Old gravestones, St. David's Cemetary, Hobart
It began to rain just as we started packing up this morning, and it continued for most of the day. At times it was a heavy downpour, at other times just a very light sprinkle. We did limit our activities today somewhat because of the rain, but we did get to see some of central Hobart.
We drove over the very high cross channel bridge, the Tasman bridge, which (as we found out later today) was struck by a ship in 1975, knocking out a span of the bridge and collapsing a 127 metre long section of bridge. The concrete bridge landing on the ship caused it to sink, and five motorists were killed when their vehicles fell through the gap. We were able to park downtown in a pay parking lot, and spent a couple of hours walking around the Salamanca market. This is a fairly large outdoor market, and many of the shopkeepers were attempting to keep their wares dry by lifting up the roofs on their tent shelters with sticks to keep the rain running off. Enid and I wore our raincoats and also used the umbrella but we still got a bit wet.
We found a very interesting wall covered with old headstones from the period of about 1800 to 1850. This is in a park, St. David’s Park, which is where the original cemetary of Hobart was located. Over time the cemetary became neglected and overgrown, so badly that apparently thieves used the collapsed graves as hiding spots. In the 1920’s the city made the entire burial area into a park, removed the headstones and placed them on walls around the park.
After the market we walked back, still in the rain, and had a seafood lunch at a restaurant. We had several different kinds of fish, prawns, scallops, and squid, and some other kinds of seafood we didn’t really recognize, all on a plate of chips. There was a nice view out over the Hobart harbour from the restaurant.
As it was still raining when we finished lunch we bought two more hours parking, and went into the Tasmanian maritime museum. It had several displays of the history of sea travel and exploration around Tasmania. It was there that we found out about the bridge disaster. There are many intricate models of old sailing ships as well as museum artifacts. Upstairs they had a display of photographs taken by Alan Villiers in the late 1930’s of sailing boats in the Arabian gulf.
Upon leaving the museum we walked through a bit of central Hobart. We found a mobile phone store, but the clerk said he would need our phone to recharge it. He also said we could get it recharged at the Telstra store, and told us where it was. Since we didn’t have the phone with us, I walked back to our motorhome, and Enid looked in some of the stores downtown. It was heavily pouring rain now. I got the phone and found Enid and we walked to the Telstra store. They closed at 2:30 and it was now 2:31, so although you could see customers in the store, they wouldn’t open the doors! Another customer, who was also locked out, had just been in the store and wanted to do something else was furious, as he said he’d only been in the store about two minutes earlier. I ranted to him about my experience trying to recharge the phone. Enid and I decided to walk back to the original store with the phone, and the clerk there recharged it. He also didn’t need the phone at all to do this, so we have no idea why the original clerk said we’d need it. Perhaps he didn’t know.
We drove out of Hobart about 30 km to the caravan park at the town of New Norfolk. It rained almost all the way there, but stopped just as we got here. Supper tonight was a very light meal of a salad, hot cross bun and cheese since we’d eaten so much for lunch. We started to walk down by the river, but didn’t take our umbrella, so of course it started to rain again. While it wasn’t heavy, just a light mist, we decided not to get wet and came back to our motorhome. We have enough wet socks to dry out after today already!