A question answered

I posted a picture of a summery but deserted Tassie beach as my piccie of the day yesterday.

Which drew a question from Anne Gallagher:
“Oh wow, what a beautiful beach. If there was a beach like that here in the states it would be filled with people. Where is everyone in Tasmania?”

Well to answer your question there are some Tasmanians there down the other end about 6 of them. (if you click the piccie to embiggen it you can just about see them as dots at the far end)

Why only six on such a gorgeous beach?

There is a story to that.

Tasmania is the smallest state in Oz. By Aussie standards Tasmania is tiny at 90,768 square kilometres (34,042 square miles). Compared to Western Australia (2,645,615 square km) it is a baby.


But Tassie’s size should not be sneezed at.

To put it in perspective it is almost exactly the same size as Maine in the US.
It is about  a sixth bigger than all of Scotland in the UK.

Scotland which is considered to be sparsely populated by UK standards has 5,254,800 people.
Maine by comparison is sparsely populated with 1,328,188

Tasmanians are even scarcer than Mainers. In the whole state there are only 511,718.

So there are plenty of beaches to go around in Tassie!

Gippsland

Once again it is longer than I would have liked between posts.

I mentioned that Deb and I drove across to Gippsland (the eastern section of Victoria).
Well one of Deb’s colleagues owns a holiday house at Cape Paterson and she kindly lent it to us for the weekend.

As you can see the road out front is very wet, it rained for much of our trip down. We have had a really wet winter, with rain more often than not. We were worried that it would rain the whole weekend, but it cleared up soon after we got there.

The house is right across the road from the beach. After we got the car unpacked we went for a stroll along the beach in the evening light.

I loved the waves breaking over these rocks.As we walked further along the beach I took photos back towards the East


The waves have carved this rock full of holes and basins. These couple of piccies feature the rocks and in the distance Cape Liptrap.At the tip of Cape Patterson is a reef that extends out into Bass Strait. Bass Straight lies between the Aussie Mainland and Tasmania.

We happily strolled across the rocks of the reef. The light was painting the rocks gorgeous colours.About now we had a near disaster. They didn’t look it, but many of these rocks were treacherously slippery.

As Deb stepped from one rock to another her foot skidded and she fell straight down onto the rocks on her front.

I raced across to where she was lying; it was a terrifying experience. I had thoughts of Deb suffering concussion and broken bones.

Fortunately, things weren’t as bad as they might have been.
She slightly grazed her chin and hands. Her worst injury was to her shoulders. She jarred both as she threw her hands out to stop her face smacking into the stone. Poor Deb has been stiff and sore all week.

Not surprisingly that put an end to our walk. We went straight back to the house where I lit a roaring fire and made Deb a hot drink. Once we got warm Deb felt a bit less sore and sorry and we had a evening watching movies and planning our next day.

Winter.

While I was away on holiday at Merimbula I was posting photos like this.

And this.

Then I was grumbling that despite the gloriously sunny weather I was cold.

People enjoying their Northern hemisphere summer looked at photos like this

and for some strange reason they didn’t take me very seriously.

Fair enough in tropical parts of Oz it never really gets cold.

However, it is winter down in the bottom half of the world and here in the southern end of Oz it gets wintery.

This Aussie for one thinks it is cold.

Now I have proof of the cold down this way.

On Saturday I took this

and this

See, I’m not just grumbling :-)