Shallow Thoughts : : travel

Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary and the Tasmanian Devil

The LA Times had a great article last weekend about Tasmanian devils, the mysterious facial cancer which is threatening to wipe them out, and the Bonorong wildlife preserve in Hobart which is involved in trying to rescue them.

The disease, called devil facial tumour disease, is terrible. It causes tumours on the devils' face and mouth, which eventually grow so large and painful that the animal starves to death. It's a cancer, but a very unusual one: it's transmissible and can pass from one devil to another, one of only three such cancers known. That means that unlike most cancers, tumour cells aren't from the infected animal itself; they're usually contracted from a bite from another devil.

Almost no Tasmanian devils are immune to DFTD. Being isolated for so long on such a small island, devils have little genetic diversity, so a disease that affects one devil is likely to affect all of them. It can wipe out a regional population within a year. A few individuals seem to have partial immunity, and scientists are desperately hunting for the secret before the disease wipes out the rest of the devil population. Organizations like Bonorong are breeding Tasmanian devils in captivity in case the answer comes too late to save the wild population.

When I was in Hobart in 2009 for Linux.conf.au (which, aside from being a great Linux conference, also raised over $35,000 to help save the devils), I had the chance to visit Bonorong. I was glad I did: it's fabulous. You can wander around and feed kangaroos, wallabees and the ever-greedy emus, see all sorts of rarer Australian wildlife like echidnas, quolls and sugar gliders, and pet a koala (not as soft as they look).

But surprisingly, the best part was the tour. I'm usually not much for guided tours, and Dave normally hates 'em. But this one was given by Greg Irons, the director of the park who's featured in the Times article, and he's fantastic. He obviously loves the animals and he knows everything about them -- Dave called him an "animal nerd" (that's a compliment, really!) And he's a great showman, with a lively and fact-filled presentation that shows each animal at its best while keping all ages entertained. If you didn't love marsupials, and particularly devils and wombats, before you come to Bonorong, I guarantee you will by the time you leave.

A lot of the accounts of devil facial tumour disease talk about devils fighting with each other and spreading the disease, but watching them feed at Bonorong showed that fighting isn't necessary. Tasmanian devils feed in groups, helping each other tear apart the carcass by all latching onto it at once and pulling. With this style of feeding, it's easy to get bitten in the mouth accidentally.

Of course, I have a lot more photos from Bonorong: Bonorong Wildlife Park photos.

Tags: travel, lca2009, linux.conf.au, australia, nature
[ 09:48 Apr 01, 2011    More travel/tasmania | permalink to this entry | comments ]

The Case of the Missing Gooseberry

Traveling always comes with risks. Aside from the risks you may encounter along the way, there are the worries of what you left behind. Will the house burn down? Will the mail pile up, signalling to thieves that the home is empty? Will the server stay up? On a more prosaic note ... Will the plants in the garden all die from lack of water?

Shortly before traveling to Oregon for OSCON, I acquired a cute little Cape Gooseberry seedling (courtesy of Mark Terranova at the south bay Geeknic). That's a new plant to me -- I'd never seen one before. But it was a cute little thing, and seemed to be flourishing. I had it in a pot on a little shelf where it would get morning sun but wouldn't get too hot in the afternoon, and was looking forward to planting it when it got big enough to withstand our marauding local seedling-loving snails.

To get it through my planned week-and-a-half absence, I had one of those glass watering bulbs they sell in drugstores. They're supposed to last several weeks, though they don't work that reliably in practice. Still, I saturated the soil with water the morning I left, then filled the bulb and crossed my fingers for no long heat waves.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I got back. Something had dug out my little gooseberry and taken it!

I still have no idea what got it. We certainly have some local squirrels who love to dig, and young squirrels (still learning their digging skills) love potted plants. But I wouldn't think a squirrel would have much use for a gooseberry seedling -- they just like the act of digging.

I wonder if cape gooseberry leaves are particularly tasty to rodents?

Ironically, the soil was still quite damp. The little plant probably would have made it through just fine.

Tags: travel, garden
[ 13:17 Jul 28, 2010    More travel | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Of Cima, Sand and Melons

Morningstar Mine

Our first goal of the morning was Morningstar Mine, a set of abandoned mines in the northern part of the preserve.

Two wide, smooth dirt roads leave paved Morningstar Mine Rd to climb the alluvial fan, but the quality of the roads gradually deteriorate over the short distance to the mines.

Morningstar Mine turns out to be a private, going concern, fenced off with NO TRESSPASSING signs. But there are plenty of older, abandoned mines nearby. Very few buildings or mine shafts, but lots of rusting cans and other trash. Really, not much to see, and Dave was in a hurry to move on, so we did.

The Contentious Memorial

Down on Cima Road near the Teutonia Peak trailhead, I wanted to see the famous WWII monument, about which a Supreme Court case is currently raging. (The monument is a cross, a religous symbol, which federal law says should not be supported by government funds or stand on government land.)

I couldn't find anything on the web that gave the location of the monument, so we had to look for it. It turns out that it's easily spotted from the road, atop one of the granite outcrops on the north side of the road, just east of the Teutonia Peak trailhead. (Or see the GPS waypoint file linked at the end of this article.)

In fact, we'd almost certainly seen it before, and shrugged it off as another of those weird inexplicable things you see in the Mojave. The upper part of the cross is currently covered with a box, so it looks like a small sign that says nothing. Several people have put up small flags nearby.

Jackass Canyon -- not to be

The next goal was Jackass Canyon, down in the south part of the preserve west of Kelso.

For quite a while the road is in great shape, hard packed and not badly washboarded. There are lots of curious red anthill-like formations right in the road that turned out to be built not of sand but of some sort of dried plant matter. (Did I mention the curious things you see in the Mojave?)

But then the road descends into a wash full of deep sand with occasional buried rocks. After smacking our undercarriage a couple of times on hidden obstacles while fishtailing around in the sand, we decided retreat was the better part of valor. We'll try Jackass Canyon from the south some time -- maybe it's easier from that direction.

Mojave Rd from 17-Mile Pt to Aiken Mine Rd

Returning to Kelbaker Road, we proceeded a few miles west to 17-Mile Point, where we'd exited the Mojave Road a few days ago, and turned north to complete a section of the Mojave Rd. we hadn't done yet. From Kelbaker to Aiken Mine, the road is quite sandy, with lots of fishtailing, but not a problem for the Rav.

Aiken Mine Rd

This was our second time on Aiken Mine Rd, one of our favorite routes in the preserve.

The lower section of Aiken Mine, from the paved road to the lava tube, is brutally washboarded, like most park dirt roads that get a lot of 2WD traffic.

We didn't stop at the lava tube today, since we'd explored it fairly thoroughly the last time (it's lovely, and provided several of my favorite desktop wallpaper images) but continued straight past it into the basalt.

The ascent from the lower lava fields up to Aiken Mine is weird and wonderful. The road is entirely basalt cinders (Aiken mine is a cinder mine located on a large cinder cone), a mixture of black and red and a little white sand here and there. It's like driving on Mars. The ascent is steep and slightly slippery, but it looks scarier than it is -- there's really no danger here for anything with reasonable clearance, and although 4WD is probably helpful I doubt it's required. The mine, an active cinder mine, is at the top, along with some hiking trails up one of the cinder cones.

Past Aiken, the road descends into the Joshua tree forest on the side of Cima Dome, supposedly the densest Joshua tree forest in the world. ("In the world" should be viewed in light of the fact that Joshua trees don't really exist anywhere outside the Mojave desert of California and Nevada.) More fishtailing in deep sand with a high center groove. The Rav4 never bottomed, but this is definitely not a road to take a 2WD street car of normal ride height.

The melon patch

At some point, the road forks and the left fork seems to be the main one -- but it's a sham. The left fork is actually a power line maintenance road that cuts across to I-15. (We knew this because we'd gotten caught by it the last time, followed the power lines then eventually figured it out and cut back to the more interesting Aiken Mine Rd.)

A few miles afer the powerline fork the road passes a water tank and corral, goes back into sandy Joshua tree forest for a while, then comes out at a strange clearing. What's strange about it? It's a patch of coyote melons. These delicious looking, softball-sized melons apparently grow wild in the Mojave -- but I've never seen them anywhere but this spot. They're apparently all but inedible by humans ... but something eats them, because you can see broken, emptied and dessicated melon rinds lying everywhere.

Did I mention "strange things you see in the Mojave"? Coming on a melon patch in the middle of the desert is one of the things I love about this place.

Alas, the melon patch is almost at the end of the road. Not long after it,, there's a house (I hear one of the rangers lives there) and an intersection, and the road suddenly turns posh for its last mile or two to paved Cima Road.

Photos and GPS Logs

Photos Track log, Waypoints

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4, ruins
[ 09:34 Nov 18, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Castle Peaks and Hart: California's Ozymandius

Castle Peaks hiking corridor

Our goal on Tuesday was the "Castle Peaks Hiking Corridor". The Trails Illustrated map showed a side road leading northwest from Walking Box Ranch Rd and eventually petering out to become a hiking trail that went, if not actually to Castle Peaks, at least close enough to get a good look.

Castle Peaks are the rugged spikes you see from I-15 between Mountain Pass and Primm, jutting into the skyline and giving the New York Mountains their appearance of skyscrapers which must be the reason for the range's name. They're eroded fins of eroded Miocene volcanics, surrounded by Precambian metamorphic rocks.

Walking Box Ranch Rd is easy to find off Nipton Rd -- not only is it a prominent, wide dirt road but there's even a road sign, a few miles after the eastern end of the Wee Thump Joshua Tree wilderness (on the north side of Nipton Rd). I'd like to explore Wee Thump and its impressive Joshua trees some day.

The road is good, open and well graded, notwithstanding the humorous "Road not maintained" sign you encounter a few miles in. The side roads follow the map well enough, so it wasn't too difficult to identify the Castle Peaks turn-off. It's a 4-way intersection, not 3-way as shown on the map.

The Castle Peaks road is much narrower and alternates between sandy stretches and dirt. Mostly it's nothing difficult, but the rocky sections are slow going (first gear), there's a high center rut and you cross a couple of washes that make you stop and think about the right line. There are also a couple of sections where the road splits and the higher fork leads to a washed-out chasm, so proceed with due caution.

Eventually the road deteriorated and we parked and continued on foot, along the road and eventually through the gate that marks the Wilderness area boundary. After that the trail crosses through an area of basalt breccia -- the northwestern limit of the "malpais" lava area concentrated around Malpais Springs.

The icy wind dissuaded us from trying to go all the way to Castle Peaks (the trail doesn't go there anyway) but we did get a good view of them as well as nice views of Joshua trees and the malpais.

After our hike, we retraced our steps and crossed over along smooth, good roads to the deserted Hart townsite.

Hart Site: Ozymandius in the Mojave

Hart was a mining town established in 1907. At its peak it had five hotels, 8 saloons, a newspaper and about 400 residents. And today, what you can see of the town is ... a lot of rusted cans.

That's all. No buildings. No walls. But I guess when Hart's residents departed, they left their trash behind, and scattered among the yucca and creosote you can find collections of rusted cans and a few glass bottles darkening in the desert sun.

It's sobering. What happened to all the buildings? Where are those hotels and saloons and hundreds of houses? Apparently if you search long enough, you can find a few tiny segments of walls -- but mostly, this boom town has crumbled into nothingness. And trash.

It reminds me of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandius:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

There's no shattered visage -- just a plaque giving the history of the town, the expansive pit mine nearby, and the garbage quietly rusting away in the lone and level sands.

Photos and GPS log:

Photos
Track log
Waypoints

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4, ruins
[ 13:03 Nov 14, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Probing the Limits of a Rav4 on Clark Mountain

The plan

Just west of Primm and north of Yates Well lies a small, disconnected piece of Mojave National Preserve called Clark Mountain.

A year or two ago, Dave and I tried to explore Clark Mountain. Exiting I-15 at Cima Road, we headed northwest and looked for a small unmarked road heading east into the park. But we missed the right road and ended up on a rocky, tedious power-line road. Eventually we took a side road heading toward the mountain and ended up in a maze of unmarked roads, eventually coming to a four-way intersection with a sign:

GREEN'S WELL ROAD
Public by-pass route

Unfortunately, one of the three roads dead-ended in a "Private property: KEEP OUT" sign while the other two looked too technical to attempt so late in the afternoon. So we slunk back to the powerline road and turned right, toward Primm.

This year, we attacked Clark Mountain from the other side.

Old Ivanpah

We started from Yates Well Rd, the first I-15 exit south of Primm. Right toward the golf course, then first left toward the mountain. Our first project was to find old Ivanpah.

Ivanpah is an abandoned town over in the main part of Mojave Preserve -- but historical records show that it was moved there from an earlier location over on the slopes of Clark.

Just inside the NPS boundary, there's a network of small dirt roads forking off to the left. We parked and walked around, and eventually found the Ivanpah site: a few standing rock walls, a watering trough, a mysterious hole in the ground with a fence around it ("Private property, KEEP OUT") and a collection of ancient rusted and flattened iron cans as well as more modern shotgun shells.

Colosseum Gorge

Beyond Old Ivanpah, the road threads its way up along Colosseum Gorge, named after the spectacular open-pit mine near the top of the pass. The mine's steeply terraced walls do put one in mind of a vast spectator arena; but the only show today was the quiet pool at the bottom, the only spectators the two of us and a trio of ravens.

There's a network of interesting looking roads below the mine. Some lead up to Clark while others explore the grassy meadow below. A couple in a Landrover (the only other vehicle we saw all day) was crawling along one of the mountain roads.

Continuing on from the mine, we found the road occasionally rocky, but easy. At the bottom was an intersection with a sign aimed westward:

GREEN'S WELL ROAD
Public by-pass route

We'd made the connection! We'd been so close on our previous trip -- if only we'd known.

Clark Mountain, West

The rest of the journey would be easy! Just turn left at the right place and head south along the west face of Clark to the paved road, avoiding that awful rocky powerline road which had so sapped our energy and our time on the previous trip.

The turn-off (shown at left) is easy to miss: a fork to the left, up a steep incline, then an immediate right (fortunately shown on our Trails Illustrated map). We drove right past the left at first thinking it couldn't be the one, but as we saw our route bending right and down toward the powerline now visible in the distance, we knew we'd missed it and went back.

We climbed out of desert willow into a Joshua tree forest with a beautiful view of the valley to the north. And then the road got rocky. Just as rocky as it had been on the powerline road -- but this time it hummocked up over hills and down into washes, so the going was much more technical.

It turned out to be by far the most technical road we'd done, involving frequent stops to get out and plan routes and sometimes build ramps so the Rav wouldn't bottom out. On the tricky sections, one person got out and "spotted" while the other drove.

In the end we made it across to paved Kingston Rd with no damage to the Rav. That section only took about two and a half hours, but it felt like five. I guess it was a learning experience, certainly the most technical road we've done -- but in future we'll stay off the west side of Clark Mountain.
(At right: View of Primm and Ivanpah dry lake.)

GPS log:

Track log, Waypoints

Photos:

Photos

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4
[ 13:44 Nov 06, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Crossing Soda Lake on the Mojave Rd

Basin to Zzyzyx

The goal for the first day of this trip involved a slight detour on the way to our hotel: a section of the Mojave Road entering Mojave National Preserve from the south.

On most maps, the Mojave Road enters the preserve at Soda Lake, a bit east of Zzyzyx (pronounced Zye-zix, we're told, not Zizzix.) We'd been warned in the past that any hint of rain turns Soda Lake into a slippery, muddy truck-eating quagmire, so it's important to inquire first about conditions before attempting it.

But some study of Google Earth had convinced Dave that there's a road not shown on the maps going from Mojave Rd. across to Zzyzyx. All we had to do was take the Basin Rd. exit off I-15, turn onto Mojave Rd at the big metal signpost, and head north until we hit Soda Lake. If the lake surface looked bad, Zzyzyx would be an easy out.

This section of Mojave Road, it turns out, is a complex braid of dry washes of sand so deep that turning the steering wheel is more a suggestion than a control. That's great fun, as long as you're getting enough traction and not bottoming out. Occasional rock cairns tell you you're on the right track.

... Until you stop seeing cairns. At some point I took the road less braided and ended up driving across sand dunes before the route finally rejoined the Mojave Rd. Fortunately the Rav4 handled the sand very competently, without ever needing its magic center-differential-lock button.

(The GPS with its OpenStreetMap-derived file was no help here -- it didn't show the Mojave Road at all. It is in the OSM database, I found out later, rendered as a red dotted line -- apparently not major enough to make it into the Garmin maps. The nice thing about OSM is that I can fix it!)

Eventually we got back on something resembling a main road, which had turned into whoop-de-doos -- endless irritating hummocks that took patience but no great driving skill as the road skirts along the southern edge of a Wilderness area: no vehicular access. Rasor Rd comes in from I-15 somewhere around here, and the area is popular with ATVers: we saw quite a few groups camping.

Zzyzyx to 17-Mile Point

Finally we got to Soda Lake. The sandy road turned to smooth hardpack as it entered the lake bed -- by far the best road we'd seen since leaving I-15, and we drove out with no hesitation. We could see deep tracks off to either side of the road -- obviously lots of people experiment, and just as obviously the surface isn't quite as good if you get off the road, but we had no trouble on this dry October day. Before long we saw Zzyzyx off in the distance on our left -- and no road going there. But if the road across the dry lake was this good, why would we want to turn off to Zzyzyx at all?

(Good thing we didn't want to, since we couldn't!)

At the far side of the lake are a couple of steep rises in deep sand -- but nothing too tricky, and much easier than the sandy sections south of the lakebed.

The rest of the trip was just normal dirt-road driving, between the more-scenic-than-their-names-suggest Cowhole and Little Cowhole Mountains, through a small basalt flow (evidence of some nice big bubbles visible in the walls), and finally back onto pavement at Kelbaker Road and north to Primm.

GPS log: Track log, Waypoints

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4
[ 11:56 Oct 31, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Bruny Island night life: penguins and shearwaters

After a week in Tasmania, supposedly the most wildlife-packed state in Australia, without seeing anything besides ducks (mostly mallards) and songbirds (mostly sparrows and starlings), I was getting desperate.

I had one last hope: Bruny Island, touted as the wild and unspoiled place to see wildlife ... though the wildlife touted in the tourist brochures mostly seems to involve paying for a boat ride to see sea birds and fur seals. Nobody ever talks about marsupials wandering around -- are there any? Since it's an island, how would they get there? Nobody ever mentions the intriguing spot marked "penguin rookery" on "The Neck" between North and South Bruny. After last year's tremendous experience at the Philip Island Penguin Parade, I thought it might be worth booking a room on Bruny in the hope of seeing (a) penguins and (b) other nocturnal wildlife.

We booked into the "Bruny Island Hotel", a tiny pub with two lodging units billing itself as "Australia's Southernmost Hotel" (a claim dubious claim -- we saw plenty of lodging farther south, though their actual names didn't include the word "hotel"). We were a little taken aback when we saw the place but it turned out to be clean and comfortable, and right on the bay. And the pub had some wonderful aromas from the daily curry special (which, we found that night, tasted as good as it smelled).

Since we'd caught an early ferry, we spent the day exploring Bruny, including a bushwalk up to Mt. Mangana. The narrow and overgrown trail climbs steadily through thick forest, but the adventurous part of the hike came in one of the few sunny, rocky clearings, where a quite large black snake (something between a meter and a meter and a half long and as thick around as Dave's wrist) slithered off the trail right in front of me. Then right after that, Dave spotted a much smaller snake, the size of a large garter snake, a bit off the trail. Should I mention that all Tasmanian snakes are venomous? (Checking the books later, the large one was a black tiger snake -- quite dangerous -- while the smaller one was probably a white-lipped snake, considered only moderately dangerous.)

After that our appreciation of the scenery declined a bit as we kept our eyes glued to the trail ahead of us, but we saw no more snakes and eventually emerged into a clearing that gave us great views of a radio tower but no views of much of anything else. On Mt Mangana, the journey is the point, not the destination.

On the way back down, when we got to the rocky clearing, both of our colubrid friends were there to meet us. Dave, in the lead, stamped a bit and the larger snake slithered off ahead of us on the trail -- not quite the reaction we'd been hoping for -- while the smaller snake coiled into a ball but remained off the trail. Eventually the large snake left the trail and Dave quickly passed it while I snapped a shot of its disappearing tail. Now it was my turn to pass -- but the snake was no longer visible. Where was it now? I was searching the trailside where it had disappeared when I heard a rustling in the bush beside and behind me and saw the snake's head appearing -- it had circled around behind me! (I'm sure this wasn't a strategic move, merely some sort of coincidence: I used to keep snakes and though they're fascinating and beautiful, intelligence isn't really their strong point.) I high-tailed it down the trail and we finished the walk safely.

That evening, we headed over to the penguin rookery, where it turned out that we had happened to choose the one night when there was a ranger talk and program there. I wasn't sure whether that was a good or a bad thing, since it meant a crowd, but it turned out all to the good, partly because it meant a lot more high-powered red-masked flashlights to point out the penguins, but mostly because the real show there isn't penguins at all.

The Bruny Island penguin rookery is also a rookery for short-tailed shearwaters -- known as "muttonbirds" because they're "harvested" for their meat, said to taste like mutton. Their life cycle is fascinating. They spend the nothern hemisphere summer up in the Bering Sea near Alaska, but around September they migrate down to southern Australia, a trip that takes about a week and a half including stopping to feed. They breed and lay a single egg, which both parents incubate until it hatches in mid-January. Then the parents feed the chick until it grows to twice the size of its parents (some 10 kg! while still unable to fly). Then the parents leave the chicks and fly back north. This is the stage at which the overgrown chicks are "harvested" for meat. The chicks who don't get picked off (they're protected in Tasmania) live off their fat deposits until their flight feathers come in, at which point they fly north to join the adults.

We were there about a week after hatching, while the parents were feeding the chicks. The adult shearwaters spend all day fishing while the chick sleeps in a burrow in the sand. At sunset, the adults come flying back, where they use both voice and vision to locate the right burrow. The catch: a bird that migrates from Alaska to Tasmania, and takes casual flights to Antarctica for food, is designed to fly fast. Shearwaters aren't especially good at landing in confined spaces, especially when loaded with fish. The other catch is that there are many thousands of them (the ranger said there were 14,000 nesting at that rookery alone).

So, come dusk, the air is filled with thousands of fast-flying shearwaters circling and looking for their burrows and working up the nerve to land, which they eventually do with a resounding thump. They crash into bushes, the boardwalk, or, uncommonly, people who are there to watch the show. It's kind of like watching the bats fly out of Carlsbad caverns ... if the bats weighed five kilos each and flew at 20-30mph. The night fills with the eerie cries of shearwaters calling to each other, the growling of shearwaters fighting over burrows, and the thumps of shearwaters making bad landings.

Penguins? We saw a few, mostly chicks coming out of their burrows to await a food-carrying parent, and late in the evening a handful came out of the water and climbed the beach. Penguins normally find each other by sound, and at Philip Island they were quite noisy, but at Bruny most of the penguins we saw were silent (we did hear a few penguin calls mixed in with the cacophony of shearwaters). But we didn't really miss the penguins with the amazing shearwater show.

When we finally drove back to the hotel, we drove slowly, hoping to see nocturnal wildlife. We knew by then that Bruny does have mammals (however they might have gotten there) because of the universal sign: roadkill. And we did see wildlife: three penguins, two small red wallabies, three smaller red animals with fuzzy tails (ringtailed and brushtailed possums?) and one barely-glimpsed small sand-colored animal the size and shape of a weasel (I wonder if it could have been a brown bandicoot? It didn't look mouselike and didn't have spots like a quoll).

Success! A spectacular evening.

Tags: travel, australia, tasmania, nature, birds
[ 11:24 Feb 11, 2009    More travel/tasmania | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Tasmania Photos

I still haven't finished writing up a couple of blog entries from bumming around Tasmania after LCA2009, but I did get some photos uploaded: Tasmania photos. Way too many photos of cute Tassie devils and other animals at the Bonorong wildlife park, as well as the usual collection of scenics and silly travel photos.

Tags: travel, tasmania, lca2009, nature, photo
[ 14:49 Feb 04, 2009    More travel/tasmania | permalink to this entry | comments ]