I have to admit that for most of my life my basic misunderstanding Tasmania was rooted in the erstwhile Looney Toons character that occasionally showed up on Saturday mornings. I knew Tasmania was somewhere in the Pacific near Australia, but assumed that such a wild creature had to live in the tropical jungle. Even the sound of it— TASMANIA — sounded exotic and wile. So I would most likely have placed Tasmania somewhere near Borneo or Papua New Guinea.

Even after becoming aware in my adult years of something called the Sydney Hobart race, I would still have placed Hobart somewhere on the Australian mainland. I think it is only when I started reading books about the Sydney Hobart race disaster of 1998 that I figured out that Tasmania is an island territory south of Australia in the Southern Ocean.

And it is quite civilized. The name “Tasmania” comes from Abel Tasman, the 18th century Dutch explorer who somehow managed to discover Tasmania and New Zealand but miss the entire Australian continent going both eastbound and westbound. Quite a feat!

If you were to somehow wake up in Hobart without knowing where you were, what month it was, or how you got there, just going by the buildings, the ships, and even the accents you might think you had landed in a seaside town in the British Isles somewhere. Only the Outback hats would be a clue that you were in the Southern Hemisphere.

Hobart itself is a small city with a distinctive early 20th century feel to the waterfront architecture. There is a farmers market every Saturday five blocks from our marina, and it feels like the Nyack farmers market, just about four times larger. Culturally we could be anywhere in the British Commonwealth - Saturday night we went to Shakespeare in the park at the Royal Botanical Gardens. A Midsummer Nights Dream. In January. Because it is midsummer. I never laughed so much at Bottoms hamming as in this production.

There is reputed to be great hiking and camping in the region - and we biked halfway up Mt Wellington yesterday to get a look. The landscape is reminiscent of New England - the highest peaks are on the order of 1600m (about 6000’) - so not as dramatic as the southern alps, but comparable to the White Mountains or the Adirondacks of our home in the northeast US. But with a few more palm trees at the base.

So this will be a familiar feeling place to take a five month break from ocean sailing. Robin has a Fulbright distinguished scholar fellowship with the CSIRO institute that lasts until June. I will be exploring some of the mountain biking trails in town, completing some of the more involved boat repair and maintenance projects now that we have a good chandlery, hiking and local cruising with Robin on weekends, and perhaps looking for some local volunteeri activities. (That tall ship Windeward Bound at the wharf has an intriguing sign “volunteers wanted.”)

So I may not be blogging much while I live a pretty ho-hum life in port for a while. Sometime in June we will head north again, to make a counterclockwise circuit around Australia towards the Indian Ocean and our next long passages. As far as we have come, we are only about a third of the way around the world at this point, as the boat tacks.

So stay tuned for further adventures in a few months! And my heartfelt thanks to all the good wishes and comments our blog friends have posted - we can’t read the comments at sea, but checking the comments on the blog is one of thr first things we do when we get connected again in port.