TasCOLD

Arrived in tasmania to find myself in a freezer locker. Thats a huge exaggeration, but it was pretty cold, even after I had been freezing in melbourne for a week.  of course, a week later when I was back in the actually miserable whether of seattle I was thinking of my time in tassie as 'mild' as well. 

I ended up staying with the Italian girl, Alice, who saved my ass on the plane, at the hostel she was at, the something frog, which was a pretty good hostel. We ended up renting a car for the next week and driving around, so it was very opportune for both of us that we met someone to split car rental fees with..  the more time I spent in tassie the more I realized that you need to have a car, otherwise you're pretty screwed and would miss some of the main attraction, such as the winerys, and the Bar in the Paddock, which has a beer-drinking pig, a definite highlight of anyones time.  

Our route was: Hobart for one night, then a drive up to Coles Bay (Red) to go to the famous wineglass bay beach, along with the 20 other tourists in tassie.  Next stop was Bay of Fires (Green), which was increible, then on to lonnie (Magenta), the real name of which I could never pronounce, and finally back to Hobart (Blue).   Tassie is so small none of these drives took more than 2 hours!

 The things that amazed me about tassie were:

A. The quality of the food, wine and beer (I LOVE Boags)

B. How green it was / the amount and quality of the national parks and hikes

C. The friendly-nes of the people

Hobart was cool, a very small seaside port town, kind of reminding me of a much less touristy Victoria with better food (although victoria has some badass food..tea at the Empress anyone?). Being the first settlement in Australia, it has the most well preserved victorian era architecture

Salamanca Street, theres a v famous market here every saturday

Old shipping buildings on the waterfront

We randomly wandered into a parking lot full of bagpipers, just a typical day...

Dan the Fisherman randomly pulls a shark head our of their freezer...lots of shark stories in Tassie. they showed me a picture of a HUGE shark that was caught by two boys with a gill net right outside their house..where they regularly surf and dive for Abalone....

On our way back from Lonnie Dan and Rob put us up at their place and showed us around the town... I would have to say, for a small town we had a pretty good night, and some delicious Souvalaki at the end of it! Everyone was going to a big party out at the oyster farm on Bruny but I had to go home :(  Alice told me it was awesome though...

Steve Irwin!! Haha.. thats for you Ali!