Impressions of Tasmania Australia's island state makes for a wonderful winter vacation

Winter in Seattle is dark, grim and often wet. Since 1985, I have been to the Southern Hemisphere six times to enjoy the reversed seasons. Five times I have been to New Zealand and, in November and December of 2004, I went to Tasmania for the first time. Each time I have gone on a bicycle tour operated by New Zealand Pedaltours

In addition to the lovely spring and summer weather, and beautiful scenery, there are other good reasons for a winter vacation in Tasmania, including the local arts and crafts, the food, the critters, the flora and, especially, the people.

People

Starting at Sydney Airport, my first impressions of the Aussies I met is that they were all very nice. In Tasmania, the Tassies, as they call themselves, struck me as the warmest, friendliest, most helpful people I have ever met. Mainland Aussies think Tassies are weird. If they are, it is the nicest weirdness.

The Tassies and Aussies speak a form of English you can generally understand once you get used to the humor and understatement.

Art

The fine arts of Tasmania are wood working and shell necklaces. Because of all the wonderful local trees, including Huon pine, sassafras and many others, local artisans make beautiful plates, bowls, cutting boards, and furniture from these woods. You can see displays of wood art at the Design Center in Launceston, at a shop on the Esplanade in Launceston, at the mill store in Shrahan, at the Glen Clyde House at Hamilton, at the Salamanca market on Saturdays in Hobart, and numerous other places. While many of these wood pieces are heavy, the dealers claim they can ship them to the United States for a moderate cost. I brought back a sassafras sugar bowl which I could fit in my carry-on bag.

At the Art Gallery in Launceston I came across a display of shell necklaces. Each necklace is made of hundreds of sea shells, each no larger than half an inch wide. Different types and colors of shells are mixed to make beautiful designs. The necklaces are a resurrection of an aboriginal art. They are made by contemporary descendants of aboriginal women who live on St. Barren and Flinders islands off the northeast coast of Tasmania.

Gardening is also a fine art in Tasmania. You will see many gardens in every city of Tasmania, but the most accessible are those in Hamilton. Each of the convict-built cottages in Hamilton, which was once a notorious penal colony, has been preserved and refurbished as a B&B unit, and each has a beautiful garden you can wander in.

Food

Good food is important for any vacation and especially so on a bicycling vacation. The food in Tasmania was amazingly good. We ate a lot of seafood, especially Trevella, the local thick, moist, mild, white fish. Tasmania also has wonderful scallops, with the orange tails still attached, mussels, very good salmon, and other fish you have never heard of. While my tour stayed at some fairly fancy places, most of the restaurants we chanced upon were also excellent. The Riverside Fish and Chips on the Esk River in Launceston was very good.

Especially on the East Coast, Tasmanian bakeries are wonderful. In addition to sweet cakes and breads, all Tasmanian bakeries serve savory tarts that I had for lunch at every opportunity. Hobart has many good bakeries but the best I found was Jackman and McRoss on Hampden Road, about a mile from the Old Woolstore hotel where we stayed.

Tasmanians make many fine cheeses which you can have for dessert at many restaurants. One dessert plate was so large, I took most of the cheese back to my hotel and had it for snacks later.

Tasmania has many wineries. While I am a big fan of mainland Australian wines, I found the Tasmanian wines generally disappointing.

Critters

Blackman feeding Wallabies

Tasmania’s native marsupials were another unexpected pleasure. Wallabies were everywhere. Even though they are supposedly nocturnal, I saw wallabies out in the morning and the late afternoon. I recommend you feed and touch a wallaby at the wild life park about five miles north of Bicheno. (Bicheno also has an excellent bakery.)

One day, a fellow bicyclist said she had seen a pademelon. I asked whether that was a Tassie cantaloupe and she informed me it was a small wallaby. I saw one briefly in the morning outside our cabin at St. Clair. There are two even smaller Wallabies, the bettong and the potoroo, which I never saw.

Tasmanian Devils are about the size of a small dog or very large cat. They are beautiful animals, with coats of black and brown with spots of white. We saw one in a wild life park, but I also saw one very briefly coming out of his den underneath the deck at the Cradle Mountain restaurant. Other people on my tour went out at night and saw or heard devils that lived under the deck at the St. Clair restaurant.

One of our biggest treats was a night-time walk led by the owner of the lodge at the Silver Ridge Retreat outside Sheffield. He fed apple slices to Cheeky, a possum that he’d built a hut for. We also got to feed Cheeky and stroke her wonderfully soft fur. Cheeky’s two year old daughter was a bit shyer and only hung down from a tree branch to get her share of apple. Cheeky’s one year old daughter was up on the roof of the feeding hut and I never did see her, though we heard her scrambling around.

Twice I saw echidnas, or porcupines, crossing the road as I bicycled by. Even they looked cute though I do not recommend trying to pet them. Tasmania also has some poisonous snakes, but they’re not aggressive and won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.

Flora

Waratah Bush

As we cycled down into Cradle Mountain Park, we saw bushes with large bright red flowers, the waratah, a Christmas tree decorated by nature.

Throughout Tasmania, the dominant tree is the gum or eucalypt. Unlike California, Tasmania has many varieties of eucalyptus. They are frequently seen on the many logging trucks but also dense in the forests and along the roads.

Tasmania has lots of other species of trees not found in the Northern Hemisphere, including the King Billy pine and the Celery-top pine, neither of which is a true pine. Many of these trees can be seen at the Cradle Mountain Park. There is an excellent newsletter at the park information center which shows the plants and critters you can see there.

Weather

Although Tasmanian weather can be unpredictable, the summer weather we enjoyed was priceless.

Come prepared for rain and coolness no matter what time of year. We had better than normal weather when we were there. In 20 days, we were rained on for short periods twice and sprinkled on a couple other times. Bring your Gore-Tex and polypro but if you are lucky, like me, you won’t have to use them.