Summary of Australian Trip: Brisbane to Tasmania - Part 2
December 18th, 2007 | by lissie |This is the 2nd part of my summary of our trip around Austalia: Part 1 is here
As New Zealanders the East Coast of Australia is nearby and a common destination to escape the winter cold, or even the summer cold! So for this long trip we weren’t interested in spending a lot of time on the east coast but wanted to get to the more remote areas harder to get to without a rugged vehicle and more than a week or 10 days break.
So having got ourselves sorted out we hightailed it south, ticking off Byron Bay as the most easterly point and headed south to Sydney to catch Priscillia The Musical. We then had a bit of a detour to do some street racing and learnt not to put petrol in the diesel engine. We actually went to Bathurst to see the famous Dinosaur remains at the museum and also the satellite tracking station at Parkes which was featured in the film The Dish and was pivotal in the communications for the first moon landing in 1968. I apparently appear to have missed blogging about these so I have added some photos now! Next stop on our detour was to get to the top of Australia - Mt Kosciusko is the world’s easiest “highest point on a continent” to reach - its a great trip, complete with chair lift! So heading further south we got to Melbourne and caught the ferry to Tasmania pretty much exactly a month after we arrived in Brisbane.
Tasmania is a state often missed by both Australian’s and visitors. We enjoyed the island and found it a charming combination of excellent food (cheese and chocolate to name but two specialties, oh and wine too), beautiful scenery, a compact geography, and some of Austarlia’s oldest European historic sites. On the 1stMay we got to the southernmost point in Australia called SouthWest Cape
It must be said though that the climate is more similar to NZ’s or the UK’s rather than the rest of Australia. Its cooler, wetter and far more variable. The best weather is generally February - March.
