The trouble with a brand new rental car is that there are no scratches already on it and so any I added couldn’t be blamed on the last person. I would have been happier with a ‘bomb’, as long as it kept going. Still, driving that Toyota Hybrid was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It floated. There was not a bump or rattle, none of the normal sensations, certainly those associated with the cars I’m used to. I glided through the suburbs of Harrogate and out the other side.
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I met a woman on the train while crossing the south island of New Zealand in 2010, who said the best way to see England was to rent a car, set yourself up in a different town every few days, and do day trips out to the surrounding districts from there. I decided to follow her advice.
I was nervous, I admit. I’m not a confident driver at any time so this was always going to be the challenging part of the trip. Still, it wouldn’t be that different from Australia, surely. They drive on the right side of the road – that is, the left. They speak English so I could ask directions if I needed to. No, it would be fine.
Continue reading “The Car Knows What to Do – Or Does It? York England”
I’d often been told I should go to York and so, in England’s autumn of 2011, I boarded a train at Manchester and headed north.
York has had many incarnations since the Romans left in A.D.400: Anglo Saxon, Viking, Norman, led by William the Conquerer, and the Tudors. Wars have come and gone, and bust times and booms. In the 1970s and 80s, industrial unrest and strikes swept the country and manufacturing went into decline. It was then that York realised its greatest asset was its history and the tourism it could bring.
I left Hobart and headed up the east coast to Swansea and the Freycinet Peninsula. I was sick of just looking at photos of Wineglass Bay; I wanted see it for myself.
A must, when visiting Hobart, Tasmania’s capital city, is Salamanca Market, sprawled between historic warehouses and the waterfront, famous as the finishing line for the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, held every year on Boxing Day.
I’d been told I had to see the dead hills on the way out of Tasmania’s old mining town of Queenstown. All vegetation had been killed off years before by the felling of the trees to burn in the mine smelters and the sulfur fumes from the smelters themselves.
White Australia began as a penal settlement, a way for the English to clear out their overloaded gaols and to rid themselves of what they called the “criminal classes”. Many of the convicts were sent to Tasmania, around 76,000 between 1804 and 1853. We were taught at school about the colourful and fascinating history surrounding this time but I wanted to learn more. Continue reading “Gordon River Tasmania”
I came to travelling alone, late in life. I’d always wanted to explore Tasmania, the island south of where I live in Melbourne, Australia. ‘Tassie’ is often ignored by Melburnians; something about it being so close, so easy to get to, takes it off the radar. And then it doesn’t offer palm trees and tropical islands, scuba diving among corals in warm, pristine waters. No camel rides in red deserts or coat-hanger bridges and shell-like opera houses. But something had always drawn me to the place, though apart from a quick drive from Hobart to Burnie years before, in true Melburnian fashion I’d kept putting it off.
Planning to the Nth 