hobart GPO |
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| Ingle Hall |
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| Bond Store Lift |
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| St David's Park Headstones |
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| Tasmanian Parliament House |
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| Hobart GPO Clock Tower |
We visited Mawson’s Hut, which is a life size
replica of the base of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of
1911-1914. It was interesting, both to
look at, and to read some of the details of what they took with them, for example,
24 hockey sticks. When we got home from
this trip I listened to an audiobook titled “Mawson” and it covered this trip
in great detail – so much easier to visualize having seen the Mawson’s Hut
replica.
We travelled from Hobart to Sorrell where we bought
more fresh cherries and they were delicious.
We drove onto Bicheno via the coast road, the view between Mayfield Bay
and Swansea was particularly beautiful – looking across Oyster Bay to Freycinet
National Park. In Bicheno we are staying in a cabin only Big4 Holiday Park –
the staff are lovely.
After dark – so yes, very late – we went on a tour
of a fairy penguin rookery. The guide – Tom – said numbers were low because the
breeding season has almost finished and the moulting season not yet begun. The breeding pairs come to the rookery to
raise their young, the parents going out to sea before dawn and returning after
dusk to feed their young. Given this is
in summer, this is a very long day indeed! Once the young leave the rookery to
fend for themselves, the adults go to sea for a month to fatten up before
coming ashore to moult. We saw penguins
that were almost ready to leave the rookery, we also saw chicks that were still
completely covered in down. We were also
fortunate enough to see an adult reach the nest and feed her two “teenagers” –
it was very push and shove on the part of the offspring. We saw penguins running across the sand,
jumping from rock to rock and making their way up the hill to the rookery – the
ones almost ready to moult are almost double their normal weight and need
several rests to make it back up the rookery from the beach. The local school children have made “nests” for the
penguins and they will use these or rabbit holes, in preference to building
their own burrow.
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