Hobart - again,

After the Huon Valley we headed back to Hobart. Aside from Karen's desire to wander the Salamanca markets (which were pretty good if you like markets) I have found the Patrol displaying a pronounced steering wheel shudder particularly on downhill sections under brakes

Time to get them looked at. The Patrol is almost due for a service anyway.

While we were in Hobart I took the opportunity to visit ICS, a company that I had been working with for nigh on two years.

It was great to put faces to names and to engage in a bit of a debrief as well as enjoying a magnificent $5 lunch at the pub next door!

As it was the weekend and the mechanic's was closed we took a drive down to the Tasman Peninsula (where Port Arthur is although we didn't visit it as we have seen it before) and spent a bit of time on the east coast.

As you can see from the pic below, it wasn't great weather, cold and rainy, but the coastline was impressive all the same.

The "Tessalated Pavement" - a natural formation that I had thought was dolorite like the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, but it is actually siltstone that has cracked as the earth has shifted. Unbelievably regular cracks though.

Then, Tassie did its thing and the weather changed from cold and wet to sunny and warm. This happened as we were checking out the officers' quarters and the dog line memorials.

The Tasman peninsula has a narrow neck of land that joins it to the mainland and in order to keep the prisoners in the peninsula they built a line of fierce dogs that went across the neck and were used to keep the prisoners below the line.

Here's us with the memorial.

A few years later they hatched the plan to drive all the Tassie aboriginals down onto the Tasman peninsula where they could "live their savage life" and not bother the white settlers. The dog line was to be replaced by the Black Line.

The plan failed so they just shot them all anyway.

A little further south we hit a place called Doo Town. A small place where all the houses have names that include the letters "DOO". We saw homes with the strangest names.

Doo Town lead us on to three natural phenomena. The Tasman Blowhole, the Tasman Arch and the Devil's Kitchen.

Here's the Blowhole - wildly impressive as it is going off.

Dangerous though and here's a warning.

The coast nearby also shows why you need to resect it.

The Tasman Arch.

I didn't get a pic of the Devil's Kitchen as it was just too difficult to see much.