Tasmania - Day 1 - Hobart

On our first day in Tasmania, we spent Saturday morning at the Salamanca markets. This market is only open on Saturdays and has a combination of crafts, jewelry, clothing and food stalls that line up the street. It is probably the best market that we've seen in Australia, which is probably why we bought the most souveniers from it. Plus, when's the next time we'll be in Tasmania? Tasmania is known for their wood, which is very pretty. Our favorite was Sassafras, which tends to be a mix of dark/light wood.


After the market, we decided to take a cruise of the bays/water around Hobart.


Along the way, we saw some great cliffs. Besides the cliffs, the boat would sometimes stop and lower a video camera into the water. It would allow you to show the sea life underneath. The best part was when these globefish suddenly turned around and started staring into the camera. They seemed to think that we were one of them!

For most of the time, we tried to sit in the back of the boat, but then we couldn't hear the information about the things we were seeing. But the back of the boat had some great views. Here's a photo of David and Casey enjoying the back.


At some points, we would stop and look at certain things, which was when we'd move to the front of the boat. Yep, I'm holding two beers in this picture, but one of them is David's.


Our cruise provided us a very big lunch. There was ham, chicken, smoked salmon, oyster, potato salad and some other goodies. One of the best parts was the berry dessert! We got to eat while we slowly moved around the bay.


During our circling, we encountered some white bellied eagles. The boat tried to feed them with some fish, but they weren't hungry.


After lunch, we stopped at Peppermint Bay and were given the opportunity to walk around. Nicole was never in the photo since she was too busy snapping away.


There were some beautiful views of the water.


Peppermint Bay was a restaurant that provided our lunch. It was also holding a wedding in one of its private rooms when we were there. Nicole wanted to get a photo to remember the name of where we went.


In the back of the restaurant, there were these giant pillows that we used to rest before heading back onto the boat. David and Sarah were staring at the clouds, while Casey (in the lower left) had decided to take a nap.


On our way back to Hobart, we stopped at a salmon farm. The salmon were constantly jumping out of the water. It's natural for them to jump out of the water as if they were jumping upstream when they want to spawn. You can see the fist in the right side of this photo. It kind of just looks like a black mark.

On our way back, Sarah, David and I enjoyed the views of leaving Peppermint Bay.


After the cruise, we were pretty tired. We headed back to our hotel and dropped off some stuff before we got ready for dinner. We ended up eating along the streets of where the Salamanca market had taken place. While we were there, we saw at least 3 hen parties (aka bachelorette parties) along the street. Apparently, Hobart is a happening place. =)

Sarah's Visit - Day 1

After traveling for over 34 hours with 2 layovers, Sarah finally arrived in Sydney!!! I met her at Circular Quay wharf and even though I had just gotten off the ferry, we got back on immediately to travel back to Manly. We dropped off her stuff and I showed her around Manly before we got the regular Australian food choice, fish and chips. We ate by the beach and enjoyed the weather. After some debate, we finally decided to head into the city. We dropped of our luggage at Bain before we walked around the city.


We walked to Lady Macquarie's Chair and ended up finding this great site to take a photo of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Sarah also took an amazing panoramic with her camera, but I haven't gotten that photo yet!


In the Royal Botanical Gardens, we saw a wedding! It was just starting when we walked by and we felt really bad for them. They were essentially almost in a zoo since any tourists that walked by would stop and stare. The worst was this mom and 2 kids who were set up exactly behind the bride and groom and wouldn't move. They were ruining their pictures because otherwise they would have had a perfect view of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.


As we walked around the Botanical Gardens, Sarah was pointing out flowers left and right! She was very excited to see the different varieties, but I had barely ever noticed all of them before. I must have forgot to tell her that bats fly around at night in the area because at one point, we looked up and there were hundreds of bats in the trees. Sarah got extremely worried and started running ahead since she thought the bats were going to dive down and attack her!

We took our time through the Rose Garden and took some beautiful photos of the roses that were in bloom!




After our walk around the Royal Botanical Gardens, we headed back to Bain to meet David, Casey and Nicole. The five of us were going to Tasmania for the weekend!! Poor Sarah had barely been in Sydney for less than 12 hours and she was already getting back onto a plane.

I was impressed at how she was never too jetlagged. She took a small nap on the plane to Hobart, before I woke her up to let her know that there was an empty seat next to us. After arriving in our motel/apartment, she managed to stay up until 10:30/11 PM, which was very impressive! Even better was the fact that she never woke up at 5 AM and couldn't go back to sleep like most of us.

Coming up next time: Photos of our time in Tasmania!!

Weekend Update - Darn Mosquitoes!

Since this was our last weekend before we have streams of visitors, we packed in the social calendar with the Bainies. This was the first time that we had hung out with some of them since before the holidays. Unfortunately, it ended up raining for the first half of the weekend.

On Friday night, we trekked out to Paddington, where Casey and Nicole were house sitting. We had organized a pub crawl around the area and were taking advantage of being able to stay somewhere closer to the city. The group started off small with 6 of us, but as we went to each bar, more and more people had come out to join us. We were a pretty big moving group, but luckily with Nicole's navigation and David's time keeping, we moved along easily. Everyone was surprised that our pub crawl actually went to almost all the bars on the list.

On Saturday, we had a slow start in the morning and finally made it to Ben's apartment for a BBQ despite the rain. His apartment was able to hold a big crowd even though we weren't able to take advantage of his patio. We watched a lot of cricket and tennis while just relaxing. As the day progressed, it was more and more apparent that David and I had been a tasty treat to some mosquitoes. It's unclear when/where all the bites occurred, but since no one else at the BBQ was getting bit, we can only assume that it was while we had been sleeping.

Originally, we had planned to play some golf on Sunday, but since the weather hadn't been cooperating, David and I decided to head back to Manly. By the time we got home, I had developed around 20 mosquito bites, mostly on my arms. Luckily, David doesn't have as many bites as me and he has a little more self control so he's not scratching them as much as me!

Weekend Fun

Since this is one of our last weekends without guests, we did a series of random activities with our favorite pair of people, Casey and Nicole. Here's a photo of them diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Doesn't it look amazing!


On Friday, we checked out a different type of movie theatre. It's called Govindas. You can get a package deal for dinner and a movie. They have an all vegetarian buffet and after you've stuffed yourself you go upstairs to let your food digest.

You get to lie down on these bed/couch like things while watching the movie. Luckily for us, there were 4 of us and they had some beds that were made for 4 people to share. Therefore, we weren't lying next to any strangers. We had decided to catch the earlier movie, which was smart because the later movie had tons more people in line. We couldn't figure out how all of them were going to fit into the theatre!


On Saturday, the original plan was to go to the pool or beach and then play some golf in the early afternoon. Since we were trying to rush too many things into the day, we decided to move golf to Sunday and we went to the pool all day. The four of us had our own raft so we were able to enjoy the sunshine lying around.

While Casey and Nicole went to a fancy, paid for dinner, I cooked David dinner. For dessert, we decided to check out Max Brenner, which is this chocolate dessert place that it's in our ferry terminal. We've found a new night time activity for the multiple guests that are about to arrive. We had chocolate fondue that was delicious and we finished it off with a cup of hot chocolate. Sugar overload!

On Sunday, we had brunch with Charlie and Lily, who just moved into our building. After brunch, we went to a bar to watch the Patriots win! Casey and Nicole also joined us at the bar along with Ben, Avaleigh and Ajay. Though there were many anti-Pats fans at the bar, we showed them who was the better team to cheer for.

After the game, the fantastic four headed over to the golf course as dark clouds started rolling in. Since the man at the pro shop didn't believe we'd be able to finish our 9 holes, he gave us a super discount. David and I paid $17 for both of our 9 holes. That's only $8.50 a person!

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera, but the club hire and buggy hire for Casey and Nicole was hilarious. They each got their own small blue leather golf bags that held their 6 clubs. The size of their golf bags were about 1/4 of the size of David and my bags. They put their tiny blue bags onto their yellow buggys (pull carts). Sometimes, when they stopped at their ball, the buggy would tip over since there wasn't enough weight with their tiny bags.

We had a great time even though it began to rain on our 3rd hole. We even finished all 9 holes in the rain. On the first hole, the sprinkler system started up near the green as soon as we were on the green. The sprinklers never seemed to turn off even though it was raining. We ended up playing speed golf at the greens since we had to try and putt before the sprinkler would rotate and hit you. On the final hole, there was a river in the middle of the green and the hole was waterlogged. We couldn't even finish it out.

Thanks for a great weekend guys! Thanks for trekking out to Manly 2 days in a row. We'll definitely make sure to come to Paddington sometime this coming weekend.

Wombat Info

Since the Wombat has left to hang out in Hong Kong with Cindy, I figured I'd give everyone some more information about real-life wombats and some photos of them. Wombats are considered marsupials and their closest relation is the koala bear. They are generally slow movers, but if threatened, they can reach up to 25 miles/hour. That's pretty fast for this short legged creature!

Even though our wombat was very small and cute, most wombats are about 3 feet in length and unfortunately not as cute. Here are some more photos of the zoo's wombat. At first it was just wandering around.



It looked at us with curiosity.


At one point, the wombat went over to this water bucket and ended up dumping the bucket over. Oops!


Australia's interesting fact of the day: The movies! Besides the expensive price for going to see a movie, it's very different from the US. The theatre I went to wasn't quite as big so almost everyone had a great seat. Their seats were very comfortable, but didn't rock. The seat part didn't even move up so they weren't trying to cram as many people into the movie theatre. Finally, the big difference was assigned seating. Yep, that's right there was assigned seating. This was actually pretty great because you didn't have to try and get to the movie theatre on time since you knew you'd have a great seat. And since there are about 25 minutes of commercials mixed in with 3 previews at the "start" of the movie, you could show up 20 minutes late to avoid all that nonsense as well!