Tasmania: Bicheno

Bicheno

Bicheno was our destination for Sunday night. Primarily a fishing town, it's getting a little bit of a reputation as a tourist destination. It's also known for the colony of Little Penguins that breeds there, which you can only see in the mornings and evenings as they go back and forth to the sea. But don't let that fool you into thinking it's a tourist town. Or even a town that runs on anything besides its own schedule! But more on that later.

The town itself is right on the coast, nice and cute. It reminded me of Lorne in size and layout. Later in the day, we climbed up a hill called Whale Watcher's Lookout where you could see the town from end to end.

Bicheno seaside

The Bicheno seaside and penguin tours were tied for our favorite activities. We headed out to explore the town and seaside first after arriving in the town. It was breathtaking.

There's red lichen on the rocks along the east coast of Tasmania, which makes the rocks an amazing orange color. That lichen is only found in Tasmania, South Africa, and Antarctica.

We also went to the edge of town and checked out the Bicheno blowhole. It was pretty amazing: water shot out of it about 20 or 30 feet at an angle on the big ones. And it was thunderingly loud. I didn't get a great picture. Holly tried to take a video of it, which turned out to be in slow motion.

And finally, to kill a little time before our penguin tour, we drove out to Governor Island to check it out. We got there right in time for a rain shower, but that was OK because a double rainbow followed!

Bicheno penguins

After a full day in Bicheno, it was time to see the penguins! There is a colony of Little Penguins (also called Blue Penguins and Fairy Penguins) that nest and breed in Bicheno, and a couple of the local guys run nightly tours to see them. The penguins come ashore at night right after it gets dark and then go back to the sea in the morning before it gets light.

Since the tours just go out at night and visit the areas where penguins are likely to be, it wasn't guaranteed that we'd see any penguins. But there was a penguin scout along with the tour, so he radioed to our guide and told him which spots we should visit. So the first spot we went to, we saw four little penguins coming up the hill!

We couldn't take any pictures since the flash can scare them away, but the tour sent us some later. It's hard to tell from the picture, but the penguins only get about a foot tall.

Aren't they so cute!?

All in all, we saw about 15 or 20 penguins in different spots and in various stages of coming ashore.

The penguin tour also sent us a link to this video, which is just so weird and funny.

Wintersun Gardens

We had booked rooms at the Wintersun Gardens motel for the night. Although I honestly probably wouldn't have considered staying in a place that looked this small and horror movie-ish usually, it was cute as a button!

The older couple behind the front desk only added to the charm. They quickly informed us that they were just "watching the motel" while their friends were on holiday, but that they'd do their best. Then they asked if we felt like a glass of fresh milk. Between the non-sequitur and their strong accents, it took us a few seconds to process what they'd asked. We all graciously declined on reflex, but looking back on it, I wish I'd said yes!

Next up was business. After they asked if we'd booked the room "on the computer," we marveled together about the computer and all that you could do with it. They also asked us about where we were from, and were so excited that we were from Tennessee. They'd actually been to Chattanooga to visit friends there, but it sounded like the highlight of their Tennessee trip was Graceland. Since none of us Tennessee people had actually been to Graceland (we could tell this was pretty unfathomable to them), we didn't get too much conversation on this point. They wrote my credit card number on the back of a piece of paper, "just in case!" and we were all set!

The man walked us to our room - which just like Lorne - was "airing out" in the 40 degree weather. This must be an Australian thing. The "airing out" of the room came back to bite us. Hard. Since this room had been refurbished with a key that only allows power to come on when the key card is in the wall reader, the heat was off the whole day after we checked in and went exploring. So it was slightly warmer than the frigid outside when we returned from the penguin tour that night.

By the time our penguin tour ended at 7:00, Bicheno was shut down for the night. It was eerily dark, and not a store was open. (We'd been warned that the grocery store closed at 5:30.) We were really lucky to find a little cafe still open, even though we had backup crackers in the motel, as we'd sensed there wouldn't be a lot of late night options. The cafe was, bizarrely, called "Gangsters," and run by two little old hippies. There wasn't another soul besides us anywhere in sight of it. In fact, they had some of the dining room lights off, so we just stood there in the semi-darkness while we waited for our food.

We didn't mind though - it was warm! We took our warm food back to Wintersun Gardens, huddled around the heater in our coats, and enjoyed our dinner in Bicheno!

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Tasmania: Cataract Gorge and driving to the coast

Day 2 in Tasmania found us wide awake early and ready to find some wi-fi. We hadn't had wi-fi since our night in Lorne, which meant that Holly couldn't check her email, send pics back to her husband, etc. And we were feeling the technology-disconnect!

As we were starting to learn, finding wi-fi in Tasmania was going to be a very difficult task. The hotel front desk person looked at me blankly when I asked about coffee shops that might have free wi-fi and be open on a Sunday. She suggested we try McDonalds or possibly one or two coffee shops in the center of town that opened at 9:30. While we waited for the coffee shops to open, we headed to the edge of town to check out Cataract Gorge.

Cataract Gorge

This side trip was the highlight of our stay in Launceston. We did a short 20 minute hike out to the gorge overlook, but along the way, we spotted some wallabies our for their morning breakfast!

Once we saw the first one, we were on the lookout for them and spotted a couple others along the way. It was a great way to pass the hike, looking for the little guys! And, of course, each time we saw them, we had to stop and watch them until they hopped off into the bush.
Finally, though, we did make it out to the gorge overlook.

The sun was coming up, which was exciting because it meant we'd have a nice day for our drive. And it was getting closer to wi-fi time! So we headed back down the trail...

Oh yeah, none of the wi-fi at coffee shops or McDonalds were powerful enough to send Holly's email.

Driving to Bicheno

The main goal for the day was to drive over to the coast, since we had booked tours to see penguins that night. We didn't have any expectations for the driving portion of the day, but it arguably ended up being one of our favorite parts of the whole trip!

The sun was out, the sky was extra blue, and the landscape was beautiful at every turn. We only passed through 3 or 4 towns, and these were so small, you really only knew you were in a town because there were a couple buildings together. There were no billboards, no traffic lights, no stop signs, and at one point, our road turned into a gravelly, no-laned path. But we pushed through and had an amazing 2 hour drive.

We passed field after field full of sheep.

And some mountains with snow at the top.

And the towns looked like this:

We did not stop to ask if they had wi-fi.

In a couple hours, we made it to the coast!

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Tasmania: Devenport, food trails, and Launceston

Our first day in Tasmania started early. We disembarked from the ferry at 6:30 AM, and then proceeded to cover every inch of tiny Devenport, looking for a place to get some brekky and wait for Toby's flight to come in. We finally saw another human being and decided they could only be heading toward coffee, so we followed her to a coffee shop where we scored some raisin toast and eggs. And coffee!!

In our lofty vision of the morning, we'd thought that we might find a cafe with some wi-fi and catch up on emails and such while we waited the couple of hours. This cafe was our first introduction to the Tassy experience: where you're lucky to get any cell phone reception at all, much less free wi-fi.

Our plans for taking the road southwest over to Cradle Mountain and hiking the Dove Lake loop were put into question because of Holly's cold and a pouring down cold rain. So after picking up Toby at the Devenport airport, we headed south of Devenport, with the new plan of checking out some Tasmanian food specialties, and maybe a hike if we could catch a break in the rain.

Cheese and chocolate

Throughout the day, we made stops at House of Anvers (chocolate) and Ashgrove Cheese. Tasmania is fairly well-known in this part of the world for their produce, and cheese is one of the big ones.

House of Anvers was our first stop. There were samples - hooray!

There was also a cafe where you could have all kinds of chocolate-inspired dishes. Holly and I were more interested in the fireplace. That should give you an idea of how cold it was!

All-in-all, a good first stop!

We stopped at Ashgrove Cheese later in the day - around lunchtime. There were lots of great cheese samples, and other local Tasmania foods in the shop. We all got grilled cheese sandwiches, of course! Tasty tasty!

Alum Cliffs

The main activity for the day was a short hike to Alum Cliffs. This involved a drive our west toward Mole Creek. It was on this drive that we learned the concept of A, B, and C roads. A roads are main highway roads. B roads are narrow, tiny roads, but they still have lines. C roads are just surfaced or barely-surfaced roads that don't have lines and may or many not fit more than one car. Our journey out to Alum Cliffs took us on all three kinds of roads, but mainly B and C. We were getting a little worried once we were on the C road and only seeing sheep, but we got there in the end!
It was a bit rainy, but beautiful.

Unfortunately, the rain didn't stop by the time we got to the hiking area. Since Holly still had a cold and hiking in the rain didn't seem all that prudent, we struck a bargain: she could hike, but it had to be really, really fast paced. So off she went!

It was cold and rainy, but the view at the end was worth it!

Launceston and Mexican food

We headed east to Launceston after our hike. We had planned to stay in Launceston as a jumping-off point for the next day, but didn't really have any plans in the town. That was just as well, since there didn't seem to be that much going on for a Saturday night.

After checking into our hotel and figuring out we needed to put the key in the slot to turn on lights, heat, etc., we decided to go out for dinner. As hard as figuring out how to turn the lights on was, figuring out dinner was harder. It seems that all restaurants in Launceston close between lunch and dinner, that is, if they're open on weekends at all.

We ended up at a Mexican restaurant. Toby and I had mentioned to Holly once or twice how bad the Mexican food is in Australia and how much we miss it. But this place was one of the few restaurants open, and the descriptions on the menu actually sounded like legitimate Mexican dishes. So we went for it!
Under no circumstances would I say our food was good, or even Mexican. But it was such an entertaining dinner, I wouldn't change a thing about it. Here are the highlights as captured by Holly and Toby that night afterwards in our room:

• We should have known the queso appetizer would be disappointing after the server called it "kway-so." But nothing would have prepared us for what we got: it was a cold, creamy kind of green dish, with no taste of cheese, very citrusy but so spicy we couldn't eat it. We actually asked the server if it was actually the queso and not guacamole or some other dip. She assured us that it was the "kway-so" and it was the "jall-a-penos" giving it the citrus taste.
• Holly and I both ordered tacos, but Holly asked if she could have them on soft shells instead of crunchy. This was clearly not a request they'd ever heard before, as the server just looked at Holly puzzled and sort of repeated it back to her. The poor server then suggested that Holly get enchiladas instead, since that was the same as tacos, but with a soft tortilla. Holly wisely decided to just retreat from the request and enjoy her tacos crunchy-style.
• The menu listed that the tacos came with tomato salsa, and not being a fan of raw onions, I asked it the salsa had onion in it. The server went to the kitchen to ask about this, and came back to report that it did, in fact, have onions. So I just requested no salsa on my tacos, and we carried on. A few minutes after we'd ordered, a man came out from the kitchen, walked over to our table, and asked if I was the person asking about the salsa. When I said yes, he said, "If you don't want salsa, you should just have a quesadilla." At this point, I was second-guessing the whole notion of having tacos at all, but I just said I'd stick with my order (and silently hope for the best).
• As it turns out, I didn't need to worry about the salsa at all, because Toby and Holly both had "salsa" on their food. Sadly, it was just straight-up tomato paste, with nothing like onions or any non-tomato flavoring to be had!
• All of these food mysteries pale in comparison to the deer head that watched over us as we ate. It was unexpected decor in an Australian Mexican restaurant to say the least. It was so strange, we asked the server about it, and she said that a Tassy couple had shot it and given it to the restaurant, and in fact, had "come in to see it" a couple weeks before. And those were the details on that!

Anyway, it was a hilarious dinner our and as disappointing as the food part was, we were so happy to have a nice warm dinner in our bellies after the cold day, and happy to have shared such a funny experience together.

All in all, our first day in Tassy was full of good food and bad food, beautiful views, and a lot of rain.

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Tasmania

Tasmania. The home of cheese, sheep, and wine. Where motel proprietors offer you a fresh glass of milk when you check in, where cell phone reception is a rarity, and where you get gas at a station when you see it because there's no telling when you'll come across another one. Where people give you a blank stare when you ask about wi-fi and restaurants open only when there are reservations and close as soon as the last one is done. Where gas pumps aren't digital and the man at the rental car kiosk is waiting for only you and leaves as soon as he hands you the keys. Where everyone is friendly, has a smile for you, and is eager to talk about Graceland when they find out where you're from.

We had 4 full days in Tasmania and got to see a huge variety of things in the state. It was a fabulous roadtrip, and I fell in love with Tassy during it.

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