Tasman Peninsula

For the second day of our car hire in Hobart, we headed in the other direction (sort of), east and south to the Tasman Peninsula.

Photo from http://tasmanpeninsula.com.au/wp/

Our first stop was a town called Copping, where we had a look at this strange art. We tried to go into the cafe / shop thingie that was attached to it, but they were closed.

A mermaid and her baby riding a marlin, and behind them is another mermaid on a stump, and perhaps the Loch Ness monster??

So instead we went to Dunalley for a hot beverage. It was a pretty brisk day, but we had a little wander to look at the Abel Tasman monument - commemorating the site where the Dutch explorer planted a flag in 1642. In fact, the 371st anniversary of this was the *day* before we were there, so we missed a public reading from Tasman's journal, but our coffee was good anyways.

The monument at Dunalley.

A tiny house.

This is the area where really fierce bushfires decimated the countryside just about a year ago. It was good to see heaps of green shoots on the trees. It made them look kind of furry.

At Eaglehawk Neck, we looked out at the lookout.

We walked down to the Tessellated Pavement, a natural geological somethingorother.

Probably more interesting at low tide.

The views over Pirate Bay were pretty stunning.

Then we headed in to Pirate Bay where we explored the area around the Blowhole.

This was the blowiest it got.

This part was more interesting.

Then we went to the Coal Mines Historical Site, a former convict site, where prisoners were put to use digging coal. This is the free version of Port Arthur. The bit we saw was quite interesting with lots of informative signs, but it was raining sporadically and quite wet and chilly, so we didn't spend as much time here as we should have.

The cells for convicts to sleep in weren't even big enough for Andy to lay straight.

Then we continued around the peninsula, stopping at Port Arthur but not going in ($70 for the two of us, and we were there mid-afternoon so decided to skip it all together!). We took a little detour towards Marion Bay, because we wanted to see some good solid Open Ocean, rather than the bays and inlets we'd seen so far.

Some marshy stuff around Marion Bay.

If you look really closely, off in the far distance, you can maybe see NZ...?

From here, it was open ocean all the way to NZ, which is pretty open. 

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On our way back, we stopped in Sorrell at the u-pick fruit farm, thinking there would be pre-picked fruit for sale. But there wasn't, and I didn't want to pay someone to let me pick their strawberries. So we bought some strawberry liqueur instead, and then headed back to our apartment.

The next morning we returned our hire car, had some cake at Frankie's Empire, and then made our way to the airport. Sleet in Hobart saw us off, and we were greeted in Melbourne with thunderstorms that shut the airport down and nearly resulted in us missing our connection. But we made it back to Townsville in the end, not even much later than usual. As good as it was to get away, it was wonderful to be home!