Tasmania: chocolate and penguins

First of all, I´m sorry it´s taken me so long to update my blog. I´ve had quite a lot of uni stuff to do since I got back from our holiday in Tasmania. But I´ll do my best to write about our trip, and hopefully the whole story will be finished in a couple of days.

Thursday 10.5: To begin with, I could introduce our traveling group: Me, Carla, Denise, Madeleine (Holland) and Till (Germany). Madeleine and Till live in Gumal, an another UTS residence on Broadway Street. We arrived in Hobart, which is the biggest town in Tasmania (120 000 residents), at 11am and picked up our car at an office at the airport. Then we headed to Port Arthur and stopped at various lookouts having quite imaginative names: Devils Kitchen, Tasman Blowhole, Tasman Arch, Remarkable Cave... All of them were located in Tasman National Park. Most of the caves/holes we saw had been formed by water and erasion, and some of the cave roofs had fallen down forming just deep walls. I think pictures will be better for describing how the rock formations looked like. When it got dark we drove back to Hobart, where walked a couple of blocks to Woolworths to buy some groceries.

Tasman Arch (I think)

Friday 11.5: We decided to split into two groups: Madeleine and I would go to visit Cadbury Chocolate Factory while the others would go hiking at Mount Wellington. First we all drove together to the mountain. We were under the impression there wouldn´t be a road all the way up to the top, but as we kept driving we actually reached the highest point. I´m glad we did, because otherwise Madeleine and I would´ve missed some spectacular views! It was really windy up there, but the beautiful view over Hobart was worth walking around the parking area. I realised I had lost my new camera and began quite worried about it. So Madeleine and I left the others to do a walk down the mountain and drove back to the hostel to look for my camera. Fortunately someone had turned it in at the reception and I got it back :)

From Mount Wellington

It was a 15-min drive to the chocolate factory. Since they had guided tours leaving every 10min we decided to have some cappucino before going on a tour. We had to wait a short time before our tour, and that´s when we got our free chocolate samples. They were just mint freddos and small bars of normal, white and hazelnut chocolate. We did a good job collecting 23 bars from the basket and stuffing them to my bag :P The tour itself lasted for almost an hour and half. Since it was Friday afternoon some of the lines were closed, but we got to see most phases of the production process: putting melted chocolate in shapes, cooling them, wrapping, packing etc... I can´t remember what all the processes are called. Seeing and smelling all the chocolate made us feel like crabbing them from the lines and eating them! Unfortunately they had stopped giving samples during the tour 4,5 months ago because of hygienic reasons. Anyways, chocolate is made of cocoa plant that grows in New Guinea, Ghana and Indonesia. They produce as much as 120 tons of chocolate a day at the factory! It´s only a fraction of how much they produce at the biggest Cadbury factory in Birmingham, though. After the tour we were given small boxes of a collection of chocolates, and we got to purchase some at discount prices.

Cadbury chocolate truck

By the time we had driven back to Hobart the others had already walked there and were waiting for us next to the highway. We drove to Kettering, where we ate our lunch sandwitches and took a ferry over to Burry Island. We could bring our car over, so after the 20-min ferry trip we drove to this lookout that was at the point that combined the southern and northern parts of the island. Then we drove to Adventure Bay to check out their accomodation offering. They had some reasonable priced little cottages, but even though Denise was going to sleep in the car (she slept in the car every night) this lady would´ve made us pay for her, too. So we decided not to stay there over night. Instead we took a walk along Grass Point Track, that went along the beach to Penguin Island. We saw heaps of wallabies! The sun was already going down on our way back and we saw a beautiful sunset at the beach.

At Burry Island

Madeleine, Denise, Till, Carla and I

A wallaby

Sunset at Grass Point Track

Since it was dark we drove back to the lookout we had been earlier, to see penguins. They come out of water when it´s dark and wander over the beach to sleep in the bushes. We waited down at the beach for quite a while before we saw the first penguins. We were lucky to meet this local couple having a flashlight, since we wouldn´t have been able to see much with just Till´s cell phone light. Once the penguins started to arrive they came either alone or in small groups. It was hard trying to take pictures of them because it was so dark, they were quire far away and moving. They were really cute, though :) After seeing enough penguins we took the ferry back to the mainland and drove back to Hobart, to sleep in the same hostel we had been the night before.

A penguin