Erik and Erin in Australia

We are finally done apple picking. We leave Tasmania via the ferry on the 29th. I'm pretty excited because there is an all you can eat buffet during the journey. I figure that I can eat enough food to cost them at least 1/4 of the $118 ticket price that I paid for the trip. I can't wait.

While I've been picking, I've been doing estimates on the number of apples I've picked. Tonight I decided to write it all out. This is how it breaks down:

Time in Devonport: 6 weeks.
Number of days worked: 30.
Estimated number of apples picked: 309,000.
Gross pay: $2,457.
Pay cleared: $1,745.
Taxes paid: $712.

Yes, I have too much time on my hands. Apparently it is possible for us to get back the tax money we paid, which will be a nice bonus at the end of the trip. I'm amazed that Erin and I have picked roughly 618,000 apples together.

See the big wooden bins in the background? They hold 1/2 ton of apples. It takes about 3000 apples to fill one, which pays $21. No one gets rich picking apples.

Here is a picture of Chantal from Dauphin, lost in a hedge maze. This was one of the many cool stops that we did while driving around. This maze had one kilometer of path through it, and it was surprisingly difficult. I loved it. I want to build a hedge maze when I get home. The only problem is where...

Here we have a Tasmanian devil. I think that Bugs Bunny cartoons had led me quite far astray in my expectations. These things are quite cute, and they can make an incredible amount of nasty sounding noise when they want to.

While we were traveling around Tasmania, we were spent a lot of our time walking in the wilderness. We got to see a lot of wildlife. There were lots of Wallabies and echidnas. On one walk we saw two very poisonus tiger snakes. At least I think they were tiger snakes. They had to be very poisonus, because all the snakes here are. We saw one wombat crossing a highway, but that isn't quite the same as seeing one in the wild. We had also hoped to see a devil and a platypus. We tried very hard to be quiet and watch carefully, but we didn't have any luck. At one point Erin was watching so carefully for a platypus that she fell off the path we were walking on.

We decided that we had to see Tasmanian Devils and wombats like the one above, so we went to a wildlife park. It was a great experience, these parks take in injured animals and help the recover to be released back into the wild. We got to hold the wombats, and watch the devils being fed. Devils have quite interesting eating habits. They are too small and slow to be very effective predators, so they exist as scavengers and carion eaters. They have a very effective digestive system that allows them to eliminate disease from what they eat without risking becoming sick. Wombats are really interesting as well. When they are threatened they dig into the ground and only expose a part of their back. On their backs they have a had cartilage plate under their fur. It is kind of funny that you can knock on a wombat's back, and it will hardly notice.

Wombats have a problem when they cross highways. They can feel the vibrations of approaching cars, and their instinct is to curl up into a ball and present their back as a defense. This isn't very effective, and unfortunately there is a lot of road kill. The devils are then drawn out onto the highway by the carrion,and are often killed as well. We read one estimate that indicated that around half a million animals are hit by cars every year in Tasmania. The amount of road kill on the highways is frightening. Tasmania has speed limits of 110 on tiny highways that wind through the hills and forests. I think that the situation is made even worse by the fact that there are no really large wild animals here. Maybe people would slow down a little if there was the occasional moose on the road.

We are still in Devonport picking apples, but we won't be for much longer. I'm counting my days until freedom from the orchard. I also have some more Tasmanian pictures that will eventually make it onto the page. It's hard to find time to write when all you do is eat, sleep, and pick apples though.

We flew into Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. It's a beautiful city and I really enjoyed the 4 days we spent there. We decided that the best way to see the island was to rent a car.

After a bit of research, we ended up renting a Volkswagen Beetle. We ended up with an orange '75 VW bug. We named her 'Matilda', inspired by the classic Australian song 'Waltzing Matilda'. At times driving a 27 year old car with a 4-speed manual transmission could be challenging. Things were made even more exciting by the fact that we were driving on the wrong side of the road. We kept repeating "driving on the left" out loud to each other. I'm happy to say that we didn't make any major mistakes or cause any accidents. In addition to a challenging transmission, we had a few other problems with our car. At one point Erin tried to roll down her window, and the handle broke off in her hand. When the radio situation was particularly grim (part 9 of a dramatic reading of the classic Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf) we decided to buy a gas station cassette tape. Shortly thereafter we discovered that the tape player didn't work. Matilda also tended to guzzle gas. This was made worse by the fact that we had to buy Lead Replacement Petrol. Apparently this LRP that we were buying was the cause of the mysterious stalls that Matilda would experience shortly after being started. Buying lead fuel would have solved these problems. Yup, thats right, you can still buy lead gasoline in this country. Driving Matilda was great though. Bugs just have stile. Other bug owners wave at you, and little kids stare as you drive by. I highly recommend the experience.

This is a picture of the wombat pool at Cradle Mountain National park. This was on one of the many incredible walks that we did while driving around. Unfortuneatly we didn't see any wombats here.

This is a picture of Chantal and I sitting on a bridge built by convicts. Chantal is a girl from Dauphin Manitoba that we met in Tasmania. She traveled around in Matilda with us for a few days. Tasmania, like many other parts of Australia, was originally settled as a prison colony. This means that almost everything historical is somehow related to convicts. If you encounter a structure that looks kind of old, and is made of some sort of stone or brick work, it was built by convicts. I wonder if the tour guides here get tired of saying "...and this was also built by convicts." That one phrase sums up the entirety of historical architecture in Tasmania.

I think that this is all I'm going to write for now. I fear that if I write any more, this computer will mysteriously crash, and I'll loose everything.