“No worries” Melbourne & Tasmania 2025 — Carol & Scott On The Road

We started our Melbourne, Australia, and Tasmania trip with attending the Australian Open Tennis Tournament. The venue for the tournament was amazing, and as always, it was incredible to watch the best tennis players in the world. Some of the best matches included: Djokovic vs Alcaraz, De Minaur vs Sinner, Tommy Paul vs Zverev, and Shelton vs Sonego.

We also enjoyed touring Melbourne, the coastal capital of the southeastern Australian state of Victoria, and we found that it had a young and lively atmosphere, amazing restaurants and museums. We visited some of the main plazas, the Royal Botanical Gardens, and the Arts Centre Melbourne. We took a couple days to explore the city on foot and enjoyed the street art, architecture, river walk and the food. Our food tour included tastes of emu, kangaroo, crocodile tongue, wallaby and wombat … some of it was pretty good! Also, we took one day to go wine tasting in the Yara Valley.

A highlight of our visit was our tour/drive of the Great Ocean Road. It is one of the most scenic and dramatic coastal drives we’ve experienced! We had incredible views of the 12 Apostles from the cliffs, beach and in a helicopter! We walked through rain forests, viewed waterfalls, and got up close to wild koala bears. During our drive, we saw so many birds and other wild Australian wildlife and ended the drive with watching many kangaroos hanging out on a golf course!

We then went to Tasmania and started with exploring the waterfront city of Hobart. The city is very quaint, and the people are very friendly, and hard to believe that it was founded in 1803 as a penal colony! We enjoyed walking around the harbor and watching the fishing boats coming in and out. Hobart also has an amazing Weekend Market, progressive art galleries, and yummy cafés and restaurants. We took one day to explore the Mona Museum which is about a 30 min boat ride from Hobart. It describes itself as “a temple to secularism, rationalism, and talking crap about stuff you don’t really know very much about”. No worries, mate! This is a must see!

After Hobart, we started our self-drive trip around the island and drove north stopping off at Mount Field National Park, Tasmania’s oldest National Park. We hiked to Russell Falls and walked through the forest which had some of the tallest trees in the world, the Tasmanian Mountain Ash. We continued to drive north to and stayed in the Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park. We took several hikes in the area through ancient forests and hiked the Cradle Valley Boardwalk Day Hike to Lake Lilla and Dove Lake, which provided great views of Cradle Mountain and close encounters with the wildlife (so many wallabies here!). Our next stop was driving east to Launceston, which is a riverside city. We loved the walking trails in the Cataract Gorge, for they followed along the clean river and rocky canyon. We also spent one day enjoying a tour of the vineyards and the wines in the Tamar Valley. Our last stop took us south to stay in the Freycinet National Park, which is best known for its Wineglass Bay due to its shape and crystal-clear waters. We stayed at the park for a couple of days and enjoyed hiking around Wineglass Bay, and cruising around the bay giving us views of the pink granite Hazards Range, white sand beaches, and crystal-clear waters. And finally, we saw the Tasmanian Devil at the Devils@Cradle Life Sanctuary, which is trying to protect the devil from the facial cancerous tumor that has put the Tasmanian Devil on the endanger list. It was quite interesting watching them up close, and observing them interacting with each other, feeding, and screaming their “devil sound” when expressing dominance! We then headed back to Hobart to spend one last evening there enjoying the seafood before flying back home.

Hi.

Jan 14 “No worries” Melbourne & Tasmania 2025

Hi.

Jan 14 “No worries” Melbourne & Tasmania 2025

Nov 18 California State Route One 2024