Van Diemens land
I had my whole day all planned out leaving Melbourne, got to the airport really early in case reissuing my ticket took a while… Turns out, Qantas wouldn’t reissue it there at all, they only deal with current day or emergency ticketing there and apparently I had to go to one of their city offices to have the changes made. The exact opposite of what the American airlines representative told me on the phone the other day. Net result, hours of time spent doing nothing at Melbourne airport. Thanks for that American airlines!
My flight to Hobart was fine, saw the end of a great sunset once we took-off. Fantastic colours as far as I could see in either direction…
Upon arrival in Hobart we left the plane via steps onto the tarmac. Haven’t done that in a few years. I arrived at my hostel in Hobart just before 10pm, checked in and then looked for somewhere to get some food. Apparently this is not possible at this time of night. At least I found nothing open in a good half hour of walking around. It’s a good thing Qantas served (albeit small) sandwiches on the flight!
I spent my first day in Hobart walking all over the place. First order of the day was food since I hadn’t had any in a while. Next was the Qantas office in town, where they can reissue my ticket but it will take them a day (hopefully no more). I really don’t understand why after they have already gathered all the information from me and have my current ticket in front of them I have to leave it with them and go back tomorrow for my new one. I don’t think any airline employees actually fully understand round the world tickets.
Once that was taken care of I explored the city centre and harbour front (in the daylight this time), had some great fish and chips for lunch on the wharf served from a boat. The city centre is full of old stone buildings and there’s pockets of them all over town it seems. Great ambience here. Hobart despite being the capital of Tasmania (population is 200k+) doesn’t feel like a city at all, just like a moderately sized town. The weather was clearing off and warming up throughout the day here too, very nice afternoon and more of the same is forecast. I’ll take all of that I can get down here!
After this exploring I started to walk back to my hostel, almost getting there until I see the block of the road my hostel is on is blocked off by police and there’s 4 fire engines parked in the middle of the road. I paid attention long enough to figure out that it was not my hostel that had any problem but the bldg 2 doors down. Never saw any smoke either but they had all the water hoses and smoke gear out. Pubs are a good way to kill time, but when after I’d visited a couple of those and my hostel was still blocked off to me I headed to the Tasmanian museum across the road. Pretty small place but good information on the deportation of convicts here from England back in the day and a fantastic Antarctic exhibit. Apparently, Tasmania was the last piece of land to break apart from the Antarctic continent, long after Australia etc. So the geological elements here are closer related to parts of Antarctica than they are to the nearby mainland Australia.
After feeding my brain something to go with the beer from earlier on, I headed back to the hostel which was finally accessible again. The idea was to fix dinner, but the kitchen here is woefully inadequate for the number of guests so I gave up on that idea and went back out again. The sun was just setting, so I tried to find some good views of different areas of town with a little success.
Today will be spent putting together a car rental share with some other backpackers here. Making the next week of two affordable for all concerned. I should also let some of you who check this blog a lot know, Tasmanian internet access is not cheap nor is it readily available outside of the major towns (of which I think there’s 3) so once I leave Hobart I will probably not be updating this until I get back here in a couple weeks. If it’s more than a couple weeks without a post, a tasmanian devil got me.
Tags: Australia, Travel
Adam
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