So I booked a 6 day tour around Tasmania, but first I had most of the day still in Melbourne, where I spent a couple of hours in the aquarium which I thought was really good but other people have said that Sydney's is meant to be better. But they had penguins, giant stingrays, sharks, turtles and nemo!! And of course lots of other fish type things too! But the first couple of days in Tasmania were not what I really expected. I'm mainly on about the weather really. We headed to the west coast first which apparently is something like the wettest place in Australia and it was freezing! At one point I ran out of layers to put on and was still cold so the next day I bought myself a nice pair of gloves! We stayed at a place called Straun first and went to a saw mill where we got small offcuts of this wood called huen pine (or something that sounds like that) and its meant to be only growing in Tasmania, it only grows like 1mm a year.. hmm that can't really be right, maybe its 1cm a year.. not sure, but anyway its ridiculously slow growing and so is now protected and the wood that is around is only going to rise in value I'm told. So we're all making our own souvenirs. But it was harder than it looked.. mine still doesn't really resemble much I don't think! On we went to the Henty sand dunes, we were hoping to go explore on quad bikes but once we arrived, the guy who runs it wasn't there so we explored on foot instead. Still good though, lots of running and jumping! Next stop, Cradle Mountain.. we didn't climb the mountain because the weather was again rubbish! Really cold, wet and now windy. The top of the mountain was covered in mist but at least we could still see the cradle part! Most of the group decided just to walk around this big lake instead, still 2 hour walk just not very strenuous, which was good! Also good news was this was the last day of bad weather! Once we reached Davenport it got a lot nicer and we visited a gorge and its suspension bridge, we were meant to go to some waterfalls as well but apparently the whole of the northeast was closed off the week before because of massive floods and now the road was blocked.. or something. So we headed onto the Bay of Fires, its a big beach with lots of rocks, it was good fun though and definitely built me up for dinner! (My face went red and one Japanese girl said in all seriousness that I looked like a giant boiled octopus! When I looked at her blankly she was like.. you know when you boil an octopus and it goes from purple to red?? Hmm I think I will just ignore that comment! I don't think of myself as particularly purple/red! But who knows!?) The next morning a lot of us got up early to try and see the sunrise over the sea. But no! Clouds on the horizon ruined everything! Why do clouds hang around the horizon anyway?? They weren't anywhere else!! At least we tried! And after breakfast we went to see a massive blowhole which was cool and I very very nearly got a soaking when I tried to get a picture! Luckily I was just out of the splash zone! Next.. wineglass bay! It didn't rain but it was a bit cloudy, which was a shame but still I think the view was worth the effort to get up! The last few things we did in Tasmania were a ghost tour around Port Arthur where some of the bad convicts were transported to (I checked on their database.. there were no Bullous's!) I got myself a little freaked out in the dark and I was convinced I had a funny feeling in all of the buildings. Maybe not..
The next day we went to a Tasmanian devil conservation park, where they're trying to breed more because there is a contagious cancer killing all the wild ones! Then the last day in Hobart, 8 of us did an extra half day trip up to the top of Mount Wellington to cycle down. The views were fab.. I nearly fell of my bike several times, we couldn't really have gotten a better day for it! And that really is Tasmania, I thought it was really beautiful state, lots of mountains, lakes, greenness, but the weather is really annoying, just because no one ever really seems to know what it's going to do!