Time of Your Life

I was going to call this post, “The Last Supper” and then I realized just how inappropriate that would be on Good Friday.

On our final day in Tasmania and our final night in Australia, we sampled some of the best that the country has to offer. The best rainforest in Tasmania has to be Mount Field National Park, which sits near the heart of Tasmania’s wildest country.

Mount Field's gorgeous rainforest

Russell Falls

We took a beautiful circuit hike amongst the tall trees and waterfalls of Mount Field in the morning, but not before we sampled the best coffee and hot chocolate in Tasmania.

Australians are serious about coffee. Bars (or pubs, as they call them) have espresso machines. Even a lot of gas or petrol stations have espresso machines – although we passed on one that offered espresso made from instant coffee (eeugh). I don’t drink coffee, but I do drink hot chocolate, and I can say that the hot chocolate is much better there too — not so sweet, and a lot finer chocolate than Hershey’s.

Anyway, we stopped at the Possum Shop and had our best coffee and a delectable breakfast of sticky date pudding, which is not a pudding at all, but more of a gooey caramel cake, and scones and fresh raspberry jam. I’m salivating just thinking about it.

Doug was on a quest to find the best fish and chips in Tasmania. Seriously, if he could have, he would have eaten fish and chips for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He thought the best was found in Strahan, on the west coast, but a pretty good runner-up was found in Hobart, where we stopped before our evening flight. The high-end fish is blue eye trevalla, a meaty white fish that is probably most similar to cod in our part of the world.

Downtown Hobart

After the fish and chips

Like a lot of nights while we were traveling, we missed having a proper dinner. This time our flight times interfered and by the time we arrived in Adelaide it was past nine, and past closing for most restaurants (they close really early in Australia). So we dined on takeout pizza on a park bench while listening to a woman playing an acoustic guitar at a local pub cover Green Day’s “Time of Your Life” and watching the intensely bright southern hemisphere stars. It sounds sappy, but it was the best last supper to be found in Australia.