At Long Last Tasmania

After a journey that began on Saturday's drive to San Francisco's airport,  on Wednesday we will finally arrive in Hobart, Tasmania on Wednesday, January 21.  Before we get to Wednesday, though, we will spend one night in Sydney.  We are staying at a Sydney airport hotel, Rydges.  The hotel is a short walk from Sydney's international terminal, incredibly convenient.  The restaurant there was not bad, both of us had the baramundi fish special for dinner that was quite tasty.  Nothing was wrong with the room except for the fact that neither of us checked to see if the air conditioning had been turned on, so we woke up in the middle of the night rather warm with no idea of where to find the thermostat in the dark.  

Not so convenient was our trip from the hotel to the airport this morning.  Thinking we could just walk back to the airport to catch our flight to Hobart aboard Jetstar airlines, we learn that we would need to take a shuttle bus to the domestic terminal.  Okay, that is not a big deal except for two facts (1) the bus ride takes us all over the airport -- I'm not 100% sure it is not going to take a detour through Sydney's central business district, and (2) we have to pay $5.50 each for the privilege of riding this bus -- unheard of to me anyway!  Yikes, that seems wrong!  Anyway, we make our flight no problem, and it is uneventful (with one exception -- halfway through the flight I notice that the elderly woman sitting across the aisle has only four toes on her left foot -- four very fat toes!).

Arriving in Hobart, we rent our car and face the stress of re-adjusting to driving on the wrong side of the road in a car with the driver seated on the right side.  Having done this before in Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, it comes back quickly, and the stress is relieved.  We find our hotel, Lenna, with only a few wrong turns -- nothing major.  Hobart is a small city and seems fairly straightforward to navigate.  After checking in, we set out to walk around the main harbor area.  Before we get too far, we stop at a restaurant in the Salamance Place area for a late lunch.  We're hungry!  We eat at Maldini, an Italian restaurant on the open patio in the front.  Before describing our lunch, I must digress by saying it is a very warm day with some level of humidity (while we were at the airport waiting for our bags, there had been a great downpour).  We are wilting a little bit.  Lunch is delicious, however.  We share an appetizer of bruschetta, which is simply toasted Italian bread drizzled with a bit of olive oil and piled with really flavorful cherry tomatoes in three colors and topped with fresh basil.  We each order the same main, which is simply grilled chicken strips over rocket salad and balsamic vinagrette garnished with prosciutto and really sweet and delicious grilled peach halfs.  For our wine, we start with a glass of the very local Bream Creek sauvignon blanc, then a glass of pinot grigio from the same winery.  The sauvignon blanc was super crisp and delicious.  The pinot grigio needed to be crisper.  What a treat to get great summer stone fruit in January!

The following is a photo of Salamanca Place:

We continued walking around Hobart harbor, checking out the various piers and seeing all the restaurants that are in the area.  We also stopped at an Aboriginal art gallery, called ArtMob, that had wonderful art.  We really admired one piece, but it was over $2,000.  We were really melting at this point, so we decided to return to our hotel for a rest, then we'll have to figure out where to have dinner.

Later, dinner was awesome, to use a cliche!  We walked only about two blocks to a restaurant called Rockwall, where we had noticed earlier that they had Tasmanian salmon on the menu.  We weren't sure we could get in, but a waiter went to check on a table, then the owner or manager told us to "come on through."  We weren't sure what he meant, until the hostess told us to follow him!  Regarding the food, Tasmanian salmon is something I have only had once before in 2006 in the town called Port Fairie, on the mainland, but also on the Tasmanian sea.  In my memory, this was possibly the most delicious piece of fish I had ever eaten.  Would the dinner tonight live up to my memory?  Well, this was one of those occasions where the answer was yes!  This fish, although sharing some flavors with North American salmon, is so much better.  The fish melts into your mouth and almost has a sweet flavor.  Tonight's portion was generous and came with steamed vegetables and jasmine rice with a little soy flavoring among others.  It is not often that I slow down the pace of my eating to make sure that I am savoring every bite, but this was one of them (actually the only one that I can ever remember).  Our wine was a pinot grigio from Tasmanian from a winery called Bay of Fires from the Piper Valley area.  It was just as we would want, crisp and fruity.  Our waitress, as it turns out, is  Canadian, and we enjoyed a nice conversation with her.  After dinner it was 9pm, time to turn in and try to get a better night's sleep than the night before.