Tuesday, January 31st

We scheduled a wakeup call for 7:15 am thinking we were going to have breakfast and meet everyone in the Atrium at 8:45 am for our tour of Hobart, Tasmania.  So, Mike and I go down to the dining room for breakfast since going upstairs to the 14^th floor is out of the question.  We sit with a couple from Queensbridge, Australia, a couple from just outside of Sydney and two women (one from Hawaii and one from Ohio).  Everyone is very nice and we have a nice conversation about how this trip didn’t turn out to be what we all thought it would be.  As we are talking the Captain comes on for the morning update.  He says that we are still about 66 nautical miles away and that we won’t get to Hobart at this speed until about 2:00 pm this afternoon.  He said that in the middle of the night we hit swells of about 30 feet high and the wind was about 95 mph.  The waves right now are about 18 feet high.  It is so crazy you want to watch but then you don’t because it will make you sick.  They have stopped all but one elevator at this time too.  Believe it or not we finally hit land in Hobart about 1:30 pm and everyone is so happy!  We meet our group in the Atrium and get off the ship to meet our tour guide, Moira.  She is originally from New Zealand but moved to Australia about 20 years ago because her husband builds boats and this is where the Yachts and Catamarans are built.  In the harbor they have two 100 foot long catamarans in hangers that they use for Ferry service.  People are starting to go back to work this week from summer vacations.  Hobart has a large Zinc refinery they use to export to Australia and China.  They also export Copper, Tin, Nickel, Gold and Metal.  Abalone is another thing the export.  They have had about 8 years of drought so this year they are happy they are having a wetter summer.  One of the largest exports they have is medical Opium.  There are fields of poppies all over the city.  We drove to the Bonorong Animal Park.  We saw lots of Kangaroos and Wallabies, the Tasmanian Devils and Koalas.  The Kangaroos were roaming the property and we could pet them, feed them and take pictures with them.  The babies are so cute.  They jump into their mothers pouches head first!  There are many marsupials in Hobart.  We also saw Quolls, Possums, and Wombats.  Wombats are Herbivores & go underground most of the time.  The marsupials that are carnivores are the Devils, Quoll, and Tasmanian Tigers.  After visiting the Animal Park we drove along the Derwin River where Moira showed us the homes from the 1800’s and the Government buildings.  They call there tract homes “Cottages” and fixer uppers “Jetrofied”.   They call their hiking trails “Walking Tracks”.  We drove up Mt. Nelson to a lookout spot which showed us the whole city and our ship docked at the port.  It was beautiful but a bit foggy.  We saw their University called “UTAS”……they are very proud of their Orchestra. Moira told us that there are approx. 3,000 people who are descendents of the original population from the 1800’s.  We end up at Salamanca Place Square where we found a pub and had some local beer.  Back to the ship we go….it is now about 7:00 pm and we have dinner reservations at the Steak House tonight.

Everyone is so exhausted from not sleeping during the rough nights that we go to bed by 10:30 pm.

                                                                                                                                      

Hobart, Tasmania Fun Facts:

Hobart is the sister city to Sydney.  It welcomes ships and yachts from around the world.  Hobart has the first legal casino in Australia.  The city was originated in 1803, when a small party of soldiers and convicts, under the command of Lt. John Bowen, was dispatched from Sydney to form Australia’s second European settlement on the Derwent River.  Battery Point is the original settlement site.  Constitution Dock is where they hold the annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race.  Back in the 1800’s so many convicts were sent to Hobart to live that they outnumbered the population here.  Some were used as slaves but in 1830 they put a stop to that.  There has been 35,000 years of human evidence on Tasmania.