The Great Barrier Reef

The Rainforest

Cairns and South

Brisbane

Tasmania

The Houses of Hobart

The Millenium in Hobart

Where to Stay, how to Travel

Sydney

Sydney, Australia  December 3, 1999

Dotted across the South Pacific sky we passed as if in a time capsule, over lunglike clouds and long lavendar and pink rays of tropical skies in the morning, which is overtaking us as we fly west.  A blue coastline appears, New South Wales.  For Barbara and I this is a new exploration.  A new land, new waters, new cities, a new forest and new people.  Ripples appear on the water, the clouds develop their depth casting flat, darker blue shadows.  A boat appears, the water shallows, the land takes shape and our adventure to Australia has begun.
 
And shortly we are sipping tea in our hotel room which is on the quai.  The Russell Hotel is an old rambling building with ceiling fans, creaking stairs and a central courtyard.   It has a roof garden and is at a place called “The Rocks”, at the center of everything Sydney.  The city is very big and bustling, rolling hills but nothing too big, right along the coast, but in the harbor, not on the coast.

We went to the opera house and happened upon the dress rehearsal for the ballet, and so it was Barbara, Tom, the ballet company, the orchestra and the Sydney Opera house.  Very grand! We felt very important.  For lunch we had a Tasmanian scallop pizza in the pizza place that made Sydney famous.  Of course it is summer, the sun is here and at 6 pm gives no hint of going down.  If it ever gets to be night I'll be looking for the Southern Cross.  We walked the harbor bridge, built in 1932, suspended by cables which kept it from falling during construction, and this is the beginning of 4 months of adventure.

The harbor bustles, ferries going here and there, people selling everything, restaurants, pubs, hotels.  The harbor tour took us to the mouth of the ocean exploring the five fingers of Sydney harbor amid ferries and racing boats with puffed sails in blistering winds.  The hillsides are populated with gum trees and the waters (apparently truly) with sharks.

The city businees district stretches through historic buildings and new skyscrapers to the south.  The Sydney Harbor Bridge, completed in 1932, connects the north--and what an elegant structure it is.  The abutment towers contain museums and serve only aesthetic purposes--nothing structural.    Bolder tourists in grey jumpsuits were strapping themselves to tethers and climbing the superstructure.  One does think back to Strauss and the opening of the Golden Gate in 1938--the era of great new public works projects, and great engineering.  A photographer was poised on the southern tower, ready to photograph the 'Norwegian Star', a cruise ship coming out of Sydney drydock this morning, no time for my questions.  Sydney bustles.

Really I went to Sydney to see the opera house, elegant placed on a peninsula just southeast from the Harbor Bridge.
What an elegant structure with French tile roofs fine theatres.  Tempted, we rushed out on Saturday night to see
"Pride and Prejudice".

The Great Barrier Reef

The north must be in winter because there is lots of sun here.  Barbara and I just
returned from the great voyage to the Barrier Reef. We've covered so much ground in a week it seems
like a month, but on the other hand there has not been much time to do
anything else so today we're trying to be less compulsive, wandering around
Cairns.  We just went to the market and have bags stuffed with pineapple,
mangos (several different varieties), macademia nuts, bananas, pawpaws and
limes, walking the shoreline, and thinking about our adventures here, feeling the breezes
sweep around us.

We sailed to the Great Barrier Reef returning from a three day voyage on
the blue waters and propelled by fresh winds, clear out to the Great
Barrier Reef, on the wooden ship 'Santa Maria' with 13 on board, including
3 crew.  The trip included a newly wed couple, Kara and Anthony, just moved
to Davis, a Spanish embassy man, Roberto, with his mother, Esperanza,
visiting from Barcelona, Captain James, Mark the dutch mate, and cook
Jenny from London, and Harry the motorcycle salesman with 3 others from
Berlin.  We visited the reef, swam its canyons, buoyed by the waves and
propelled by swim fins, watched a hundred species of fish and slept at
quite moorings in the lee of a hundred million polyps of coral heads of
every shape and variety.
Santa Maria 
The ship 'Santa Maria' was built 16 years ago in Noumea and has found its
niche taking groups of 10 travelers for 3 day voyages to explore the reef
via snorkel and scuba.   Barbara and I doffed our bags, reduced our gear
to a bottle of sun cream, a book, a tee shirt, and a pair of shorts and
a hat and we were off.  Captain James and crew Jenny and Mark do this voyage twice a week,
but like counting trees, each trip is its own--brand new.  Their attitude
made us feel like it was their first time, appreciating their visitors,
while the professional nature of the operation assured us that we were in
good hands.  Food was served like clockwork, the ship was handled with
expert and sensitive hands as we weaved our way among coral heads, and
the guidance, safety instruction, and friendliness was genuine and
complete.  We shared the reef with 11 others.

The Santa Maria put out on time early Monday morning, put into the wind and held 80
degrees through the Coral Sea, passing Fitzroy and Green Islands,
locally popular tourist resorts.  The "Great Adventures" catamarans, each with
350 passengers, zoomed past us and we were smugly assured we'd made
the proper decision.  By 2 pm we were at our first stop-a mooring rope
on Thetford Reef.
Our favorite ship fish
I had known Coral Reefs throughout the world from my younger days-and I
have watched them disappear.  The great reefs and coral gardens which I
knew so well in the Caribbean in 1961 were gone when I visited there a few
years ago, overtaken by eel grass.  I understand the great coral banks off
Waikiki are gone now too.  It is an understatement to describe the
greatest living thing on earth as one of its most fragile.  The Great Barrier is
visible with the naked eye from the moon.  It is a place
Reef unmatched in its biodiversity-supporting 1500 species of fish,
thousands of mollusks, and a wide variety of coral, but absolutely at risk from
pollution from effluent and waste discharges developing cities along the coast,
and damage inflicted by us as visitors, loving it to death.
James gave us clear instruction-do not touch anything, keep
your distance, do not stand on the reef, put nothing in the water.  One
swim fin touching a fan coral can destroy it.  A touch of sun cream is
enough to disturb a hard coral.  Nutrient rich effluent will certainly destroy
the auster environment of a coral reef.  Respect extraordinary pulsing and
silent beast where we are not at home.

The Great Barrier Reef is out in the Coral Sea at the edge of the Pacific.
It derives from a time before the oceans rose, and the reef itself was at
one time the shoreline.  The seas rose up at the end of the last ice age,
about 80000 years ago, the coastal plain was flooded and the reef was formed.
The coral heads grew up at the surface as the water level rose.

We plunged into the water, kicked with the fins, and swam a few meters to
the reef.  We slipped among schools of damsel fish, watched the parrot
fish pound the coral heads and the clown fish hide in the anenomies.  The
giant clams were actually giant--a meter in diameter, exuding a coral
repellant from their shells as they grew so the coral would dissolve and
make way for the growth the the clam shell.  I was lucky enough to
fleetingly swim face to face with two sea tortoises.  Esperanza, Alberto's
elderly mother, dived in with the rest of us.  A group tried a night dive--I
contented myself to photograph the group plunging into the water.

Captain James and the Night Divers

I snorkeled 8 trips on 6 reefs to fish and coral of every imaginable
description.  Barbara, unfamiliar to snorkeling and missing the point,
dived into the water and off she went, like a motorboat headed for a
distant island from the middle of the ocean.  Fortunately I managed to
attract her attention and stoppped her before she was over the horizon.

I don't know how to describe the quality of the trip though.  It reminded
me of the south seas I sailed over so many years ago, the salt, the wind, the
color of the sea, the reefs, it was exhilarating.  Try it sometime.  And of
course it was that you had to be there type of luck.

The Rainforest

Also on Santa Maria we met Anthony and Kara King on the 'Santa Maria'-newlyweds from Minnesota
recently moved to California and on their honeymoon in Cairns.  Anthony
is a wine maker in Carneros region of California and Kara is a social worker
and counselor for a Sacramento Valley school District in Winters.  We took
to them magnetically.  Their presentation and outlook was fresh, without
pretense, and as two couples we were sharing a remarkable set of experiences.

Anthony and Kara had plans to rent a car and head for Cape Tribulation,
the northern coastal jungle rainforest park, and invited us along to share
a great 4 wheel drive Land Cruiser they had rented, and so we went there,
to Cape Tribulation and beyond, fording rivers in the Land Cruiser,
watching flying foxes (bats) hanging from the eucalyptus trees, waiting
for dusk.  We were lucky to have found a mango tree dripping with ripe
fruit as there was no shop or waypoint along the way.  The road from
Cape Tribulation north to Bloomfield Falls was only opened a few years ago,
and is essentially the end of civilization in northern Queensland this time
of year.

As it should the road was pushed through amid great controversy--it was
created without proper engineering and provided access to virgin jungle.
A consequence of the battle (as I had guessed, the locals wanted the road)
was that the area became a World Heritage Site.  It is also largely
protected being within the Daintree National Park. The temptation was
there to continue to Cooktown and then to the complete
wilds of Cape York, but it is just too late in the year for that-the track
has turned to mud already, and of course, being Yankees, we don't have the
time.
 

We were told we wouldn't see a Cassowary, an endangered ostrich-like bird
which inhabits the jungle at Daintree. Apparently there are only 54 of them
in Daintree and less that 1200 in the world--but as we drove through the
bush with an eye out for crocodiles at the mouth of Cooper Creek, there
it was--a 4' tall black bird with a red and yellow head, feathers so
slender as to act as a raincoat as 2-4 meters of rain roll of its back
each year during the December-March rainy season. Camera in hand
I dashed into the woods as the Cassoary stood there.
Cassowary
The rainforest was a jungle, hot steamy,
and dark, with foreign sounds of every variety. Birds, cicadas and the smells
of everything rotting away.  Epiphytic plants clinging from the branches, strangler
figs vining their way to the canopy, strangling their hosts and becoming
trees in themselves.  The wet season has just begun (though we've hardly noticed
the rain) and we swam the rivers are full of warm clear water.  No worries, there
is almost nobody around.  This isn't California.  I believe the entire country
has 18 million and it's the size of the US!  We climbed a tower and stood for half
an hour at the jungle canopy watching it move.

The forest was intensely humid.  In the uplands Eucalyptus appeared.  Below it
was familiar sounding names like 'posion oak', 'red cedar', 'poison walnut',
a variety of mahoganies, 'black bean', 'fan palm', and figs of all varieties.

Tree FernFan Palm

I was dead set on finding a crocodile.  Apparently it is warm enough that
they stay (for two hours at a time) at the bottom on the estuaries, we we
plodded around the mangroves and the tidal flats watching the hermit crabs
and trying to learn the names of the trees, but sorry, no crocodiles.
 

The Mangroves
 

Cairns and South

The Aussies have a way of being more like Americans than we are, but with a different history and culture.  Cairns keeps reminding me of Waikiki when I spent time there in 1972.  A few big hotels that I never bothered with, and a lot of small tacky tee-shirt places in a beautiful setting.  We are no longer on the boat, but we’ve spent time walking along the esplanade, consumed by warm moist winds coming off the reef.  It's just a beautiful place.

Yesterday we walked along the Barren River, up in the rainforest at Keranda, avoiding the opal shops and the butterfly farm, and we met a group of drunken Aboriginals on a Sunday outing. They fed us fish which they had cooked on a fire and we talked awhile.  In a way it was sad.  They do not share in Australian prosperity.  Perhaps they just don't want to.  Culturally they come from song lines and open land without the complex trappings of European background.

It has become clear that racial tension is so deeply rooted here in Australia that frustration with the problem is part of the place.  There is an overwhelmingly white population with sub-groups from everywhere—the aboriginals, the Papua New Guinea blacks, the asians, and of course, here in Cairns, the ubiquitous Japanese tourist.  We watched TV in our hotel room for a few minutes to see what it was like (all ads and sports and nonsense shows) and we were amazed to see an ad for MacDonalds hamburgers, depicting a Japanese tourist couple trying a hamburger for the first time—background voiceover saying “become a real Australian”.  After the first mouthful the Japanese man gets up and says “Good on ya, mate, this is a real hamburger” in a deep Aussie drawl—we call it “strayin”.

When it rains in the rainforest, it rains a lot, and it just started.  We were told that in 1987 it rained 72 inches in as many hours.  The hills started sliding then, but, for the most part, the land is made to take the rain.  We have just been lucky to have good weather for a week.  But we are in the tropics, and so it’s a warm rain, and it ends as abruptly as it began.

Last night we dropped in to the Cairns Yacht Club for dinner and their Christmas show.  The room, overlooking the harbor, was full of children having a party and a family group singing christmas songs, led by a 13 year old destined to become a country western star.  It made us think of all the similar events we've attended as parents, and before that, as children.  It was
uniquely though a slice of Aussie life.  Santa here rides a motorcycle.

The Aussies will keep to themselves--that is, until you open your mouth.  We've enjoyed so many snippets of Aussie
life that they become a part of each day.  Yesterday it was a young couple touring and passing the time who taught us to clip
cocoanuts from the palms using a stick, and then to saw off the tops for a sweet drink.  We met them again and again and,
although we had really nothing in common, became friendly.   Then there was the ranger at the Townsville Wildlife Park where we saw Kangaroos, goanna lizards, eagles, and hundreds of new birds.  He showed us the nest of the orange and black
bower bird which plants sticks in a thicket in the ground and collects red, green and white plastic trinkets--all a mating ritual.
We met a gooana lizard, over 2 feet in length, sitting beside the road.  I jumped out and snapped a poor photo, and while
the camera was getting ready for the next shot I lost the opportunity for a wonderful photo.  I must learn to take photos.
The same happened with the cassuwary.
the fleeting goanna

Anyway, we're learning a bit more about the Aussie humor.  It's a pretty rough and tough place.  Yesterday we ran across a middle aged Aussie man walking stark naked along a hiking trail.  He unabashedly explained to us that the sign explained that this is a naturalist trail so he thought he'd try it out.

South of Townsville, the lands stretches out into sparse eucalyptus forests and the mountains become hills become river vallies.  Mangroves live all long the coast in tidal areas.  I am still looking for a crocodile.  There are lots of dangerous plants and
animals.  When you swim along this coast you have to do so in a "stinger net".  There is a lot of incentive to swim, the water
is warm and blue and salty, the surf is fresh.  We enjoyed Queens beach at Bowen, a place to spend some time.  The Whitnsunday offer terrific opportunities to explore nearby islands.
 
Kangaroos--now we're down to figuring out which is which.  At Cape Hillsborough they were waiting for us in the picnic area.  We found an shell mound much like you might expect to uncover at Point Reyes.  People always like to eat and party.  We learned not to try to do that 5 star.  You end up with a plastic place, mediocre food, insincere people, and an enormous bill, and usually hungry and with a headache.
  "Wallaby"

We've been sticking to the trails and exploring the National Parks, which appear all along the way, often umarked on any map we've seen, but usually directing us to some extraordinary place for hiking, learning the flora, swimming, camping.  Our life this week is one of Sunday drives, as we work our way south to Brisbane in a rental car.  It is turning out to be a long way, so we are trying not to stop everywhere.  But many of the wetlands and forest types are irresistable.  Bird life is absolutely prolific, and every species is new and extraordinary.
 
The land is rolling with the occasional rocky mountain or steep gorge.  The moist areas, east of the hills, are cloaked with green.  The land dries out at once where the hills vanish.  In the vallies sugar cane is the predominating crop.  The flora is beginning to have a structure and shape that we recognize.  The mangroves are very extensive along the coast, and rich with birdlife, giving way to paperbark (Melaleuca sp) and palm forests in the wet areas.  On the hilltops and uplands the eucalypts take over in a dry open scherophyll forest.  Further inland is arid woodland and grasslands.   Some of the Eucalypts have been recategorized to become Corymbia sp.  Some of those forests are natural and others are grazed.  Some of them are burned regularly and others not.  The climate is still tropical at Mackay and the land is protected still by the Great Barrier Reef.

We don't have time to visit the islands along the way, but I have photographed many of them.  We've walked to vista points one after another.   But there are places like Carmila--alone in the sun and the sand.  At low tide the water is a mile out.  Islands pop out of the Coral Sea.  The colors make it look as if everthing you look at is a jewel.
 
 

Night in Bajool

Rockhampton had a great Botanical Garden and we saw our first Koalas there, but didn't offer much in the way to motivation in terms of a place to stay, so we pressed on south .
 
No visit to Australia would be complete without a little time in the outback, and we chose Bajool.  A sleepy little place with a railroad, a few houses, a pub, and a caravan park with a sign saying "Vacant Caravan".  Surrounded by eucalyptus forests and wattle scrub land, nothing much happens in Bajool, though the coal train rumbled past our ancient caravan at half hour intervals on a 24 hour schedule--apparently exporting coal to Japan from a port rigged up in a mangrove along the coast.  We moved in for $10 and met Di and Spud, the mad Murphy's--our hosts.   Apparently it's not too often that they get tourists in Bajool.  Di proudly showed me her abundant tropical garden, complete with goanna lizards.  As we admired the mighty creature, about 30 cm long, it sprang to action and engulfed an enormous beetle in quick swallow.  Perhaps it is good I never encountered a crocodile.

Di and Barbara
 

An hour later we were at the pub, suitably introduced to the Bajoolians assembled there (Di spoke up in her loud raspy Aussie drawl "This is Tom and Barbara and they want to eat" ).  Over a few schooners of VB we chitchatted with Di, Spud and other tenants of the town and caravan park about this and that, the forests, the gardens, the economy and life in Bajool.  The history of the area is one of sheep stations which became cattle stations until a few were converted to mines.   For $6 we were served the finest meal (pork roast) that we've had in Australia, real people, real cooking, real food.

But nothing prepared us for the night.  Nested in our 1950's vintage cararvan---obviously been without an occupant for the last year or so we turned out the light and fell fast asleep, not even counting the trains rumbling by in the night.  I tried to ignore the whining of the first mosquito around my ear, but then they were in stereo.  The sweltering heat made me realize I was bathed in sweat and it became apparent that I was cloaked in mosquitos and bathing in my own sweat.  I thought of Steve Chamberlain and I sitting in the woods years ago, covered also in mosquitos, with Steve noting that the best way to deal with Viet Nam had been to ignore them.  I tried.  Finally enough was enough.  I got up and turned on the light.  The trailer was swarming with mosquitos.  I rolled up yesterdays paper and the massacre began.  Running around the trailer at 2 am swatting 40 mosquitos. I closed the unscreened roof vent washed off the sweat and settled into a grand sleep.  In the morning the walls and the ceiling are covered with blood.  I suppose we should have washed it off before we left Bajool--our outback memory.

This is still the beef area of Australia.  The forests are burned regularly.  Huge machines uproot great eucalpytus trees over hundreds or thousands of acres at a time.  The trees are then pushed into piles and burned, giving way to better grass for cattle range. There is rightly growing concern in Australia about the problem of industrial deforestation and move afoot at the highest political levels to regulate activities on crown land. The land just goes on and on.  This is on a scale of, perhaps, the Great Basin in the US.  There are coal and chryptophase (nickel gem stone) deposits nearby.  History dates back to the 1830's and there are a few compelling historical accounts of the development of the area and the aboriginal cultural history.

From Rockhampton and Bajool it was south along the "Bruce Highway" to Gladstone, a coastal town quiet on Saturday.  We stopped for a walk, coffee, a look at the mangroves and the Port, which was exporting ores, coal to Japan, and woodchips,
The Aussies are busy logging
coming from monterey pine plantations further south. We wanted to visit Heron Island, 50 km northwest at the south end of the Great Barrier Reef.  But realizing that the trip from Cairns to Brisbane is longer than a short jaunt, and with so much yet to see we pushed along the coast to Hervey Bay, the gateway to Frazer Island, the largest sand island in the world.

Tony Glad, our local Brisbane friend, had warned me that the monsoon rains commenced around Christmas, but nothing perpared us for the rain that fell as we inched our way into the village of Hervey Bay.  It poured.  In the torrent we found a beachfront apartment took refuge.  Was this the beginning of the monsoon?  Well, we'd been lucky with the weather so far, a few tropical showers to reduce the humidity and to cool things off, but nothing serious.

Again, time was short so we passed up Frazer Island in favor of a great walk around Hervey Bay, along the longest restored peir I've ever seen (which was opened by the Queensland governor general on November 28 only to be smashed by a trawler on the first of December).  We could walk half a mile out into the Bay itself.  We watched a fishing family, and talked with an old time fisherman about the size of the fish he'd caught here, when suddenly a school of "goldies" appeared lazily passing under the peir in the current,  fisherpersons grabbing their lines, poles bending, and and locals staring at the water in disbeleif.  Though no fish were caught I think we witnessed a moment of Hervey Bay history.

For Tom and Barbara, the explorers with a time limit, it was on to Brisbane via Tin Can Bay and Noosa Head.  Dreamlike places.  We walked for miles along coastal bluffs.  I looked into a tree and, there it was, our first koala in the wild!  A young woman and her younger child were walking the bluffs, also along our route, telling us of the history of the area, the plants, the birds and other natural glories of  Australia.  I was impressed.

Approaching Brisbane from Maryborough to the north we seemed to pass from the tropics to a humid and fertile subtropical zone.  We noticed the greater population (though sparse by any California standard) passing a hundred km of  Pinus caribbea plantations (which I photographed profusely).  The Australian government is developing partnerships with the private sector to provide investment which will triple Australian plantation forestry in the next 20 years.  This morning I spoke about FSC certified forest stewardship with a contact from Timbercorp, a public Australian company working to develop the process, providing technical, land mangement, industrial and marketing expertise to make this a reality.

Tony Glad 

Brisbane is as human city as you can get.  Its rolling hills are clothed with beautiful tropical gardens and old houses with red-painted tin roofs.  Every house has a view.  The river winds through town and then winds back again.  An entire corner of the city is dedicated to the river walk and the botanical garden.  The downtown is small, but comprised of elegantly designed skyscrapers.  Moreton Bay is nearby, and Moreton Island, a huge national park, lies beyond.  The city is filled with esplanades, unique bridges cross the river and the cultural attractions are many.

If the world was flat, Tasmania would be at the very edge of it.  Tasmania is south and the most terrific resource that it can supply is great scenery, fresh cold winds always off the sea, and a multitude of places to explore.  The first day we were here we walked to Cape Raoul, the southeasternmost place in Australia, and we looked south over the ocean and if we could have seen land, it would have been Antarctica.  The waters were blue and just looked full of (Travalla) the local fish.  Basaltic columns rose hundreds of meters out of the sea to form the cape.  Not far away thousands of prisoners were imprisoned until 1877 in the Port Arthur penal colony, and that is the way that the English populated Australia. Barbara and I stayed over Christmas with Garnet ("only to my mother, everybody else calls me 'Garney'") who was kind enough to invite us to his Christmas party.  It was a wonderful meal, Aussie champagne, shrimp, Trevalla,  Christmas pudding and port.  We had the hotel to ourselves, a glorious spring garden with Eucaluptus globulus, Tasmanian blue gum, the naturalized Australian tree so disdained in California.  Here, along with stringy barks, ironbarks, Huan pine and others, it's another of the forest species which the Tasmanian's are logging furiously.  The forests look like Oregon 15 years ago, clearcuts dotting the landscape.  In the dry areas the scenery is further highlighted by evidence of huge bush fires.   Dotting the landscape, however, are innumerable National Parks which provide refuge for old growth forests, and well maintained walking tracks for the tourists.
  Cape Raoul Echidna Cape Raoul
                                                                                                    Bars in the windows since 1830 in  Port Arthur
We visited Swansea and stayed at Braeside, now a bed and breakfast run by a very friendly couple, Ronnie and Hetty, who have retired to care for their guests, their 2 corgy dogs as sentries running the show.

We're touring in Mazda Metro, close relative to the Ford Festiva and certainly a putt-putt.  My friends Dean and Mike at the Tasmanian Travel Company in Hobart arranged accomodations and so we do have the best of everything.  I had told them we wanted to walk, and they placed us at what must be the best walking tracks anywhere.  Yesterday it was Cradle Mountain, spectacular alpine scrub and cushionplant types, rocks along the continental plate that were push straight up out of the ground form the mountain, and then a glacier scoured out lakes on an alpine plateau all around the peak.  This is part of the geologic history that created the west coast mountains in New Zealand and also in South America.
 
Cradle Mountain and the View from there
Today we're exploring Strahan, the only town on the west coast of Tasmania, population 500.  It is at the mouth of the Gordon River and Macquarie Bay.  Although we are in northeastern Tasmania, everything south is a national park.  World Heritage sites abound.  I struggled up the side of a sand dune which is towering above the eucalytus forest that it is slowly consuming.   We ate a sand sandwiches overlooking Ocean Beach and watching tourists ride 4 wheelers across the dunes.

Creeping Dunes
 

The Shearwaters of Strahan
 
Each night thousands of nesting Shearwaters, locally known as muttonbirds and oblivious to onlookers, fly into the dunes along Ocean Beach at Strahan to meet their subterranian mates, patiently tending nests protected in holes in the dunes.  These birds have created an extraordinary ecological niche.  By flying in the night they avoid predatory peregrines and eagles.  Their light sharp and streamlined wings enabe them to fly between Tasmania, at 40 degrees south, to Alaska (and back) entirely at sea, in a few months each year.  Another of the great migrations.  Aborigines dug out the nests and today the young are still treated as a great delicacy:  tiny, greasy and gamey.

The Muttonbird Searching through the dunes

We were standing there as it happened.  Darkness fell as the sun settled and the Southern Cross emerged and we were surrounding by shearwaters, shearing the air.  I ducked for cover and they zigzagged like huge bats about the night sky and the surf broke over the sands not 50 meters away.  After 20 minutes of this display, suddenly the ground was covered with the little black birds as they exchanged places with their mates, fighting, hissing, kicking sand and pecking as the monogamous shearwaters disturbed the wrong nest.  It seemed they had a little trouble finding their places, but when they did, their mates took to the skies, the shearwaters vanished into holes in the dunes, and the shearwater miracle was over.  Except for the sound of the surf, it was quiet again.
 

   The winner
The Millenium in Hobart

Tasmania is not a secret but it seems like it.  The country is unpopulated, diverse and spectacular. The coastline is rugged to sandy beaches.  The mountains are jagged and remote.  The wildlife is unique.  Birds are everywhere.  A third of the state is Park land.  The climate is gentle, and it even has Hobart!

With all this we greeted the millenium here with a total state population of only 470,000, and rapidly declining.  The reason of course is the economy and the lure of Melbourne, the big bustling Aussie city in Victoria just across Bass Straits (where we go tomorrow).

Hobart knows how to have a party.  The Sydney Hobart Yacht Race just ended, the Hobart Summer Festival in full swing, we came to Hobart to celebrate, and we did it in style.  Fireworks on the pier.  The crews of Nokia, Brindabella and Mari Cha III, probably the fastest sailboat in the world, did it with us.  The Taste of Tasmania is the place to eat!  A wharf full of 100 dairies, vineyards, oyster companies, salmon farms, vennison producers, and other food producers selling everything you could imagine.  We feasted on farmed Atlantic Salmon, drank sparkling brut, blue cheese, indian curries, oysters, scallops and listened to the music.  The harbor burst with fireworks at midnight, and the millenium is here.  Just the passing of time, a good party, and a time to project.

What steps should we take now?  We decided to walk all around the city.  Hobart is wonderful.
 

The Houses of  Hobart... a virtual city block

Of course, if you plan to travel to Australia your needs and itinerary, available time, interests and finances
mandate your choices.  You can easily spend up to 6 months exploring Australia and feel that you did not have
enough time.

But just for fun, here are a few leads...

Cairns.  Take the Santa Maria to the reef for a 3 day outing.  Stay in the Hides Hotel in the center of town, or head
north to Port Douglas.

Sydney.  The Russell Hotel.   It's a classic and in the middle of everything nice in the area known as the Rocks.  Choose a
room with a shared lavatory and book ahead.  Plan on the Harbor Tour, the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House.

Tasmania.  Camping is available everywhere (in most of Australia).  You can rent a camper van and save a lot of money on hotels if you like, but then you have to reach further to meet people.  Walking is great.  Pack a tent and sleeping bags and a cook stove, or stay in the many hotels and Bed and Breakfasts along the way.  There is little or no need to book except at Holidays.

If your time is short Dean and Mike at Tasmania Travel will book for you and you'll have a nice time, but you may end
up paying a little extra.  They did our bookings over Christmas and the Millenium and we were lucky for it.