About how every hiking tour should end

Sunday, 15 December 2013

If you come to Tassy you wanna see the nature, the crazy wildlife of Australia, the wonderful landscape (if you’re not interested in that cancel your flight straight away!). There are two ways to explore that: by helicopter and plane (which is pretty expensive and probably no choice for anyone who reads travel blogs) or you go hiking. And there are quite a lot of walking paths on this island as approximately 40% are National Parks.

One of my favourite hiking tour became Cape Raoul. Not only is the landscape magnificent. This is a magic place where Pasta learn to fly (here’s the proof)! Ok, maybe it’s less magic and more physic but anyway it’s damn impressive to see a Pasta or a stick that you throw down the cliff seeing coming up again and flying over your head (or you get even hit by a noodle) back because of the strong winds that blow up the cliffs.

You might even see some Echidnas (the only egg-laying mammals beside platypus) ambling the path next to you. They aren’t too afraid of humans…neither are the snakes! We met another traveler on the path who told us that a big snake was blocking the path making us walking in an always-on-alert-mode. Usually they shouldn’t attack you, but be aware not to step on them on accident. 😉

And make sure that you don’t loose the path at the end of the track as we did…but if you make it back to the start of the track you will be rewarded with a Finnish sauna! The farmer who’s property is next to Cape Raoul has build up a sauna which you can use for a donation and provides a camping zone for 5$/person! Make sure that you don’t come back too late (we started heating up the sauna at 9PM) and you may have a nice chat with Andy, the owner of the sauna!

I published thirty more pictures on Flickr (Click here to see them). Enjoy the view (without the damn strong wind up there), and tell me how you like the pictures 😉

Monday, 16 December 2013

I still haven’t seen a platypus, but I’ve been to an area where obviously enough Platypen (plural of Platypus…anyone a better idea?) live to let the people make up with those signs.

To be seen near Lake Huntsman. 😉

Advent Calendar: 17th December

A few days ago I’ve been in Launceston (the second biggest city in Tassy) to a farmer market and saw this sign there. Whenever you go on this island to a supermarket you read at least 500-times “Buy Tasmanian Products” or “Choose Tasmian!”. So, they put a lot of effort into making people buy local food which is pretty good, I would love to see that in Austria.

But on this farmer market they sold not only the common stuff like vegetables and fruits but also furry of Wallabies and Kangaroos and home cooked jams (I tried an onion jam – no added sugar, but it was so sweet, unbelievable!) and home cooked convenient food (yeah, strange, isn’t it?).

And after three weeks on this island I have to admit: I do not only love food, I love Tasmania too!

Advent Calendar: 18th Decmber

makaki

This cute little guy is a Japanese macaques monkey who lives in an enclosure in the Launceston City Park (there are no monkeys in the wild in Tassy, everything that looks similar to a monkey is probably an Opossum). The enclosure is free to visit, it’s in the middle of the park!

But be sure not to climb into the enclosure, the monkeys got Hepatitis B (which is not dangerous for them but for you if you hug them). And yes, I’m pretty serious about that you shouldn’t climb in because I’ve heard a story about two drunken guys who climbed in, smashed the electric fence, which fell into the water that surrounds the enclosure and weren’t able to get out anymore because every time they tried to get through the water, they got an electric shock. In the end they got rescued by a friend who had a ladder and lived nearby.

Don’t think too much about it, I’m conscious about some logical issues with this story, but it was too funny not to share it. 😉

Advent Calendar: 19th December

tree and sun

There was a company in Tassy which kind of rented space from farmers. They paid an amount to grow a few trees on each (or at least a lot) of farms here which they would cut down when they were big enough to sell the wood. This was a good income for a lot of farmers, but the company went bankrupt so now there are a lot of trees on the farms and the farmers get neither money for them nor do they know what they should do with the trees.

This one may be one of those trees…

Advent Calendar: 21st December

pingpong

When you tell someone in Victoria or Tassy that you go to Hobart, you’ll probably get the recommendation (and so do I) to go to MONA – an innovative museum for old and new art.

This is one of the museum pieces. And you can actually play on it…well…at least you can try! 😉

Advent Calendar: 22nd December

This is the motivation to do the 2 hours walk at Fortescue. The rest of the hiking track is pretty odd, but it’s worth to walk there for this rock!

Sunday, 29 December 2013

stars

One of the probably most gorgeous thing to see in the world is a sky full of stars and when you look up to the sky in a clear night in Australia you can even see the milky way. This was one of my first shots of the stars, taken when we where camping at the Bays of Fire.

Sunday, 5 January 2014

In Europe they are mostly known from Hollywood-movies but I finally saw one in real life in Deloraine in Tasmania – a big truck looking like Optimus Prime from Transformers.

Daniel Somji – Austria

See more of Daniels blog at

Dancing Round The World