This bonus post is a little hodge podge of really short stops I made before and after Cradle Mountain. When I left Port Arthur I had an extra day. In retrospect, I could’ve spent that extra day in Cradle Mountain and had plenty to do, but I didn’t know that at the time. Instead, I drove up the east coast and spent one night in Bicheno. I arrived around sunset, so I just made a quick stop to the Bicheno Blow Hole before checking into the hotel.

I spent my evening in Bicheno stuffing myself with fish and chips and doing some much needed laundry. First thing in the morning, though, I was off to East Coast Natureworld, the main reason I took this detour. I arrived just in time to see the feeding of the young Tasmanian devils. This group is all about a year old. They were energetic and feisty. Fights break out often as you can see.

After their wallaby leg lunch, they all calmed down a bit, a little bit. This guy was just over it though. He had had enough of the drama!

I learned that you can kind of tell the young devils from the old ones by the amount of scarring on their faces. The older devils like this girl below have been around and fighting for a lot longer. How can a creature that’s so cute be so violent and so cantankerous?!

I was also lucky enough to see one of the spotted-tail quolls out and about. This is another one of Australia’s carnivorous marsupials. They aren’t quite as violent with each other as the devils are, but while the devils are mostly scavengers, quolls are hunters. They’ve been known to take down wallabies, and they’re only about the size of a house cat. Impressive!

I wasn’t lucky enough to spot one of the albino wallabies when I visited Bruny Island a couple of weeks ago, but they had a whole horde of them here. A lot of these guys end up in rescues because they have no camouflage and are very vulnerable in the wild. They were pretty shy.

Like I said in another post, most of these animals are here because their moms got hit by cars while they were in the pouch. That’s what happened to this wombat. She’s just here until she gains enough weight to not get picked on by the other wombats, then she’ll be released into the wild.

And I got to see one of the little potoroos, the smallest of the macropods. The next size up are the pademelons, then the wallabies, and the kangaroos are the biggest.

As is always the case at these rescues, there were a lot of birds. I found out what those pink parrots that I saw everywhere are called. Meet the galah.

The best part as always, was being able to hang out with and feed the kangaroos. This day I had the whole mob to myself. These guys don’t just eat food from your hand, they grab your hand and hold on tight to make sure you don’t try to get away. They’re so much fun!

I left Natureworld headed for Cradle Mountain, but I still had time for another stop. So I broke up the drive with a hike to Liffey Falls. There were several little cascades along the way, but the one just above the falls and the falls themselves were the best. A solid seven on the gusher scale. This was a perfect spot to stretch my legs a bit.

From Liffey Falls I went and enjoyed my time in Cradle Mountain as seen in the last post. On my way out of Cradle Mountain I headed up to the Tasmanian Arboretum, but not for the trees. There’s one more native Australian I was hoping to see in the wild, platypus, but they are so rarely seen I didn’t think it would happen. Then I read about the Arboretum and the platypus that live in the lake there. Everything I read said that even though they’re wild, sightings are pretty much guaranteed, so I went to give it a shot.

As you can see my gamble paid off. They’re definitely the strangest creature on earth. An egg laying mammal with an otters furry body, a beavers tail, a ducks bill for a mouth, and webbed feet with venomous spines on the back pair. They sure are cute though.

I was running around that lake furiously taking pictures like a little kid. They’d float at the top of the water for a few seconds then dive down to find food while I watched the direction the bubbles were moving so I would be ready when they surfaced again. I was pretty excited!

I would watch one for a bit and then go to another part of the lake to watch another one. I’m pretty sure I saw at least three different individuals, maybe four, but I’m not 100% positive. Either way this is definitely a highlight for me.

It’s maybe a little anticlimactic, but the other really cool characters at the arboretum were all the black swans. They were floating and walking around all over the place. So pretty!

From the Arboretum I traveled east to Launceston, the biggest city in the north of Tasmania, to spend one night. I’m just here because I have a flight tomorrow. They do have a couple of worthwhile museums to visit though, and since I still have an afternoon to kill, why not? Both museums are named after Queen Victoria. First was the Queen Victoria Art Gallery.

The entire upstairs of the museum was dedicated to one local artist, Michael McWilliams. He paints somewhat humorous works pointing out the damage that people have done to Tasmania, particularly when it comes to logging and the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger.

There are tiny depictions of the Tasmanian tiger hidden in a lot of his works, just as a reminder, but he includes pretty much all of Tasmania’s unique wildlife.

Probably the two most damaging things to Tasmania’s environment have been the introduction of foxes and domestic cats. He also touches on those issues in a sarcastic way. Note the Tasmanian tiger in the background of the fox painting. Even though it was all one artist, I really enjoyed this exhibit.

Just a few blocks away I paid a visit to the Queen Victoria Museum. There were several really interesting exhibits here, but my favorite were the dinosaurs. As I’ve said before, no dinosaur exhibit in Australia would be complete without our friend the Muttaburrasaurus.

It was a smallish exhibit, but there was a lot of cool skeletons and a Tyrannasaurus skull.

I also learned about a new marsupial I had never heard of before, the Zygomaturus. They went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, but they were a very close relative of the wombat. Just picture a wombat the size of a grizzly bear. Good thing they eat plants!

I don’t usually talk about my accommodations too much, but this next place was an unusual and new experience for me. I spent my one night in Launceston at the Pod Inn. These pod hotels are all the rage throughout Asia, but I’ve never stayed at one before. It felt like I was sleeping on a space ship. This is apparently the first and only one in Australia.

It’s in what looks like was once a giant one room office space. The pods are arranged into seven or eight little alcoves, so there was probably a total of fifty or sixty pods in there. Essentially, everyone is sleeping in the same room, just in individual little pods. Above is my alcove, the C pods, and my pod is the open one on the bottom right, C6. Below is the inside of my pod. It was pretty comfortable. There are light controls, fan controls, USB ports, a wireless phone charger, hooks to hang clothes. I would stay in one of these places again.

Anyway, that’s it for the bonus post and that’s also it for Tasmania. Now I have a plane to catch. I’m not finished with Australia yet, though. I still have about a month to go…