George Town (Tasmania) 25/8/07

Fairly relaxed start, with an 11:00 flight to Launceston, to pick up my ridiculously small car (it was fine until it hit some hills, then he slowed somewhat:
But on the whole it was cheerful:
I enjoyed my short walk around the city. It has some very nice architecture - I think I could wander around taking lots of pictures, but well, I was hungry so only got a church (note the blueness of the sky, in wintry Tasmania):and a rather nice looking park on the edge of the centre of town:
It had a good fountain, with a few characters who look like they may have been there for a while:
which probably means they get wet on occasion:
Fresh café made me a nice scrambled eggs and mushroom breakfast in the middle of the afternoon, then I wandered into a couple of decent music shops, although found no real bookshop. Rather than stay in town, I decided to head for George Town, at the eastern head of the Tamar river, and apparently the oldest settlement in all of Australia. Have to say, there were very few signs of it - the central town were mainly modern nonentities of buildings, although there was the Watchhouse and the George Town Hotel (“the oldest hotel in the oldest town in Australia”), where I stayed - partly because they had a very nice sounding carpetbaggers steak on the menu. Problem was, once I’d stuffed around, watched the news on TV and so on, I went down to the dining room to find that dinner was off for the evening. At 7:45! My only other options were the Italian place “Marios” which didn’t look like it had had a customer for a decade or one of two fish and chip shops. I opted for the busier of the latter, and was given an enormous meal of very average food.

Further north of George Town is Low Head, marked by a couple of light houses:
and a pilot’s station - now a museum
with places available to rent.
I kind of like this place - it has a resoluteness about it:
Maybe it was because it was near dusk on a late winter’s day, but this place did not speak to me as somewhere to linger. Since there were not many people about, I had to make such friends as I could find: