Guday Folks!

Sorry for not updating you lot, I've been working my blog off these past few days, I've absolutely bloggered!

Firstly, here's a coupler piccies from my fishing trip last week.

The last time I was bloggificating I was sitting behind the staff desk in Port Arthur. Laura, Phil and Rosie's daughter works there as a tour guide, showing groups of tourists around the historic site. The next day I went on a small ferry in Port Arthur, accross to The Isle Of The Dead! Yes, it sounds like something ghastly out of some horror movie but it's basically the old cemetery where the convicts were buried, as well as the other inhabitants. But becuase most of the convicts were illiterate, there were mispellings on many of the epitaphs, like our friend "Benjiman" below!

Laura and I returned from Port Arthur, and on the way back visited the fascinating "Tesselating Pavements". This is a geological formation, formed when salt from the sea water crystallises in the cracks in the rocks and makes them expand. It forms an amazing grid of rocks, piccies below!

The next day, Phil, Rosie and I drove to Bruny Island, which is an island off the South-East coast of Tas. The Island is actually itself made up of two islands, separated by a thin sandy "neck" shown below:

We drove to Advand walked to Fluter Cape, where we found this seal! Rosie nearly tripped over it because it looked just like a boulder! We also saw this flame robin, piccie below.
This was Sunday, and between then and now (thursday) I've been working with Phil to clear up his old house to get it ready for selling. It's been hard work, but a good laugh and surprisingly good fun!

Well How About That!

Yesterday was a fishing day! I was pretty overexcited as it seems everyone in this world seems to fish except me, so I jumped at the opportunity when Phil's mate Pete offered to bring his boat down to the shack (beach house) for a day. Phil, Pete, Nick (Pete's son) and I jumped into the boat and we zoomed off down the River Derwent off past White Rock. It's called white rock because it's always absolutely covered in seagulls, and these seagulls cover it in seagull poo, well how about that!

I caught about 10 flathead fish in the space of an hour or two, but most were little tiddlers, not up to size. This made them not worth eating, so we threw all mine back. The others caught four big ones between them and so we went back to the shack to put 'em on the barbie! They were really meaty tasty, and we also had sausages and lamb chops and wedges and sprouts and onions and peas and sweetcorn and carrots and homebrew! Tom, Phil's son is in a band called Chamelion, who play all cover tracks, and don't write any of their own music. They had a gig last night and the Mayfair in Hobart, so anyone who's anyone went along and had a good time.

Today Phil, Rosie and I were kindly shown round the Australian Antarctic Division by Henk. That was fun.

This afternoon Laura and I came to Port Arthur, which is on a Peninsula in south Tasmania. It's a huge old prison where convicts used to be transformed through hard labour into civil citizens. There's a few photos below that I took on my way round the ground.

The sun is shining, the weather is sweet yeah

Phil, Rosie and I went on a 3 hour walk up Cathedral Rock, which is a 900m high peak with a big rock at the top. It's a sheer drop all sides of this rock, which was pretty daunting looking up from below, and looking down from above! It was qutie a slog, up hill walking for about two hours.

It was a good walk, with a bit of scrambling for the final few hundred metres, which was fun, although my legs were a little stiff the morning after!

Day before yesterday had a bit of a lazy day, went into town with Tom and Mary, then went back and watched Shrek 3 on Tom's computer.

Yesterday Mary and I went to the Cascade brewery, the oldest brewery in Australia and the only brewery in Australia with its own grain store. They say the beer is fantastic mainly because of the pure water they use, taked straight from the mountain streams running down from Mt. Wellington, which towers over the brewery.

We took the tour around the brewery, and saw all the stages of the beer making process, which was really interesting. From it opening in 1824, to 1987, the workers were allowed to drink as much beer as they wanted in their breaks. So in morning break at 10am, all the workers used to get completely pissed! However, in 1987, when the Health and Safety people came knocking, they deemed it unsafe to be drunk at work...so they had to stop drinking i their breaks. Predictably, all the workers went on strike! They were on strike until management allowed them to take home 6 cartons of beer a month, which is 6x24 bottles per month! So the current workers take all this beer home every month, great job :-D .

We were given three beer vouchers, which gave us 3 free half pints to taste. I tried the First Harvest, which is the first brew of the year, and used the freshest hops, or something like that. It wasn't too bad, but I prefer Phil's homebrew! However, I've had a bit of a sore throat, so then had two fizzy apple juices for the Vit C, the beer was grinding down the sore throat in a pretty unpleasant manner.

Today's a really nice day, we're going fishing !

I've been waking up at 7am every morning and not being able to get back to sleep, especially as I crave a lie in!

By the way, here's me at the Shot Tower yesterday. I don't know if I said, but it's a pretty cool place. It's a 30m or so tall tower where they used to make lead shots for shooting. They melted lead (called it poison lead as it had arsenic in it, duno why) dripped it through a sieve at the top of the tower. It fell down the middle of the tower and formed a near-perfect sphere, which dropped into a pool of water to cool, and was then sieved to get the right sizes separated. Anyway, here's a pic of me at the top. The walkway is completely overhanging, Phil is too wimpy to go up, and even the great Mark Collins wouldn't go to the edge. there was a 12 year old girl running around up there! Dad you're rubbish! Pfffffft!

nb. Thankfully this picture doesn't display "Underwear Cam" !

Retreat! Retreat! Meet me by the quayside.

I've had Eggs n Bacon every morning I've been in tas!

This morning, after e+b Phil and I went to smash in some glass windows. We scoured the windows and then nurtured them out. Cool stuff.

This afternoon was great, we went deep into the forest to the Tahune Forest Airwalk. The airwalk itself is a large walkway, up about 30m above the ground that does right up into the canopy. It was rather good. The highlight was this eagle flying thing in the picture. It flew right up over the Picton River, I got a good view. It was quite scary though, about 30m up and it brought you right back down.

Here's the walkway thing. We went with Mia, a family friend, and we all pretended to be a family, to get the family pass! Thank god they didn't ask me any questions, if I answer they'd soon find out I wasn't aussie!

You can see the walkway above, where at the end it isn't supported from below, we were bouncing up and down to test the cables.


Have to go, the Mayor is coming round for dinner! :-0

Lenny "The Legend" Leworthy

Today I had a good day, it has cheered up here, it's been absolutely miserable the past few days, cold and wet just like I hear England is at the merment. Laura and I went to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and had a little look around, there were some cool exhibitions on coins and medals.

We then headed over to Mures, a seafood restaurant on the harbour in Hobart. We met up with Tom and some of his gang and I had a "Fisherman's Basket", which was a basket full of chip and various deepfried breadcrumbed seafood, like scallops, squid rings and prawny prawnies. Yummy, though no ketcup :-( .

Then Rosie came and collected me as Laura left for Port Arthur for work. We walked Lenny "The Legend" Leworthy half way up the mountain and back, in the dark coz Phil went and got us lost, grr.

We tried, but we didn't have long. We tried, but we don't belong. We tried, but we didn't have long. We tried, but we don't belong.

Dazed and Confused

Yesterday Scott and I went into Melbourne city centre and took a 53 floor lift up the Rialto, which is a 253m tall observation deck right in the heart of Melbourne. The views were absolutely stunning! The sun was setting and the sky was clear, so I whipped out the old camera and took a few snaps!

You could see right accross the city, see the MCG (Cricket Stadium) and right accross the Bass Strait and the Yarra River.

Got this burger, was nice.

Last night I was getting the "Spirit of Tasmania" ferry accross to Davenport in Tasmania. I hopped on and found my fantastic "Ocean View Recliner" which offered incredible discomfort and great views into the back of the seats infront, in row H.

Anyway, this was 8pm so I slapped in the old MP3 player and listened to the new Arctic Monkeys album for the umpteenth time this holiday. Fantastic fantastic band. I nodded off and woke up at 10pm. Hm, then didn't really get back to sleep. DAMN!

Hopped onto the coach from Davenport, and after a quick egg muffin (nb. NOT McMUFFIN!), and slapped in the old MP3 player to listen to the new Arctic Monkeys album, again \o/ .

Rosie met me in Hobart and we grabbed some Crunchy Nut (thanks Rosie :-P ). Headed down to their place and I'm now chilling drinking his homebrew (which is the nicest beer I've ever tasted!) and listening to Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused".

x

That's when good neighbours, become good friends!

Hello Family and Friends!

Wow. OK, here goes! I've been on this bus with a company called "OzExperience" who basically drive good for nothing students to some of Australia's most amazing places. I started in Sydney at 6am in the morning, which sounds pretty early but I was still jetlagged, so in England that would be only 10 at night [ I think, if my maths is right, which it probably isn't because I'm pretty shattered, you'll hear why later ;-) ] . There were about 20 people on the bus, I was the youngest. They were all about 23 years old. A few Germans, but mostly Brits.

There was an unbelievable coincidence, I hopped on the bus and this dude who I'd never seen before sat opposite and I soon found out he lives 5 miles away from where I live in England! I was like, omg, lol. He goes by the name of Scott Walker, I don't know if anybody knows him he went to The Leys and is the year above me.

So on the bus we did some introductions where we got the microphone and talked about ourselves, for some reason I said I liked tea, and from then on everyone thought I was a tea expert...which of course I'm not!

On the bus we did a little sociable quiz which was cool, I got 7 right but it was first to 10 so I didn't win, Gemma, a school teacher from England won it instead.

We were on our way to the capital of Australia, Canberra. The city was completely purpose-built, which is good in that it's a very practical design, but many people say that the place is lifeless and no sense of community. Based on my short stay I was inclined to agree with them. We visited the parliament buildings there, which were amazing! They were designed around the house of commons in London, with the red and the green chairs etc. The green was the colour of Eucalyptus leaves, wow. There was a HUMONGOUS flag, which weighed 15kg, and was really really high, it towered over the city, and it was really big and massive and big.

Also in Canberra we went to the National Museum of Australia, which turned out to be the absolute spot on definition of "Pretentious". There was this ridiculous spinning booth which we all sat in. It was mildly amusing that the booth consisted of three "quadrants" :-), as the polite, jolly Australian guide called it. In this stupid booth there were three TVs that for reasons unknown went up and down on little mini pillars. And behind these TVs was another huge TV. They had irritating bird noises, and water sounds and things like in an attempt to create an atmosphere in there, the whole time these TVs were bobbing up and down, it was like watching tennis. The whole display was a ludicrous attempt to convey what Australia is about, I'm glad we didn't take it too seriously. There was a large courtyard which they called the Garden of Australian Dreams, this was just one big artistic symbol for Australia.

"take one step and you travel the equivalent of 100 kilometres across the real landmass"

The guide was there for about 20 minutes telling us about underlying symbolic references. There was a huge great tree trunk bathing in a shallow pool, the reasons why still bewilder me. Maybe it's rain+forest?

We picked up a dude called "Rory" who was Irish and was pretty damn legendary. Here he is, with a roo.

We were driving to Jindabyne, which is a town where we were staying that night. There was a stunning view across Lake Jindabyne from the hotel balcony.

Next day we went tobogganing! We drove up to the mountains and there was a huge blizzard so I whipped out the old waterproofs and threw myself down the slopes, great fun. We had a hot choc in the cafe which was welcome relief from the storming blizzard raging outside, seriously it wasn't nice out there, glad I had me hat n gloves!

We then went to Lakes Entrance, which is a big fishing and oil industry port. We got up early the next day to watch the sunrise over the lakes, amazing photos, stunning with the full moon too! We also went to Victoria National Park, and saw Kangaroos yay! And also saw Emus, and Craig the driver almost ran over a Wombat, that woulda been naasty. He actually got a speeding fine the day before for $318 (strange sum i know!).

This was yesterday, and we arrived in Melbourne our destination. I went with all of the gang from the OzExperience bus to a pub called the Elephant and Wheelbarrow. You had to pay $40 to get in, but it was worth every cent :-) . The reason for going was because on Monday nights they have a neighbours night, so a few of the stars like the doctor guy came round. I've no idea who they were, but I got some good pics of them. There was also a pub quiz, and my team, ''At It Like Rabbits" were on top form. We had one Australian woman who was going out with this english dude, and this woman seemed to know everything about everything to do with Australia, so she got all of the Aus questions. I helped in the following question:

2x+4=14, find x (this is pretty tricky stuff.....)

So we had a few english tourists, and then the whole of the OzExperience bus on our team, which I swear must have been cheating. Other teams had brought along their brainy parents along just to get a quick buck. We so showed them !

Spot the German...

To cut a long story short, we actually came joint first out of 50 teams! And it was absolutely hilarious becuase the dude going out with the Australian woman had to do a dance off with the other team leader who we were joint first with! He danced like an idiot which was tres amusant, and he won the crowd over. So we ended up winning this prize of $500! The main contributors to the team (yes that included me :-P) got $50 each and swiftly moved to the bar to buy the whole team some rip off drinks. So overall was an amazing night.

I'm now in Melbourne on the south coast, and I'm just about to go have a little explore, maybe go down to the beach or tram into town. I'm getting the ferry tonight to Tasmania to stay with Phil and Rosie, some family friends.