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Bradt Guide Tasmania
Ref: BRA075
Discover the traces of its ancient Aboriginal past and learn the brutal history of the convicts first exiled here. Go in search of the Tasmanian devil. Tasmania - The Bradt Travel Guide allows you to maximise your enjoyment of the surroundings while minimising your impact upon them.
About this Destination
Forget the timeless adage. In Tasmania, you can have your cake and eat it. The island combines a ravishing, untamed landscape, and weird and wonderful wildlife, with all the comforts and amenities of a modern, developed country. With warm weather and en even warmer welcome, Tasmania is the ideal holiday destination.
Author's Note, by Matthew Brace
As a journalist, I suppose I am always looking for the catch, trying to sift through the PR-speak and find the facts. Tasmania cannot all be beautiful can it … must be some really bad areas as well? Well, yes, actually, with only one or two very minor exceptions it is quite astoundingly picturesque.
And the people, there must be a few rogues, after all they are descended from convicts? I am sure one or two are hiding somewhere but I have always found Tasmanians to be among the most pleasant, giving and genuinely friendly people in Australia, and in turn I rate the Australians as one of the most welcoming and warm populations on the planet.
Visitors can bask in the added luxury that Tasmania is a modern state in a modern nation with all mod cons and buses that leave on time, clean toilets that work, and exotic food served in fine restaurants.
Regular Developing World travellers might miss the unpredictability of African train timetables or the platforms full of staring faces looking at you open-mouthed as if you have landed from Mars that afternoon.
Personally, much as I love roughing it through the tropics, the ease of being in an ordered and safe place was welcome and comforting. Wilderness with washbasins, and wasabi ... and wine.
Tasmania restored a good amount of my faith in the world, and continues to do so as I pop down from Sydney as often as possible. Walking the Overland Track I remember standing on Cradle Cirque with my Queensland hiking pal Graham and we looked in silence and in rapture for countless miles into the far distance.
We could see nothing man-made: no roads, towns, logging operations, power lines, factory smoke, not even an aircraft vapour trail. There were no artificial sounds or smells; it was all completely natural.
Matthew Brace is a foreign correspondent and photographer based in Sydney, currently representing the Observer and Geographical Magazine.
£13.95
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