Too much Tasmanian excitement for one little blog

Internet access is, as one might imagine, very limited to the traveler in Tasmania. There are public libraries in tiny little towns that signal online availability with an adorable poster featuring the shape of Tasmania rendered as a computer mouse. However, when one is trying to get from point A to point B on an island state in the southern ocean -- even when one's husband is, in normal life, focused like Dr. Evil's laser on the Internet and all it has to offer -- it's very easy to pass up the public libraries and allow one's blog to suffer sadly in its non-updated status.

Picture the thrill, then, when we checked into our B&B in Strahan, on Tasmania's west coast, and our host Mike told us that he had a computer available for guests' Internet use. The only thing that kept us from blogging all night long -- and instead forced us out into the local pub where a drunken bearded Tasmanian named Granto proved to us that drunks are the same the world over by asking us the same questions repeatedly in a two-minute span -- is the fact that this computer has dial-up Internet access. I can hear the rodentia turning the CPU's wheels as I write.

Anyway. Enough about computers. (When did I become such a loser? Perhaps when I purchased a beach towel that says "Sith Lord" at Target.)

Tasmania is amazing. There are not enough superlatives to describe this place. One could spend months here and not even scratch the surface -- the five days we have allotted here are nearly an injustice. On Wednesday we spent the day at Port Arthur, the notorious facility on the Tasman Peninsula for convicts who committed additional crimes after arriving in Australia. We toured all day long, dodging school groups of cranky and uninterested adolescents wearing t-shirts with such epithets as "High Maintenance Bitch." We booked into the ghost tour of Port Arthur that evening, which might sound cheesy and contrived but I assure you was fascinating. Given the reality of what has taken place on that site, the stories -- masterfully told by our guide -- were telling and, dare I say, believable. Our tour group included some veterans from the HMAS Hobart, so I felt extra-safe. (The High Maintenance Bitch was part of a group that departed just before ours, mercifully.)

Thursday we drove into the Huon Valley (south of Hobart) to the Tahune Airwalk, which is this gigantic cantilevered steel structure that allows visitors to walk among the canopy of the towering eucalypts. I have never seen such a thing in my life. Not for the faint of heart -- or the fearful of heights -- we got to see the very tops of trees I am not even lucky enough to see the bottoms of in regular everyday life. In addition to the Tasmanian Blue Gums, there were all sorts of exotic species like the Celery-Top Pine and the "Horizontal," a tree that, as its name suggests, grows horizontally through the bush. And of course the magnificent Huon Pine, an extremely hardy and slow-growing pine that the convicts were made to harvest to near extinction in the 1800s. There are Huon Pines that are 2,500 years old, although the most magnificent stands were felled long ago and now primarily young trees remain. I took dozens of photos of Huon Pine boughs.

We then checked into our B&B in the Huon Valley, an unreal place called Matilda's of Ranelagh. The host, a woman named Pamela who used to own Matilda's Meadow winery in Western Australia, has three golden retrievers who meet you at the door: Molly, Pinot and Blossom. It was quite possible that I had died, and this was heaven. We didn't want to leave this morning, and it might not be wishful thinking to assume that Pinot didn't want us to leave, either. He looked kind of wistful as we drove off.

Spent the vast majority of today driving to the west coast, from the Hobart area to Strahan. I drove the whole way, and I must say the driving on the left side of the road is addicting. Especially since I was driving through the mountains, in the rain. It was like a videogame wherein you must drive on the opposite side of the road in the cold rain whilst avoiding wallabies and out-maneuvering gregarious ute drivers. I totally won the game, as we made it to Macquarie Harbour in one piece. (Well, really two pieces, since there are two of us, but I guess now that we're married we're, like, one.)

Tomorrow: Gordon River cruise, then back across the Bass Strait to Melbourne.