An adventure in around Cradle Mountain

It will be noted by the reader that this post, like the last, is still posted one day behind. But fear not! The day succeeding the one chronicled in this post (that is, the very day this record is being written) proved rather modest in its eventfulness, granting me quite an amount of luxury to catch up, as it were.
The day which is the subject here, though, was rather the opposite, and began with a rather overpriced breakfast at the visitors center for the national park. Also at this location we also contrived our plan for the rest of the day, as we were to tackle a relatively long hike through the park.

Having stated now, and presumably convinced the attentive reader, that the day in question was a veritable carnival of events and experiences, it is with some contrition that I must now confess there was little that made for exceptional material for a blog post such as this. Our walk took us through breathtaking scenery - around lakes, up mountains, through gullies, past waterfalls and across fields, but I am impelled to state that there is little I could write on the subject that could not be better expressed through pictures. Therefore, I shall conclude this post with just a photographic record of the walk, followed by a short account of the activity we partook in the evening, after our long ramble.

I apologize for the formatting of the photos - unfortunately Blogger seems to be quite touchy regarding it.

But as promised, I shall now recount the events following our walk. Ally was familiar with the nearby sanctuary for Tasmanian Devils, having been there on numerous occasions before. The reader may not be aware, but this animal, which sounds fierce in name and vocalisations (though it is thoroughly
undeserving of this reputation) is actually quite endangered, thanks largely to the horrible facial tumour disease crippling the population. The sanctuary, then, serves to build a population free from this affliction, as well as protecting a number of other endangered species (namely two varieties of quolls, and the occasional wombat).

On Ally's advice, we arrived in time for the evening feeding, in which a group of the ravenous creatures were given their dinner of Wallaby, which they proceeded to squabble and fight over to our amusement. It must be said that they are quite remarkable and singular creatures, and charming in their own way. But for those not inclined that way, the quolls certainly satisfy those of a more conventional taste in their small, furry animals. Put a simpler way, quolls are very cute.

Devonport to Cradle Mountain

This blog post is recounted somewhat delayed, as I could only summon enough energy last night after a long, tiring day to make the briefest of notes on the events of the activities we had undertaken.
The exhaustion was only heightened by the fact that neither of us were able to rest particularly comfortably on the small, hard beds of our cabin, although thankfully the weather for the crossing was rather calm and there was not too much rocking heaving.

Coming in to Devonport

Ally and I got up early too, and were not able to get ourselves to sleep again, so instead we gathered our luggage and headed out to the lounge, then the deck to watch the approach of Tasmania. A brief soujourn on deck, however, proved rather chilly, and we quickly retired to the lounge to await our arrival, and the announcement that we could return to our car.
Luckily, when this announcement came, we did not find ourselves languishing in our vehicle nearly as long as on embarkment, and were driving through the streets of Devonport within half an hour of entering the car.
Our first stop was the local tourist information centre, where I received some very helpful information as to what I could do on my last day (when Alison would already be off at her placement), and we were given good advice as to which cafe to avail ourselves on for breakfast. The "Laneway", as it was called, served us with a very satisfying breakfast, with eggs, bacon, toast and waffles, and Ally even assures me the soy flat white she ordered was Melbourne Quality.

Tasmanian Dairy Country

Promptly following breakfast (with an immediate interlude at KMart to gather some items we had irresponsibly neglected to bring, such as pants) we hastened to our first tourist destination for the day (with a second interlude to photograph some photogenic cows and ducks standing by an idyllic, mirrorlike pond before a breathtaking mountain backdrop) which was King Solomon's Caves. Between the two interludes, we also made an extended detour to view the local hydro-electric dam, known as "devil's gate", which was quite a sight to behold. These distractions aside, however, as I stated, we took ourselves directly to King Solomon's caves without delay.

Devil's gate dam

Normally a person visiting the Moles Creek area of Tasmania would be spoiled for choice if they were inclined toward visiting underground places, however the region has recently experienced an embarrassment of rain, resulting in the caves and their respective visitor centers being damaged by floods, leaving the aforementioned caves one of the few still open to visitors. This proved not to be too great a tragedy for us, as the cave we visited was amply impressive. The tour guide, too, was particularly knowledgeable and informative (if a little too anxious not to offend), and despite my previous interest in geology and caves, I am happy to say I was granted some new wisdom, however slight, on the subject. The reader may be interested to note the reason it was given its moniker - apparently its first explorers, upon seeing the crystals in the limestone glistening in the light of their lanterns, incorrectly assumed the cave to be filled with expensive diamonds.

It's hard to take a good picture in a cave

After duly enjoying the splendour of the cave, we sought out lunch in nearby Railton, a town which is resplendant with topiaries, via the town of Sheffield, which is similarly blessed with a slew of murals. We made a perfectly adequate meal of a pie and a burger at the local take-away shop, and continued on our way in direction of Cradle Mountain.

Wooden bridge over clear water

On this final leg for the day, Tasmania very vaingloriously flaunted as much of its admittedly spectacular scenery in as short a space as possible. From green, rolling hillsides, then eucalyptus forests, quaint wooden bridges over swiftly babbling mountain streams took us through rainforests, then stark highlands of scrub and skeletal trees and finally the mountains which seemed to be trying to compete with the Swiss Alps in their ostentation.

Highlands with me in a tree

As if to abash us, we were even audaciously given a welcoming committee of dear little Pademelons, seemingly waiting for us to arrive at our cabin.

Welcoming committee

We did not tarry here for long, however, as the light would soon begin to fade, and we still planned to view the spectacular Cradle Mountain itself from Dove Lake, as the weather the next day promised to be less than ideal for this task. And so we drove on, up toward the titular mountain, and again I found myself humbled, with the breathtaking peak bearing majestically before me, reflected in the glassy surface of the lake once we arrived there. We spent some time at the shores, basking in its glory, before finally returning to our cabin (the welcoming committee, we noticed, was now nowhere to be seen), to retire for the night.

Cradle Mountain

Reviving the blog - Tasmania

Well, here we are again. I've decided to dust off the old travel blog, and make some new literary contributions to it. While I have been on a couple of trips away since my last post, as you could clearly gather I didn't bother recording them here, which I afterwards found myself regretting. There's a lot you can forget in the months and years after a trip.
So I thought this trip to Tasmania would be a good opportunity to pick up the old habit again.

This first post will probably be reasonably short, as I'm not, actually, you know in Tasmania yet. Currently I'm typing this in our cabin in the ship "Spirit of Tasmania", but you have to start somewhere!

The day leading up to the departure was quite hectic. My girlfriend Ally and I have quite a few animals that need to be taken care of, but luckily one of her uni Buddies was willing to house sit for the week and a bit I would be away. (Ally is gone longer, because the holiday will for her be immediately followed by two weeks of placement).
This is particularly fortuitous because they are both studying veterinary science. No having to worry about the fur babies not being properly taken care of!
So the afternoon consisted of Ally and I splitting our time talking to Louise about the feeding routines of our various pets, trying to get the last of our recently washed clothes dry, and then packing said clothes.

Then, when we realised it was getting a lot later than we had planned to get away, we finally bustled out the door and drove off...
Only to have an excruciatingly long wait at the terminal to get on the ferry.

The "Spirit of Tasmania", waiting for us to board.

In order to make the best of our time away, we took Ally's car. She also will need it for her placement, so it definitely had to come over with us.
But once you arrive at the terminal, you still have to wait in queue for a very long time... first all the other vehicles coming back to Melbourne have to get off, then you can slowly inch your way on, the vehicles being squeezed together in the hold like sardines.
Once we could finally get out of the car, it was a matter of squishing between the other cars with whatever luggage we wanted to take on board and making our way onto the decks.
Ally, being of a somewhat overprepared nature, chose to take eight of the thirty-seven bags, backpacks, duffel-bags, suitcases and shipping containers she had packed with her on the boat. (Actual numbers may be exaggerated for comic effect). I, taking just my medium-sized sports bag, laptop and camera, was already wondering if there wasn't a fair number of superfluous items I could pitch overboard as I struggled to carry it past the lines of parked cars.

Soon, however, we had found our way to our small cabin. Modest though it is, especially at the price, I think I greatly prefer it to the slightly cheaper option of airplane-style seating. It is some luck that we found it at all actually; upon reaching one landing in the middle of a flight of stairs, a lady, seeing the slightly bewildered expressions on our faces, kindly pointed us in the direction of the fore of the ship, where she assured us we would certainly find the cabins - and where, upon our venturing, we discovered no such thing. The cabins, as we presently discovered, were in the exact opposite direction.
Until it came time to finally retire to our tiny dorm for the night, we spent a good two hours exploring the ship. A number of minutes were well spent up on the deck, trying (mostly in vain) to coax our cameras to take a decent picture of the night-time skyline of Melbourne.

Me, with Melbourne vanishing in the background

Out of curiosity, we also ventured into the small gaming lounge the ship sports. In my normal life I am an attendant at such a venue, and I found myself wondering which gambling regulations a ferry would follow. I didn't get a satisfactory answer to my question, except to gain a fair level of certainty (due to the lack of appropriate signage) that it was not the Victorian regulations.
As luck would have it, however, I spotted a single dollar coin left in the tray of one of the poker machines by the previous absent-minded patron. Upon gifting it to my girlfriend, and warning her duly about the dangers of gambling, she promptly wasted it in the nearest slot - one belonging to a Geisha themed game, which she assured me was my favourite. Not a sausage did it give us either.

After this unsatisfying experience, and a few more minutes aimless meandering, we finally decided to have dinner. The restaurant on board, I'm sad to report, is expensive and nearly as disappointing as the gaming lounge.
Our final destination before heading back to the cabin was the in-house entertainer. With his shiny metallic guitar and banjo, he certainly looked the part for cruise-ship entertainment (a sparkly suit and keyboard may have been more appropriate, but his persona was also not out of place), but the small crowd was only able to muster a somewhat lackluster cheer to his old-timey blues songs.

I guess that is what you get on a cruise to Tasmania in the middle of winter.

A reverse history of Western Civilization

I’ve certainly enjoyed writing this blog so far – it’s given me a bit of perspective on my trip as I’ve been experiencing it, it’s going to be a useful record later on when I start having difficulties remembering what I did and in what order, and of course it’s given me valuable writing experience – normally I’m too lazy to do all the writing I should! But the other important thing it provided was education and information. I promised when I started writing this blog that there would be interesting historical content, and I’ve made a special effort to research (usually with wikipedia) everything I don’t know, and I truly feel as though my historical knowledge is far greater now than it was three months ago. But I want to do something with that knowledge too, and I want to make this blog something more than a simple journal nobody will be interested in in a year’s time. I want to create something unique, interesting and informative, and I think I’ve come up with just the thing.

The seeds for the idea began months ago when I was planning the trip. It was apparent to me then that this would be a trip not just across countries but also back in time. Of course the path hasn’t been straight back – there has been more than a little jumping back and forth, but broadly speaking you could say that the important historical points I’ve experienced were earlier and earlier in time as I progressed through the countries. In Ireland I learned about the “troubles” of the 20^th century and the potato famine of the 19^th, in Scotland I learned about their battles with the English in the 16^th century, then I headed to Venice, which was a very important power in the 15^th century, and then Florence which was pretty much the centre of the Renaissance in the 14^th century. Rome followed that, of course the capital of the Roman empire until the 4^th century. After Italy I travelled to Greece, the predecessor to Rome and the birthplace of Western civilization. With Athens being one of my first ports of call I gradually headed backwards on the mainland until I reached Mycenaea, the civilization that flourished before the classical Greek. After that I headed south to Crete, where the Minoans built their palaces hundreds of years before Mycenaea. After a short regress to Classical and Hellenistic times in Turkey, I visited Troy, a city that had stood in some form or another since 3000 BC. Finally, before bouncing back toward the present, I got a taste of the Sumerian civilization in the Archaeology museum of Istanbul, which began arguably as early as 5000 BC.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and though originally not intentional is certainly potential fodder for something creative. I think it was in Greece or Turkey that the concept for the form of this project came to me. Some time ago I read a book called “The Ancestor’s Tale” by Richard Dawkins. Using Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, in which many pilgrims meet up and have a story telling competition as they travel to Canterbury Cathedral, as a template he writes a kind of reverse history of evolution with various organisms of increasingly distant relation meeting up with their common ancestors. One thing I liked about this format is the unique perspective which a backwards history affords. In an important way it makes the history much easier to digest. Having read a couple of other books that tried to tackle the history of evolution on Earth using a more traditional forward chronology I found Dawkins’ approach much more effective. Instead of beginning in an alien environment with no reference point to what we know we must wait until the end to discover how it all relates to us, and by then we’ve already forgotten many of the important points. A backwards history, however, allows us to ease out of our comfort zone and still retain a sense of relevance and continuity. It also helps us to grasp the scope of the time frame involved. Throwing a huge number, like 3000 BC, at someone is a lot more effective when you already understand all the things that have happened between then and now. I already tried a condensced version of this, if you will remember, in my post about Mycenaea.

So that is what I propose to do. Using the context of my trip I will try in a number of posts representing key periods in the history of Civilization as we know it to construct a reverse chronology. Wish me luck!

Getting up to date

Okay, now I´m back in Germany. To be honest, little of particular interest has happened since my last post. I headed across to Limassol on the south coast of Cyprus, basically relaxed there and did practically no sightseeing, then the next day took a bus to the airport and headed back to the fatherland. I suppose this post is just to let you know I´m still alive, and to get the pub challenge up to speed - I´ve been to a handful of pubs, but haven´t updated since Rhodes!

Billy´s place, Rhodes

Looking very suave with a spillage down my front in
Eskalan´s Beer house, Selcuk

James Joyce, Istanbul

North Shield, Istanbul

Alexandros, Nicosia

Ship Inn, Limassol

First taste of Cyprus

For what it's worth, this was what I saw of the Roman
Temple in Silifke

Things seem to be straightening out again. The ferry ran on time and without a hitch, and I seem to be more or less over my stomach bug. And you wouldn't believe how relieved I was about that on the rocking and lurching ferry over the choppy Mediterranean to Cyprus. I'm not usually prone to sea sickness, but there was more than one person on the boat with their head in a bag by the end, and with a stomach bug I'm not certain how well I would have held out. But that wasn't even my main worry on the trip. In the back of my travel guide to Cyprus which I was reading on the way I discovered some worrying news.
Now, let me give you a bit of an idea of the political situation of Cyprus if you don't know - it is a country divided. For many years it's had two populations - Greek and Turkish - and in the 1970s the tensions between them resulted in the country being split into two. The Greek half in the south is in fact an independent republic, and the northern half belongs to Turkey, although it's not recognized by most of the rest of the world. Tensions are still there, but the UN manages to keep the peace.
My problem was not with this political situation - I knew all this beforehand, and besides if anybody tried to shoot me their bullets would simply be caught by my manly yet elegant beard and converted into attractive paperweights. My problem, as the travel guide suggested, would be getting into the Republic from the Turkish side. Apparently travel the other way is supposed to be not a problem, but for some unexplained reason north to south is out. At least that's what the book said. I spent a lot of the trip across working out what I would see and do, and how I would get the hell out of there, instead of visiting the south. But I was pretty suss about the whole thing - I'm an EU citizen, and the Republic of Cyprus is a member of the EU. How can they even keep me out? Well, beard aside, guns would be the answer, but I mean it can't be legal.
As it turned out I got across no problem. The guard at the very Checkpoint Charlie crossing did look at my passport with something approaching surprise, and I was afraid for a moment he wouldn't let me through, but I assume he was just humbled by beard, being forced to look at it in facsimile as to look at it directly would bring him to tears, because I got through no problem.
This was in Nicosia, known to the Turks as Lefkosia, the island's capital and now the only divided city in the world. A walk around the city is testament to the checkered  history of the country. Imagine a Souvlaki shop with a yellow English post box standing out front with a mosque converted into a church across the street on top of a bastion built by the Venetians towering above excavations of Byzantine and Hellenistic ruins. Yes, it seems everyone has taken over Cyprus at one point or another. The English, who were in charge from 1878 until 1960, have added a very welcome character for an English speaking traveler such as me. I can see why the Brits love to visit this place so much. They drive on the left hand side of the road and everybody speaks English. It's a nice change of pace for me after one and a half months traveling.
As I've mentioned earlier, I don't have much time here. In Nicosia I only had enough time to walk around the city center a bit and go to the Archaeological museum. That was yesterday, and today I had to leave for Paphos.

A mosaic featuring the Minoan Labyrinth

Paphos and Salamis, which is on the Turkish side, were at different times in the ancient world the capital. Paphos was it from Hellenistic times to early Roman times. The archaeological site, however, is quite different to all the others that I have seen. I expected to see a jumble of broken blocks and a handful of columns re-erected in recent years. I saw nothing of the sort, but I saw enough mosaics to make your eyes bleed. A large part of the excavation area encompass rich villas, and it's very clear that at the time rich people liked decorate their houses with little pieces of colourful rock stuck to the floor.

Yet another tomb that could be lifted from an Indiana
Jones movie.

The other interesting thing to see in Paphos is the so-called "Tomb of Kings". If I didn't know any better, I would have thought Schliemann or Evans had excavated this place - the complex was simply called that because many of the tombs were large and opulent. As it turns out they were mostly just for rich citizens.
All day dark clouds had been gathering, and finally my luck with the weather broke - since Florence I only got a little bit of rain on Santorini (and of course my ferry was canceled because of it), but today the heavens really opened up. Thunder, lightning - the works. But I managed to stay relatively dry, happening to be inside when most of the rain was happening. Isn't that lucky?

Well, what a great day.

So that's what I get for being prepared. Worried that I wouldn't catch my ferry to Cyprus today I went to a lot of effort over a week ago to rearrange my trip, cancelling a night in Ankara, driving all the way through to Göreme a day early, changing the booking there as well, booking a room in Taşucu where the ferry leaves from, trying to call a couple of days in advance to confirm the ferry and making a sacrifice of a choenix of wheat (look it up) and a small goat to Poseidon. And this morning when I went to check in (half an hour early) I discover it isn't running due to bad weather. And my day didn't get much better. In fact my bad luck didn't even start there - I woke up with a little bit of a stomach bug. Nothing bad enough to put me out of commission, but let's just say I felt ... uncomfortable the whole day. And it's been horribly muggy which did't help.
After some time in the local internet café working out my options - do I wait for the ferry tomorrow, do I travel all the way back to Istanbul and try to catch the 9:30 plane to Cyprus from there, do I say bugger it and catch a plane back to Germany, do I head back to Göreme and see what I missed - I eventually decided on the first option, cutting my already short visit to the island even shorter. Ideally I wanted about a week there, but due to the irregular reasonably priced flights back to Germany I originally shortened it to four days. Now the ferry has made it a pitiful three. So, trying to make the most of it, I headed today to the nearby town of Silifke to see if there was anything worth seeing or doing. At the tourist office I was handed a xeroxed copy of a map that looked like it was made in MS Paint. However it did promise some interesting sounding sights in the "ancient city" area as well as an archaeological museum. I headed off to the museum to find my disappointments were only just beginning - the place was closed. Apart from that I can only assume that the map that I thought was in English was actually in Turkish, and that things like Theatre, Necropolis, Mosaic and Water Cistern actually meant nuanced variations on "Slum" and "Ghetto", and that "Ancient City" simply meant "don't go here after dark". The only thing that I was in any way capable of finding in the spot where it was supposed to be was the Roman Temple and, well, I'll let the picture of that speak for itself. Except this computer won't accept my camera. Today just keeps getting better.