Of weather

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 14 November 2008 08:35:55

The joys of Spring in Tasmania – Hobart was 31deg C yesterday … today snow is forecast for Mt Wellington, which is behind Hobart. Welcome to Australia :) I know the general image of Australia to those not living here is sundrenched, beach, hot, flies, drought, kangaroos, koalas, barbeques, sunburn, ayres rock (or better known these days as Uluru) … And yep, we got all that. But we’ve also got tropical, temperate AND alpine rainforest, we’ve got mountains (small as the world measures, but still mountains!), lots and lots and lots of snow (not necessarily accessible or skiiable, but it’s there!), large rivers, small rivers, rivers in crisis (hello Murray river!), lots and lots of camels, black swans (yep, black is the colour of the native swans), sand deserts, stony deserts (called gibbers), big red deserts (the Nullabor), giant weird rocks, lots and lots and lots of different types of bush (that’d be forests for those not in the know), enormous wetlands (Kakadu), big weird bitey black ants, little bitey black ants, whopping big angry black furry spiders (the famous funnel web), little black and red ones (redbacks, obviously), lots of snakes, but lots of lovely things like echidnas (our version of the anteater), wallabies, wombats, quolls, pademelons, kangaroo rats (very cute), Tasmanian devils (not so cute).  We can’t all swim or surf or ride a horse or hypnotise a crocodile … in fact the place is so big that some people have never seen the ocean and possibly never will.  It’s 1200km’s from my place on the north west coast of Tasmania to my parents place approximately 1/3 of the way up the New South Wales coast (the NSW coast, in it’s turn, is maybe 2/5’s of the Eastern coastline of Australia – Queensland is massive!). Don’t know what brought all that on but there you go :)