Everything I knew about TasmaniaI knew little about Tasmania, or "Tassie" as the locals called it, before I arrived. But on arriving, the license plate slogans told me everything I needed to know. "Tasmania, Your Natural State," "Tasmania, Your Holiday Isle," "Tasmania, Discover the Possibilities," and "Tasmania, Taste the Rainbow."
Tasmania had been discovered by a Dutch explorer named, big surprise, Abel Tasman. But Tasman wasn't greedy - he had named the island "Van Diemen's Land" to honour Dutch East Indies Governor Anthony van Diemen . I was already familiar with Tasman - he was the first European to set foot on Tonga, where he traded the locals nails and shiny mirrors for all the yams and hogs his ship could hold. He named Tonga "New Amsterdam," a name that might bring Tonga more tourists today had it stuck.
Tasman thought that Van Diemen's Land was part of mainland Australia instead of a massive island. Cook thought the same thing when he visited Tasmania years later and wrote about the native people who would later be hunted down and wiped out by British colonials. But none of this was known to me when my plane landed in the provincial capital city, Hobart.
Hobart was COLD. It was around +eighteen or twenty degrees Celsius, and I was shivering. It was more conformation that, when I step out of the airport in December 2009 in Ottawa, I'll probably drop dead of hypothermia. The harbour city was small and clean, and reminded me a lot of Victoria BC. By coincidence I had arrived the weekend of a big music festival. I had the chance to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in concert, an Australian artist a friend had introduced me to a few months earlier. Nick composed the music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a film I really enjoyed. But the tickets cost more then I could justify, and I stuck with the free events.
After a few hours of wandering and standing, I went in search of a non-crowded pub for a Guinness and supper. In keeping with my navigation style, I was soon completely clueless as to where I was, and that's when I found Knife. Knife, also lost, was from Saudi Arabia, and probably spelled his name different from how it sounded. Ironically I ended up helping him find the homestay he was about to move in to, and I met his new roommates who assumed Knife and I were old friends. Afterward, we went for pizza, picked out gifts for his new homestay family and roommates, and then grabbed some coffee before I called it a night. All in all, a very satisfying first day down under Down Under.
(I got sidetracked with midyear exams and haven't updated this in awhile. But next week I'm taking off for a couple weeks of midyear break to the island countries of Fiji and Vanuatu. I'll try to catch up on Tasmania, which happened about 5 months ago, so I can get back to what's now).
