I walked down Chapel Street in Melbourne tonight

A fast internet connection

Back from Tasmania. The ferry departed at about 4.30pm on Saturday. We once again took advantage of the 'Teen Lounge/Galactica' video game and pinball machines, noticing that (a) Teenagers of Today have no concept how to play pinball and (b) pinball machines on ships don't have their tilt sensors activated at all!

So we had dinner at 6.30, read a bit, and went to bed... for the ferry was scheduled to dock in Melbourne about 5:00am. yawn You couldn't sleep much past 3am anyway, since they kept on announcing 'Breakfast is now served in the Promenade …

Grrr. My ISP, Telstra BigPond, has a very interesting ISP dialin number. There's only one number for all of Australia, and it's charged at the price of a local call (80 cents typically). Makes it handy.

Telstra, being the national telco company and holding a pretty good monopoly on local phone service, pulled this off by creating their very own special area code: 01.

Irritatingly enough, though, some PBX's can't handle this funky new-and-Telstra BigPond ISP number at all. Like the PBX that's in this rather dingy apartment we've rented for the week in Melbourne.

So... hee hee, I dusted …

A day wandering around before we take the afternoon ferry to Melbourne.

Bad.

...

Warm summer day.

Poking around the mountains and parks of northern Tasmania.

Around Cradle Mountain National Park

Along the unsealed roads of northwestern Tasmania

Wet and cool. Chris and I took a cruise up the Gordon River into the rainforest. It was misty and mountainous; reminded me of pictures of China's Three Gorges. Cruise was OK, but at 5 1/2 hours it was about 1 1/2 hours too long.

Strahan Village

The best part of the cruise was right at the beginning: when we went out of Macquarie Harbour into the ocean through the 60m gap called Devil's Gate. The tide was going out, and we glided out. into the Southern Ocean. Out in the Southern Ocean a couple of miles, a …

Breakfast at the Oatlands Lodge was quick, we then headed out on the road across the Central Highlands, following a route described in the big "Explore Australia by Four Wheel Drive", a big bible of a book we picked up somewhere in Sydney.

Nothing but a Telstra phone booth here.

Interlaken was our first stop; it looked like a town between two lakes and I had vague visions of a Swiss like village. Sorry, no. It was in high grazing country, with sparse eucalypts and fields, the village was no more than a few sheds and some battered weatherboard houses …

Driving day to Strathgordon

Fantastic hike at Mt Field

Hartz Mtn National Park and Tahune Airwalk

Hike to the south coast of Tasmania

Bright sunny day in Hobart. Went to the Saturday Salmanaca Market... a big open air market mercifully not hempen-clad and patchouli-soused. Old book sellers, farmers with end-of-summer produce, woodworkers, a ginger beer homebrewer (yum), small garden stuff, etc.

And bikeys!

Some of the zillions of seed packets I brought back were bought at this stall.

Salamanca Market, Hobart.

I bought seeds, which are just about the only thing I can bring back to the US, plant wise. Here's what I bought:

• Christmas Bells (Blandfordia punicea)
• Kangaroo Paw (red and green, Anigozanthos manglesii)
• leatherwood (Eucryphia lucida)
• black coral pea (Kennedia nigricans …

Going to New Caledonia for a week in late April.

Gotta leave the country (for visa reasons) every six months... this was the cheapest option, as all the good deals to Bali were all taken up since it's school holidays in New South Wales... and with our road trips to Cape York and the Kimberly, it'd be rough to do it in May or June.

We want to see Bali anyway; figure we'll do that in October from Perth. For some curious reason, it's cheaper to fly to Bali from Perth than it is from Sydney or anywhere else in …

A collection of stuff I've found interesting.

- People here tend not to clean their tables--even at places like McDonald's, only a few people will actually throw away their trash. Most folks just leave it on the table behind them.
- Recycling bins are few and far between--almost everything ends up in one bin.
- Restaurant service can be interesting--often you'll have one person take the order, some one else serve your food, and some one else ask you if you'd like another drink with your meal. Sometimes you pay the server, but most of the time you just walk to the cashier …

One surprising thing about Tasmania is the amount of roadkill. Traveling at a nominal 80kph/50mph, you pass one dead mammal about every 20 to 30 seconds on any of the highways here--anything from the size of a cat (possums, quolls, pademelons) up to dog sized (wombats) and big dog sized (wallabies). What makes it all the more interesting is that Tasmanian devils come out at night to scavenge the road kill. They're carnivore scavengers, and often four or six of them fight over the carcass at once, though you never see it since it's usually really lat at night …

Short hike around Waterfall Bay, Tasmania

Visiting Port Arthur, the most notorious open-air convict jail

A great 16km hike to Cape Raoul

A bit of rambling along the eastern coast of Tasmania