One of the benefits of touring Australia with a group tour is that the tour company handles all the bags and makes all the flight arrangements. Only one morning did we have to get up before the crack of dawn and get our bags outside our hotel room door. We’re early risers anyway, so that was never a problem. Everyone in our group was prompt and congenial about it all.

Australia is one BIG country – almost as large as the United States. We flew from Los Angeles to Melbourne, Melbourne to Hobart, Launceston to Melbourne, Melbourne to Adelaide, Adelaide to Alice Springs, Ayers Rock to Cairns, Cairns to Sydney, Sydney to Christchurch, Queenstown to Auckland and from there back home. In the three weeks we were there (three in Australia, one in New Zealand), we saw just the central and eastern part of the country (we didn’t go to Perth, Darwin, etc.). At each new destination, buses were there to meet us once we landed, and our wonderful tour guide, Marilyn, was right on top of all those arrangements. We traveled as a “group” at airports, so often we got into other (much shorter) lines to check in. Upon arrival in Adelaide we took a little side trip into the local foothills and visited a wildlife park (koala above). It was raining, rather drizzling, and quite cold there, but the koala was quite content to pose for the tourists as he nibbled on the ever-ready eucalyptus leaves. Below, some Cape Bretton geese who were willing to take some food from Marilyn, our guide.

Two in our group took a one day (all day) flight to Kangaroo Island, where they got to see lots of the indigenous animals and one paid an additional fee to hold a koala. I’d heard or read mixed reviews about the trip (long day, may or may not see many of the animals, and expensive). So we opted not to go on that adventure. But all the rest of our group was game for a day of wine tasting. Marilyn made the arrangements and we tootled off in a small van to see wineries, etc.

Left to right, top to bottom: a vineyard in the Barossa Valley, a typical country road in the Barossa, vineyards again, colorful trees just leafing out in springtime, Albert Di Palma, the owner of Villa Tinto telling us all about his wine (we bought several bottles and so did nearly everyone else in our group), their winery sign, some delicious kangaroo (roo, they call it) with red cabbage and apples, and a very interesting gnarly tree in which, once upon a time an entire family lived.

The Barossa Valley is a major wine region in South Australia, producing some of the finest wines the country has to offer. We visited three wineries, but only one of them stood out for our group, although I did buy one bottle of a lightly sparkling rose at another winery. As our wine-tour guide explained to us, sometime recently at a major wine tasting, Penfold’s Grange (it’s one of the premier wines of the Penfold Winery, also in the Barossa Valley) was blind tasted with the wine from Villa Tinto. Villa Tinto surprised everyone with being almost a tie.

Now Penfold’s Grange is no wine to sneeze at – we saw it on restaurant menus in Australia from about $400 to about $700 a bottle. Here in the U.S. it can be purchased for $450 or so not including a restaurant mark-up. And I’m very proud to say that Dave and I have tasted one – complements of our friends Lynn and Sue (who recently moved to Colorado, big sigh). Lynn was given a bottle by a generous business associate, and he shared it with us. It was fantastic. It’s a shiraz (in Aussie twang, it’s pronounced sheer-razz, not sheer-raahs, as I thought it was).

Villa Tinto, however, was pretty darned fantastic too. Their price? About $18 a bottle for the Cabernet/Shiraz blend, which was our favorite. Unfortunately, Villa Tinto doesn’t export. They’re a 6-acre, small husband-wife operation (they built the winery from the weeds up starting in 2001) and they sell everything they bottle. It’s a hassle to ship wine, besides. We’re sad, though, since we have just two bottles we brought home. Sue and Lynn? I think that bottle is earmarked for your next visit back to So. California (they read my blog, so I know they’ll catch that!).

As for the “roo,” I didn’t order it. Dave did. Several in our group ordered roo (the delicious 3-course lunch was included in the all-day Barossa Valley wine tour) and all proclaimed it outstanding.

I think these photos are repeats from above, but wider and bigger . . .

One of the evenings we were in Adelaide our group was divided up and visited a private home for dinner. OAT contracts with individual families to host tourists for a home-hosted dinner. That kind of adventure is included in all the OAT tours. The family we visited is pictured below (the two children had gone to bed by then), along with the photo of the beef bolognaise she prepared for us for dinner. She always includes small chunks of carrot in her sauce. We enjoyed some nice Aussie cheese and crackers, the spaghetti with sauce, a green salad and a layered chocolate cake for dessert.

Here are a couple more photos that don’t really have stories attached to them. I love to photograph walls. Interesting walls that have lots of character to them. This one was at an old, old winery we visited, so this wall hadn’t been reconstructed, but it had obviously been patched.

And lastly, I always love to take photos of tree trunks. There’s something about eucalyptus trees that intrigue me – the bark is multi-colored, layered and it keeps peeling off, giving the tree some very interesting views.

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From top: the meeting point at the main train station (a common place where anyone in Melbourne will meet others; we flew in); Dave standing in our little apartment (bedroom is behind Dave); and one of the very modern buildings in downtown Melbourne.

When we were on our journey throughout Australia – did I mention we were on a tour with a max of 16 people, with OAT (Overseas Adventure Travel), a part of Grand Circle? In one of my other posts I know I mentioned that this tour – called Ultimate Australia was an active one – not as active as a group of athletes would be, but for oldsters like us, it was active. Some in our group were far more active than we were. Dave, with his artificial legs, kept up with most activities – he was amazing, really. Occasional days (usually when we were traveling somewhere else) we didn’t have active walks, but most days we took walks of a  mile, or up to about three maybe.

Anyway, after touring Tasmania for nearly a week, when we flew from Launceston to Melbourne all of us needed clean clothes. Oh, were we ever happy campers to stay in a residence hotel, right in the heart of the city, where each unit had a washer/dryer combo. Some of us were more successful than others with using it, though. Our clothes washed, but never dried, but since we were there for 2 1/2 days, everything dried, draped everywhere.

We walked all over Melbourne, back and forth, here and there. And one morning we visited the Queen Victoria Market. Pictures below, and that’s Tasmanian fresh wild salmon bottom right.

Another day we visited the Old Melbourne Gaol (jail). THAT was really interesting. They used some fairly ugly techniques. The cells were incredibly small. None had windows or daylight.

There’s a photo taken from the ground floor looking up at the 2nd and 3rd levels. Each cell was about 5×9 feet, I’d guess. Some had hard wood doors; others had bars. This was before the era of soundproofing, so every noise could be heard. Down at the far end on the left was the hanging place (inside, see in photo below). Back during the era of this prison people believed in phrenology (the study of the brain – size and shape related to behavior), so nearly every prisoner had a death mask made (death masks are done post mortem) and the heads were studied as part of this phrenology movement. The most notorious of the prisoners was the famous bushranger Ned Kelly of the Kelly Gang. He was imprisoned and hung at the Melbourne Gaol in 1880 (his death mask is pictured below). The man has received nearly cult status in Australia – some people revere him like a folk hero (kind of like Robin Hood). Others, of course, know he was an Australian gangster.

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Did I tell you that visiting Cradle Mountain in northern Tasmania was one of the highlights of the entire 28 day trip? And did I tell you that probably 3 out of every 4 days the sun doesn’t shine on Cradle Mountain? So you can see why getting that photo above is so startling, so unusual, and so special! After traveling nearly all day (by small bus) we arrived at the Cradle Mountain Lodge, a gorgeous resort within the Cradle Mt – Lake St Clair National Park.

We had a beautiful room overlooking a small pond (see view of pond below, top right). Fantastic food in the Lodge was provided. That night about 9pm we took a night tour in an elongated truck/jeep thing to see all the nocturnal animals as they were feeding. That was truly fun (I didn’t even take my camera along as the animals were all about 30+ feet away and dimly lit), so I have nothing to show for it except a photo of the truck!

The next morning we took a nature walk (separate from the 20 some available within the National Park) around the Lodge, then drove to see Cradle Mountain itself.

The day we were en route to Cradle Mountain we stopped in the town of Ross. I remember reading about Ross (one of the early prisoner-developed towns in central Tasmania), and Marilyn, our guide, told us where she was going to have lunch, at the Ross General Store. Most of us followed right along behind her and Dave and I shared a salmon and brie pie (like a Cornish pasty, but with salmon and brie instead) and oh was it ever good! The dessert at bottom right is something called a “vanilla slice.” A kind of vanilla custard between two layers of pastry. I can’t say it was one of my favorite things, but it’s beloved by Aussies. Meat and vegetable pies were on menus nearly everywhere we went in both Australia and New Zealand. Every single one of them I had was really delicious.

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While in central Tasmania we visited a wildlife park called Bonorong. It’s a small place supported only by donations. They rescue abandoned young animals – usually because the mothers were killed by a car. The park personnel try to rehabilitate the animals so they can return to the wild, but that doesn’t always work. They also are raising many young Tasmanian Devils because the population of these animals in the wild is being decimated by an infectious facial tumor/cancer that kills them. Several wildlife parks in Tasmania are raising young that are not infected and will remain in captivity (but isolated) until this awful cancer has run its course. So here were the animals we saw:

Pictures L-R, top to bottom: A aging male koala. Did you know that koalas have a cartilege plate (called a carapace) on their rear ends? No wonder they can sit for hours on end in the fork of a tree? And did you know that koalas are really quite dumb? About all they know how to do is find and chew eucalyptus leaves (that’s all they eat), climb up and down trees, sleep (about 20 hours a day) and mate. The young male koalas sit in trees and wait for the available females to come to them. Hmmm.  Bennett’s Wallabies or Kangaroos. Bennett’s are smaller and have a multi-color coat. Young ones were very skittish about taking feed from our hands. I loved feeding the kangaroos – they’re very dainty as they hold down your palm to get at the goodies you have. A young Tasmanian Devil. The group we observed were young and they were just learning their charge and scare tactics. They scream and snarl at one another, although they’re mostly all bluff, we were told. However, don’t ever, EVER get in the way of a Tassie Devil and its food! Because they’re carrion scavengers, they’re usually the lowest in the pecking order, so they’ve adapted to eat bones. That’s just what they do – imagine the strength of those jaws! Tassie Devils screaming at one another. It’s all part of the eating ritual of protecting the food they’re scavenging. Cape Bretton Geese. Nearly all, if not all Australian birds are not winged as they have no natural predators. And lastly, a wombat. These guys, marsupials (and nocturnal) were a favorite at this park – they’re just so cute. But they have almost superhuman strength. If they need to, they can run (scamper, really) at nearly 40mph. They have unbelievably strong teeth (they’re similar to a badger) to chew and cut plants (they’re herbivores). Generally they’re docile with humans, especially if they’ve been raised in captivity. They also have a cartilage carapace (on their rear ends) because their method of avoiding their predators (usually dingoes) is to run into a hollowed log (or a hole) with just their back end sticking out. Predators can’t access any soft tissue and usually give up in frustration. If a predator happens to outlast the wombat, the wombat will allow the predator to climb in on their backs, then the wombat jams and whacks the predator into the top wall of their hole or tree trunk until it’s dead. Wombats are intelligent in case you hadn’t guessed.

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Picture: the small inner harbor at Port Arthur, the 200 year old prison where early  prisoners were sent from Britain. Such British prisoners had been sent to America, but because of the American Revolution, the British had to find another destination for its worst felons. First it was Australia, then Tasmania starting in 1803. We took a boat ride on that white boat you see in the distance.

Since I assume most of you don’t know a whole lot about Tasmania, I’ll give you a little history lesson. Hobart is a small city, the capital, at the south end of the island of Tasmania, which is off the southernmost tip of Australia. When we flew from Los Angeles, after 15 1/2 hours we landed in Melbourne, then took another flight to Hobart where we stayed for a few days. We took a long walk around the city itself, visited the Salamanca Market (a once a week event, beloved by the locals), visited the old convict camp, Port Arthur, and toured some of the pristine coastal bays in and around Hobart. Since the island is closer to the Antarctic than the mainland of Australia, it’s cooler there. You can see lots of pine trees in the photo at top.

Originally it was called Van Diemen’s Land. And the books (novels) I’d read in the past all called it such, the name given to it by Abel Tasman in 1642 when he landed on the island. Later it reverted to Tasmania to honor its founder. Aboriginal people lived there, but it was an unknown to the western world at that time. It’s 150 miles long – that’s all.

And I’d suppose not a lot of people go to Tasmania – it’s on some of the extended Australia tours, but it’s not exactly mainstream Australia. Lots of Aussies have never been there. My reason was because of a book I read many years ago, a novel called Morgan’s Run, by Colleen McCullough. It’s about the British prisoners who were sent to Tasmania, there at Port Arthur. It’s about their captivity, about a few of the prisoners, their stories (probably based on fact), but eventually the prisoners were released, the island was developed and grew because of the prisoners and the families they eventually created there.

I vowed that one day, I’d visit Tasmania. Just because. It sounded so unique. And was it ever! Dave and I just loved Tasmania. Not that we’d want to live there – probably not – but it was a glorious place to visit.

Clockwise from top right: tessellated pavement, a unique geological phenomenon that exists in two places in the world, where flat sedimentary rock erodes as if it’s been carved, like tiles, but it’s natural (see further photo below); remains of the church at Port Arthur; wattleseed flowers; the main prison building remains at Port Arthur; a lovely water view near Port Arthur; a natural ocean arch near Port Arthur; more tessellated pavement.

Here’s another photo, a real close-up, of the tessellated pavement which I downloaded from Wikipedia. It’s amazing to me that the creation of this is natural.

More photos and more stories tomorrow or the next day of Tasmania.

Here’s one more photo that didn’t mean much because we didn’t see any of the penguins while we were there. But because the little guys like to cross the road near this, they put up a nice warning sign to watch for them. Where we come from in Southern California, to even see a sign such as this is just hilarious!

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We’re home from our long trip. Since I have hours of work to do on photos before I begin uploading some stories from out month-long odyssey, I thought I’d just give you this one. I learned something from an article I read about packing – I wrote up about it before we left – Advice for Travel Packing. One of the suggestions was to put all of your things needed at your seat during a flight in a plastic bag so they don’t get lost in the pocket in front of you. That’s what I did. It made it SO helpful to have everything at hand. The only thing missing from the photo was the shawl/wrap I kept over me through the entire return flight – the plane was SO cold.

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There will be a whole bunch of posts I’ll need to make once we get home and I have time to cull through all the photos and write up some stories about our adventures in the last 4-5 days.

As I write this, it’s our last day in New Zealand and we’re headed home. Currently we’re in Queenstown – on the south island, fairly down south on it – we’re actually at the 45th parallel (mid way between the equator and the South Pole). It’s crisper weather here, almost cold, although it is expected to get up to 18 C (that’s about 66 F) today, and maybe with some rain showers. We have been SO fortunate with weather on our entire trip – we had just a few showers when we were in Tasmania and that’s about it.

People who visit the Millford Sound experience 2 out of every 3 days in rain. We were there in perfect sunshine as you can see from the photo at top. I took over 100 photos yesterday, although relatively few of them ON the Sound. Technically the Sound is not a sound – it’s a fiord (here they spell the word with an i versus the Norwegians who spell it with a j as in fjord) but somebody long ago named it and it just stuck despite the technicalities.

I was not feeling very well (car and sea sickness) our day on the Sound. Not only did we take a 5 1/2 hour bus ride to GET there, then we did a 2 1/2 hour boat ride (about half of it on somewhat choppy water), then we got back on the bus and had another 4 hour ride back to Queenstown. I was “this close” to losing it at least half the day. I didn’t, but I certainly was woozy and queasy for about 12 hours.  So I didn’t take as many pictures as I wanted to. Somebody else in our group got photos of the Fiordland Crested Penguins, so will need to wait until I have a copy of that to share with you.

So, I’ll be back in a day or so with some new posts – stay tuned.

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Time doesn’t permit me to create the kind of photo journal that I’d like to – there are simply too many to post and I don’t have enough internet time to be able to crop them all, then put them into some kind of attractive collage. So this one picture will just have to tide you over until I have the opportunity to show you more. Probably once we get home. I think the above tree is a Copper Beech.

I won’t be able to post for another day or so because we’re going to stay at a farm for a night, and have dinner with the family. Our tour will resume the following day (although it IS part of the tour).

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Flying into New Zealand was gorgeous. It was a beautiful day with puffy white clouds everywhere, and as land came into view (it’s a 2 1/2 hour flight from Sydney to Christchurch) what could most easily be seen were the snow-capped mountains. And lakes, and a landscape just beginning to green up with springtime.

After checking in at our hotel, we took a lengthy walk all around downtown Christchurch, including several of their beautiful parks. There is still a goodly amount of earthquake damage here (from the big quake that hit in September) so many buildings, homes and other structures were propped up with special equipment and scaffolding surrounds many of the downtown landmarks. Mostly, though, it’s business as usual here.

Our guide pointed out a number of restaurants to us, but I had my palate set on going to a well-known Indian restaurant here called “The Last Train to India.” Cute name, I thought. It had a good write-up at Trip Advisor. I’ll need to compose a separate post just about our dinner. As I write this it’s the end of our first full day here and it’s about 23 degrees C (about 75). Warm and comfortable – much warmer than we’d anticipated.

In lieu of that I’ll show you just one food photo from our last lunch in Sydney. We met a friend of our daughter Sara and her family. He took us to a restaurant called Malaya, right on Darling Harbor (King’s Wharf, actually). He ordered for us – it was absolutely outstanding – kind of Asian-Malaysian fusion, I’d think. I have no idea what all we ate; just that it was delicious from beginning to end.

The above is shrimp on skewers and it was served with a delicious sauce to dip them into. We also had a fish thing wrapped in banana leaves, plus a curry of some kind on rice and a Malay kind of egg roll too. Quaffed down with an Ashbrook Sauvignon Blanc from Australia. After we get home I’ll update this post with links to the restaurant.

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There’s no time to write up anything much, except to say that I’m in love with Sydney. What a gorgeous city, what a beautiful skyline. And the Opera House. Oh my goodness. I’ll need to write up a post JUST about that. So stay tuned. Don’t know when I’ll be able to post next  . . .

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