Filling in the Gaps

So I headed back to Sydney for a few days and tried out some stuff I missed last time I was here. Having got up at 4am to get the flight back from Hobart on the Tuesday I was a bit tired, so only managed to make it as far as the Sydney Tower. You get pretty decent views from the top and I guess it's something I should have done when I first got here, but not being a huge fan of heights it wasn't at the top of my to do list. The views were pretty impressive though and then it was onto a thing called Oztrek which is a tourist ride showing you briefly round Australia which again was something I probably should have done a few months ago.
Next day I headed to Botany Bay. It's a bit of a trek out of Sydney involving nearly an hour on the train and then 20mins on the bus, but you can go where Capt Cook first came ashore and there are a few walks to do around there so it was worth the effort. The area's a port now and it's a bit weird to have big tankers right next to a historical site but I guess the reason it was a good port for Capt Cook makes it still a good port today.
On Friday I caught up with Lisa who I had travelled with in Peru and is now living just outside Sydney. The next morning I headed to the Botanical Gardens, had lunch again with Lisa and then went surfing at Bondi one last time.
Sunday was a trip to the IMAX in Darling Harbour to see Spiderman 3 on a very big screen and then I headed to Hawaii.
The fun thing about flying to Hawaii from Oz is that you cross the international dateline so having taken off on Sunday evening and flown overnight I arrived in Honululu on Sunday morning. I mainly sat on the beach and vegged in front of the tv while I was there, but I did manage to climb a volcano crater called Diamond Head near Waikiki beach. Then went snorkelling at a place called Hanauma Bay which is another volcano crater but this one has been eroded on one side so it's a big bay and it has a reef right near the beach. It's not in the same league as either the Grat Barrier or the Ningaloo Reefs in Oz, but the yanks seem to like it and it was fun to be snorkelling again.
Another overnight flight took me to Vancouver, Canada where I met up with the canadians I had also travelled with in Peru. We all headed to a place called Granville Island where there's a market and some arty shops had lunch at a restaurant (well hut)by the river called Go Fish which did nice fish.
My last trip for a few weeks was catching the ferry over to my uncle's over on Vancouver Island where I'll be for another week or so.

It's cold outside...

I'm going to first point out that I've spent most of the last 7 months in warm, actually hot weather. My wardrobe is set up for 30 degree heat and I sent my coat home in February. So it was a bit of a shock when I flew into Tasmania and it was cold. And windy. And drizzling. I was not happy, in fact I was bloody cold even when I was wearing 2 T-shirts and both my fleeces. It was actually about 14 degrees, but I think my body has got used to heat (hopefully it'll be sunny when I get back to the UK) and so I've spent a lot of the last week shivering. Rant over here's what I got upto on the tour I booked...
Day one and a 7.30 start - the first of many - for a trip to Port Arthur which was the major prison out in Australia in the 1800's. It's been badly affected by fires and selling of the bricks after it closed and so a lot of the buildings have gone. However it's still pretty impressive and there are a lot of tiny cells that people got crammed into for rather petty crimes. We also saw some pretty cool coasts and beaches and collapsed sea caves.
The next day we headed to Ross (I think) which apparently has the oldest bridge in Australia. This meant it was about 170 years old, which for them is really old, but for the europeans on the tour wasn't very old at all and we were a bit underwhelmed. Anyway then we headed off to The Freycinet Peninsula which has a really cool beach called Wineglass Bay that you can go to a lookout and look at and then go down the other side of a mountain (ok large hill) to get to. It was a good idea at the time, but we were a bit tired after the return journey. That night a few of us went on a penguin tour which was very cool as the penguins will walk right past you if you stand still.
Have just had to look at my photos to remember what we did the next day it was a trip to a wildlife sanctuary where I saw my first tasmanian devil and then we went to the Bay of Fires which is another cool beach with white sands and pretty decent waves. This guy called Matt managed to drop his camera between a narrow gap in some rocks. It didn't wash away but he just looked at it pathetically until an Irish guy called Liam managed to get down and pick it out before the next big wave hit. I have no idea if it ever worked again...
The next day we headed for Cradle Mountain which is in a big national park. A load of the guys set off to walk to a place called Marion's Lookout which is a decent climb. Our guide had spent the whole morning saying how only the 'fit young lads' would make it. So me and another girl Fiona decided to go anyway. We left about 5 minutes after the guys did and headed up at our own pace. Having been told it was 90 mins to the top I got there after about 35 and was surprised to find no-one at the top. Fiona arrived about 5 mins later and we took some photos and assumed the lads had gone on a bit further. Amusingly 10 minutes later the guys staggered up the slope and were pretty pissed off and confused to find us already there. It turns out that there is a longer but flatter and easier route that they had accidently taken. needless to say we continued to mention how we'd got to the top first for the rest of the trip.
We saw a pretty cool waterfall called Montezuma's Falls the next day and went to Lake St Clair the day after before ending up back in Hobart last Saturday. Then I hung a round for a couple of days to go to the Cadbury factory which was fun even if the chocolate doesn't taste so good over here!