Tasmania's VirtualTourist Home Page

We all take our home towns for granted. Familiarity blinds us to the potential of our surroundings. We travel thousands of miles to gaze in awe at someone else's humdrum existence.
So travel is above all a stimulant for the brain. A mind tonic. A soul revitaliser
Travel offers a repite from serious life citizenship....forget the mortgage, weeding the garden, feeding the cat and how much fibre you have in your diet. Just go. Free at last, if only for three weeks.
Travel also provides soul food for those who journey. The image we have are given of the world by the media is often of despair and destruction. But to travel is to stumble across scene after scene of such rugged splendour and timeless magnificence that your emotions overwhelm your senses. If this place exists then there is hope yet for the world.
To travel is to explore the many shadows of your psyche, for different people find beauty in different things....soul food comes in different packages.
The magic of travel is everywhere. The tragedy, the drama, the pathos of past human life haunts every grand ruin, and you feel the haunted or triumphant ghosts echoing in your every step.
Travel renews your sense of childlike wonder because the world indeed has many wonders. Sometimes wonder can be found on a small scale, a universe reflected on a drop of dew. Sometimes wonder is seen on a spectacular scale. To stand and absorb the massive prehistoric form of a mountain, is to feel for a moment like a mere speck of existence in the infinite continuum of the universe. To be humbled.
And to travel is to experience irony. The boredom on the face of the gondolier in Venice. A cleaner yawning as they sweep the floor of the Louvre.
After all, this is where they live.

Looking back down over Hobart from halfway up Mt Wellington, the mountain in the previous picture.

Because our Christmas falls in the middle of summer, we have shaken off the tradition of eating heavy, fatty foods to celebrate.
At this time the best of seafood and fruits are available and we enjoy the opportinity to indulge our taste buds.