This ones for you Dad! Hops fields freshly harvested. One of our first stops was hops fields between New Norfolk (which I originally thought was the smallest town EVER..but then we kept driving) and Lake St. Claire. Tasmania brews some good beer, but they also export their hops to some of the best beer producing countries in the world (Germany, Czech, etc)
Tall Tree walk. 1 guess why its called that...
These trees are the second largest trees in the world, second only to the Redwood. There aren't that many of these trees because they were cut down by settlers and they need a lot of sunlight to grow to impressive sizes. When a tree falls in the forest, it creates light for the other trees, helping them get huge. We saw lots of fallen trees as seen here...
Here Danielle, me, and Melissa are standing inside a fallen tree!
The first waterfall of the trip! And possibly my favorite :)
Russell Falls are on all the stamps in Australia, if I sent you guys mail or the post cards that I've written but not sent, you would see that, just without me standing in front of it. But really, whats a picture of a waterfall without me in front of it?! (My Tasmania friends did notice and appreciate my narcissistic personality)
Lake St. Claire used to be home to many aboriginal people, with something like 10 tribes and 9 different languages. However white settlers extinguished them. Literally, entire cultures completely wiped out. Little is known about the people but they do know that they believed all life sprang from the lake, which is deeper than the Bass Straight that separates Tasmania from mainland Australia (about 150m, which is over 450 ft---I think).
We also know that aboriginals used to burn the forest to help condense hunting areas. They still do this in Tasmania, creating button grass fields pictured here:
Button grass fields are endemic to Tasmania. In the background you can see Dollarite formations. When Tasmania broke off from Australia and Antarctica, the magma was able to push the rocks up, but did so in hexagonal pieces. Close up you can see the pattern, kinda hard to tell here. Don't ask me why or how this happens, Im not a geologist...im just telling you what I remember from our tour guide.
Probably the coolest thing about Tasmania was the dichotomy of extremes. They have the densest forest in the world (which the picture does no justice to):
Then, there's Queenstown:
About 20 minute down the road from the previous picture, Queenstown is an old mining town. As our tour guide put it "Think West Virginia." Queenstown got hit by the gold rush, then the gold dried up, so they started mining copper. Apparently part of mining copper deals with super high heat, which the miners used all the forest from the mountains to create. By de-foresting the mountains around the town, they lost all their top soil and can no longer support the forest that should there. Mining copper also polluted the land so much that the Queenstown river is actually dead, there are no fish in the river.
My accidental attempt at artsy. I like it.
To see the lush beautiful mountains turn to the most polluted area all because of man's interference says a lot. Queenstown itself it a lot like an old fashioned ghost town. The cars are more expensive than the homes, as a lot of homes we saw were tin shacks...no joke. It was surreal.
This is Queenstown. All of it.
That's day one. These blogs will take forever to get through, but I'm going to power through so I have a record of Tasmania. It was really a great trip. The tour was better than I expected, I made some great friends, and being somewhere so remote was truly awesome. We were without cell phones, internet, television, work, uni, other dramas for a whole week! It felt very liberating to be out of communication, though my mother doesn't feel this way!!
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