The last day on the tour started with a trip to a penal settlement and finished with a tour of the Devil's sanctuary:
Tasmania Day 6
Port Arthur. Prisoners could have at least enjoyed the view, except that they were hooded on the boats so they couldn't see anything. And since they came in from the water, it made it very very hard for them to escape. Good planning on the govt's part.
Prison ruins. The higher you lived the better off you were, you got the better jobs, and didn't have fecal matter falling on your head.
I think it was a massive fire that destroyed the settlement after it was closed down. It isn't known whether the fire was intentional as Tasmanians were very ashamed of their convict past.
Here is a picture of the garb they had to wear, hood included. Each prisoner was given a number making it very very impersonal.
Prisoner's cell. If they were good. If they had to go to the seperate prison, it looked like this:
Seems harmless enough. Not really. This cell had 4 doors to get to this point. It had absolutely no light and no sound. Complete senses deprivation. Guards even had to wear slippers on their feet to keep from making noise. This cell was completely pitch black, my camera flash is the only reason you can see anything on the picture. Melissa and Pavel ventured a little further in than I did, this was a close to inside as I could get. Apparently I have a fear of the dark.
Church was big for the convicts. And not because the guards forced them, convicts wanted their church, they even got a Protestant and a Catholic church. Isn't the government so good to them.
Outside the church ruins.
View from the church to the convict quarters.
Where the free people lived. For being a penal settlement its quite picturesque.
We took a short (20 minute) cruise around Isle of the Dead. Which is only cool when you say like you're telling a scary story, as we did all day. This is where the young convicts went (as young as 9) to not be influenced by the older more corrupt convicts. It is also their cemetery with an unknown by ginormous amount of men and boys buried on this tiny little island.
Look, I'm a tourist! I hate feeling like a tourist, but it was just so pretty, I wanted a picture.
In its hayday, Port Arthur was a thriving little self sustaining settlement. Convicts were all given jobs to keep everything functioning. If you were well behaved you got a better job, if you tried to run away you got whipped and put in chains. Eventually they stopped the whipping and chains, and moved the the Separate System. Beating convicts wasn't making them stop the behavior, so instead they started putting them in isolation. Port Arthur was the first place to use the separate system, that we still use today. There are lots of reports of convict abuse, but seems to me on paper the idea of making this little town and everyone gets a job and its self sustaining would have been a reasonable way to deal with convicts. Interesting.
From Port Arthur we went to Safety Cove for lunch. My last beautiful Tasmania beach.
We couldn't figure out what Matt was doing at first.
He was making us a sign! It says Tasmania April 2010.
On to the Devils' Sanctuary...
Tasmania Devil that is! Doesn't look much like the cartoon. And it doesn't run around in a crazy tornado. But it is a scary little creature. They have the strongest jaws of any land animal based on their size. Their teeth can crush through 8in of bone. Ouch.
They are also really violent. They fight with each other all the time, and they bite each other often. It is normal for them to bite each other in the face while mating. At the sanctuary they were trying to mate these two. The male had already impregnated the other female and they to move her out of that den. Tasmanian devils can have up to 20 babies in one go, but they are tiny, and the mother only has enough nipples to feed 4. So up to 16 die every time. No matter what. Weird huh? Also, they are endangered on their own accord. There is a mouth cancer that is being spread through biting in the devils. One of the very very few cancers that are spread through exposure. but you can't tell if a devil has the cancer until giant tumors form on their mouth, eventually growing enough to make it impossible for the devil to eat and it starves to death. Pleasant.
Also not pleasant, but extremely funny. Matt makes the meanest Tasmanian devil I've ever seen.
Melissa and I give it a go:
The sanctuary had other animals, but only rescues. This is a Rainbow Lorikeet. Funny enough I just saw one of these this weekend in The Rocks (a neighborhood in downtown Sydney) at a cafe. They were stealing the sugar packs and breaking them open and eating the sugar. Sneeky little buggers.
And they had wallabies!! Big wallabies that looked like kangaroos, but there aren't actually any kangaroos in Tasmania.
They were pretty used to people in the sanctuary and didn't mind being pet. Though I did learn that they don't like it when you touch their heads, so you could pet their backs and rub their bellies, but it was actually best to come up to them from behind. I thankfully, did NOT learn this the hard way :)
This baby one was my favorite <3
Watching them bound away on their tails is pretty interesting.
These signs are everywhere throughout Tasmania. Kinda like our deer signs, only cooler.
As we headed back to Hobart to end our tour we saw the most awesomest rainbow that ever was. I which the picture was more clear. It was huge, and bright, and you could see all the colors and both ends of it. Coolest rainbow I've ever seen :)
Danielle and Pavel on the bus. Our home for 6 days :)
Then it was on to Hobart, where our tour started and finished. And this was sad. Very sad.
Thankfully, we all had that night in Hobart together. We were going to have a great big night out, but it was a Sunday, and we were tired. So we settled for keeping the whiskey distillery open past their closing time!
Marna, Dominik, me, Melissa, and Pavel.
These were all the whiskeys we got to try. They were really good, and I planned on buying one to share with Jake (cuz I'm a good friend like that) even though the small bottles were $100 each. But then I tried their spirits. If you did the whiskey tasting you got to taste 5 whiskeys (for a measley $12) but then you could taste any of their spirits for free. So I asked for whatever he recommended, and he gave me Pepperberry Liquer, and I bought a bottle on the spot. It was the most delicious and different thing I've tasted! It was like Christmas, spicy and sweet at the same time. Then I tried the Pepperberry Gin, and I bought a bottle of that too!! Remember how I said the end of the tour was unintentionally heavy on the alcohol activities? So now my problem was that I had 3 big bottles of liquor (because I still had the bottle of wine from the winery) which I had to take on the plane to get home. And my bag was already stuffed to the breaking point. I had to buy a new bag so I could check my backpack and bring whatever I couldn't fit in there on the plane with me.
That night I said goodbye to Melissa, Dominik, and Caitlin who all had early morning flights to catch.
Tasmania Day 7
The alcohol activities didn't stop there. The next day Marna, Pavel and I went to Cascade Brewery. Another Tasmanian beer.
Unfortunately, we didn't think to book the tour in advance and they were booked. It was also $25 and an hour and a half. By this time, I was just done. So we decided to grab a beer. I wasn't going to partake cuz I was also feeling guilty and stressed about spending any more money. But Pavel was nice enough to buy me a beer. Marna went all out with the beer tasting:
From there, we hopped the bus back to town. We had walked out there, but it took about 45 mins. We saw this cute church on the way.
Hobart is rated one of the most picturesque cities in the world. I can see it. There are very colorful houses built into the surrounding mountains and old buildings and its clean and safe. It was a nice little city. About the population of Crystal Lake (200,000) but still has a cool urban feel.
And so ended my Tasmanian adventure. After we got back from the brewery I said goodbye to all my friends, stopped at Target to get a new bag so I could take my alcohol home, and hopped a bus to the airport. Where I experienced one of the scariest flights of my life. A few times I thought the plane was going to roll over. I thought it great irony if I had just had the most amazing time and made some amazing friends, spent a week of the radar, only to go down on my way home. And before being able to show or tell anyone about the amazingness.
Thankfully, this was not the case and I made it home unscathed.
