My grandparents have a friend who is related to someone who lives in Australia, and they gave me her no, she in turn gave me the no of her daughter in Tasmania and when I called up Kelly not quite sure what to expect she offered me a bed straight away. So off I went to Tassie early one morning to be picked up by Kelly and taken off to the farm to meet Leigh and the Kids, told to help myself to anything and given a room with a huge bed, Wahay the luck still stands! So for the next 2 weeks I walked around a field carrying big irrigation pipes, chased sheep, went fishing for flathead and caught a mountain of them, got fed more food than even I could cram into my black hole of a belly and got several guided tours of the surroundings courtesy of Kelly and Leigh.
I got to see a bit of Hobart, which is a small town even though it is the capital in a space almost as big as England. Hobart is quiet and pretty, the harbour is lovely with plenty of cool looking fishing vessels as well as the large sailing ships now used for making money from tourists and often there is even a massive cruise ship sitting there looking as if it could easily accommodate everyone in Hobart. The state library is about the size of most YHA hostels and there is a massive chess set in Franklin Square, the museum is filled with random stuffed animals and odd paintings and then at the back there is a whole section on Antarctica that told me all about the expeditions that I never knew set off from Tasmania, but of course that’s obvious that they would. My first impression of Hobart was of an odd little fun city and I loved it, even some of the old Georgian buildings still remain, all in all it is a lovely little place.
Richmond also still has most of its Georgian buildings and is extremely proud of its history, being very old (only by Australian standards obviously) it boasts the oldest Gaol in Australia (yes they spelled Jail like that back then) the oldest Bridge in Australia and the oldest church in Australia. It’s amusing that there are three pubs in Sydney that all claim to be the oldest, so who knows how accurate Richmond’s claims are, I certainly don’t plan to argue with them. What’s even funnier is how Australia always likes to tell everyone how old their buildings are even though they are all recent history and none of them actually count as old, Europe has towns and buildings 100 times the age of the oldest Aussie settlements. That aside Richmond is very pretty and very English for that matter, it looks just like most English country villages.
0 comments:
Post a Comment