Finally, I got around to visiting Tasmania. Initially we both thought this would be a place we would like to buy a house and settle down (We even found a perfect house), but at the end of the holidays neither of us were sure if we wanted to stay there. The place is incredibly beautiful, we saw more wild life in Tassie than all of mainland), but there was something missing..it wasn’t my Shangri-La

Of all the photos we took, this is one of my favourite. We couldn’t set up our tent the night before because it was raining very heavy and had to stay in a motel. It was cold, wet and a miserable kind of night and to top it all there was no internet, so I couldn’t talk to my children or play scrabble. Shops were all closed and we only had two packets of instant noodles, a packet of salad greens and three eggs and two slices of bread and an avo.. So I boiled two eggs for breakfast next day and made mee goreng with the rest of the ingredients. As I mentioned before, he had lived a very entitled childhood and one of biggest problem for him is food. I waited for complaints, none came. Next morning, neither of us were hungry, so I packed the boiled eggs to take along.

From where we were to the next destination, we had to cross a mountain pass and the drive was long. By  mid afternoon both of us were hungry and there were no shops around. I saw this spot that said “truckers rest area” and told him to pull over. There was no one around and he parked our car in front of the fence. The temp outside was 2 degrees and the wind was very strong. I took two plates. placed a slice of bread on each, sliced the boiled egg and the avo and placed it on the bread and gave one plate to him and I took the other plate. Again, I waited to hear some sort of complaints..( Ok, may be it is a  Malayalee trait, may be it is just me, every man I have known always had something to complain about food and this guy should be the one complaining the most because he really really had a very entitled life as a Spanish Nobility. He ate without a word of complaints and when I told him how pretty the moss on the fence looked, he went out in the howling wind and took the photo for me.

The best part of Tassie is in the eastern side, especially the Bay of fire( named due to the red lichen growing on the rocks) We climbed  plenty of rocks and walked nearly three kilometres to find this spot. We were the only people around and we both desperately wanted to go for a swim. But it was very cold..

Photo below is another one of my favourite. This was taken in a small bay called Little Musselroe bay. We didn’t really have any plans that day and when I saw the signboard for little mussleroe bay, I decided to drive to there because the name was funny.. There was no one around and he wanted to walk on the rocks on the right..As it was late evening and with my last experience of finding a snake beneath the rocks, I felt I shouldn’t take any chances. So I suggested, we walk to the left. We must have walked about half an hour on the isolated beach when he stopped walking and took the binoculars out.

“I think there is a wombat” He said and pointed it out to me. It was the first time I saw a wombat. A big, brown wobbly wombat wadding along behind the scrub. Few minutes later, we saw fairy penguins coming out of the water, few puffins and terns. It felt like the nature was organizing a feast for our eyes. I took this photo before all these events..but I think you can imagine the joy we both felt after watching all the wildlife..