Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

-day 5 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

And indeed, we woke up to a white blanket of snow. But not enough to keep us in Tarraleah. We drove off at 8:15, as the breakfast cafe only opened at 9. It was a different scenery than the day before, a lovely white forrest around Tarraleah, with snow covered gumtrees and ferns.

We ended up having late breakfast at a Banjo’s in New Norfolk (yummy eggs Benedict, and bacon and eggs). As we drove back down to Hobart, we were looking for Bagdad, but there was actually nothing to see. A truly missed opportunity, marketing wise: no Bagdad Cafe, or postcards or anything.

Drove down to Richmond and the Richmond bridge, and had our Banjo’s rasburry shortbread cake there. There was only a couple of hours left for us to return the car. We still went on to Pirates Bay lookout and the underwhelming tessalated pavement rocks. Times up and we drove back towards the airport, enjoying more lovely lookouts.

We were early at the airport (14:30), but that meant we didn’t have to queue at the rental company, checkin nor security. Unfortunately our plane was delayed by 20 minutes, which meant we only had a 10 minute window for our connecting flight in Melbourne. But on arrival in Melbourne there were no worries, as they hadn’t started boarding yet there, their boarding delayed by 30 minutes. They started boarding as we arrived.

And the rest is history, right? Next day, back to work (for a very short working week)!

Photos on this Flickr set!

-day 4 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

Big breakfast at the Lodge, like really big: bacon, beans and eggs, pancakes with fruit, and a croissant with smoked salmon…

No internet reception in Cradle Mountain, so looked on the Lodge’s internet kiosk for Tarraleah comfirmation. At the same time checked out the new Apple iPhone announcement :), and my mail. Noticed that this day Google Wave hackathon registration would be opened at ten, hmm. So between 9 and 10 we did the Enchanted walk right at the beginning of the national park, and then headed back to this internet kiosk to register (#iamageek :).

Next we did the King Billy loop walk at the Lodge, another easy walk, though it was raining a bit, leaving Cradle Mountain at 11:30, when heavy rain started. Backtracking part of the same road back. At Delaware the road started to get interesting again. At Mole Creek lot of rain, when I wished it would snow in stead (as we didn’t have snow yet). We stopped at a lookout where there was nothing to see because of the rain, where it then started to snow! We drove on and a ute was blocking the road. The car had crashed into the road railing, and it’s front wheel had broken. The local (in a t-shirt in 0C weather) managed to get the car of the road and we gave him a lift till past Bearnie, the next village. It turned out people here also don’t have (Telstra) reception, so dropped him off at a phonebooth, near Great Lake.

Snow at this height had stopped and we passed some great views of the Great Lake. The road turned into gravel road, for the next 50 km. We found ourself on the great plateau, the Central Highlands, at about 1000m. Very desolate landscape (reminds me of Iceland don’t know why because I’ve never been there). More lakes and more dirt road. We finally got some asphalt again, and boy the car looked dirty. Had to clean the back window of car as it was covered in dirt.

We drove past vast hydro works and arrived at Tarraleah around 4pm. Tarraleah is a village turned into a holiday village. It used to house the workmen working on the hydro works, but they have long moved on. We stayed at a refurbished school building, which was pretty cool, but also cold this time of the year. We had dinner at the local Highlander tavern (the only place for dinner), having warm smoked trout mouse and a big scotch fillet with mushroom saus. The Inn keeper was trying to scare us saying two days of snow was expected and we would be stuck!

Read on, final day 5.

-day 3 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

We had self made breakky in our cabin (eggs + toast). In Ross I happen to get Vodafone GPRS reception, slow but at least it’s something. No Optus what so ever. So I started looking for Tuesday’s accommodation, somewhere in the middle. I picked Tarraleah, and The Scholar House there.

In the morning we walked through Ross (which is really only one main street), and got some local goodies from the bakery (a shortbread wheel). We passed through Evandale, which is another old, colonial town, and snapped some great pics of low hanging clouds. Again, we passed a bunch of lovely lookouts on the way to Cradle Mountain. But arriving at Cradle Mountain, there’s lots of diseased or dead trees, at Middlesex Planes.

Checked in at the Cradle Mountain Lodge (into cabin 73) and visited… the visitor center of Cradle Mountain (another 22$ day pass). At the visitor centre is a short boardwalk through local forest. There’s a bus service departing here to Dove Lake, as a sign tells us parking spots are limited, and there’s a 30 minute waiting time. We thought we’d risk it anyway and driving down to Dove lake. Turned out not even a third was filled up. Dove Lake with Cradle Mountain in the background is lovely. We walked down towards Glacier Rock. While there a rainbow appeared, a great photo opportunity. Up here it was the first time that we really felt the wintery cold, so you’d better dress up.

We didn’t stay too long, as we wanted to do another short stroll along boardwalk (Kenny something walk). That evening we had dinner at the Lodge’s Tavern (tomato soup and oysters, scotch fillet and salmon). While walking down to the tavern, we had a wombat encounter, a mommy with her baby, so cute! After dinner we enjoyed our cabin’s spa bath…

Read on, day 4.

-day 2 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

We cancelled the remainder of our stay in the hotel in Hobart. But canceling the hotel also meant we had to book two other hotels, not sure where. The night before I found a little cabin in Ross, though this morning, driving up to Freycinet, it was too early call just yet. We stopped at the Rosny lookout, looking over across Hobart, and an obvious popular make-out spot…

We stopped at a Woollies to stock up on some water and food, and grab a (next door Gloria Jeans) coffee. While driving up to the east coast, it became obvious quickly that Optus does not have any coverage beyond Hobart (about a 30km radius). Now, how are we going to book our accommodation for tonight? Anyway, along the way we stopped at several beautiful beaches and lookouts: Raskin beach, Oyster Bay, Mayfield beach. And we arrived in the early afternoon at coles baytasau-42.1242750148.2920920Coles Bay. First stop Freycinet NP visitor centre, to get a 22$ park day pass, and see if they know of any accommodation in this area. It’s not a tourism information center in itself so we had to call around ourselves for accomodation,… at a Telstra payphone. Boy, do they swallow coins like… I mean, they take a lot of money, and don’t give anything back. All contacts we’d call were booked, so we tried the cabin at Ross, which is 1.5h back inland. And it was still available! Pfeww, settled for today (we didn’t have to sleep in the car).

We then drove on to the parking spot for the Wineglass Bay lookout walk, which was medium hike uphill, but certainly worth it. It was a very well laid out and maintained path. After this walk, we drove up to the Lighthousetasau-42.122816148.34282lighthouse, which offered nice views of the coast line.

We then had to drive back inland, past Cambell Town to Ross, where we stayed at the TSpot cabin. We arrived at around 5PM, a bit earlier than we had told them. We took a stroll (in the dark) around Ross, which is a tiny countryside village but with one wide avenue and a particular bridge. At 5:30 we checked in with the lovely English proprietors. They used to have a tearoom in the Hunter Valley, but moved down here since a couple of years. We changed clothes and went for dinner at the local pub (for pumpkin soup, gourmet lamb and rib eye steak). After dinner we watched the Story of Ross on DVD (available in the cabin), and  V for Vendetta in cabin.

Read on for day 3

Last long weekend (we made it a 5 day weekend :), we went down to Tasmania, not sure what to expect exactly. We didn’t have any real plans, only thing we planned was a cabin at the Cradle Mountain Lodge, and four consecutive nights in Hobart (which I booked before the cabin, which meant we were going to forfeit one night there), making Hobart our hub to explore the island.

We got up early Saturday morning (3:30 am) to fly with Virgin Blue to Hobart (passing through Melbourne). We arrived in Hobart around 10:15, and picked up our rental car from EuropCar. There was a queue because their computer system was down (tip ctrl+alt+delete :), so there was a bit of a wait. Not a happy start to our holiday. As expected, it was raining in Hobart, and from the forecast, it looked to be rain for five days.

But spirits were high, and we arrived at our hotel at “somewhere past 11″, too early to check in. But no worries, we could leave our baggage behind and park the car in the hotel’s garage. We went straight to the close-by -42.8863630147.3308110Salamanca markets, which turned out to be the biggest, regular open air market I’ve seen  in Australia (true, haven’t seen that many markets here though). We had lunch at Tricycle (a crunchy BLT and delicious ham and pea soup). Because it was raining a bit, and the rest of the weather outlook, I bought some plastic pants at the local Katmandu, as an insurance policy as it were, just in case. At the Salamanca Square, there’s a salmon store which I couldn’t pass by without tasting some smoked Tasmanian salmon. At the same time, next door at Smolt, we made a reservation for dinner that night.

It was almost 14:00, time to check into the hotel, freshen up a bit in our room. We were staying at the LeisureInn on Macquarie Street. The room was small, but modern and decent, especially for the price of $79 a night. We got our rain gear on, and headed to the botanical gardens (something we try to visit in every city we pass), walking through the main Hobart shopping street. The Hobart botanical garden was a nice garden, nothing exceptional. Even in the rain, the Japanese garden looked great. We’d read about a ferry departing at the botanical garden, so we headed down to the water. Well, unfortunately it only goes out a couple of times a day, if it even still does do that, as we couldn’t see any reference to the ferry. Strange. Another thing to keep in mind is that there aren’t that many taxis around in Hobart. Kind of disappointed in this dreadful weather. So we headed back to the hotel on foot. (yes, we could have taken the car too, but then you don’t see that much of a town you’re visiting). Quick jump into the tiny shower, and then dinner at Smolt, which was pretty exceptional I’d say, strongly recommended!

Back in our hotel room, the (single glazed) window didn’t close (like a pinky wide gap). It is winter, and the hotel is on one of the busiest streets in Hobart with a lot of traffic, and it was Saturday night, and it was a long day for us, we weren’t to happy with this. And since it was the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, the hotel was fully booked and unable to give us another room, until the next day. We had to make a decision, stay here (it was cheap, decent rooms except the windows) or cancel. I started to look around for some options, though couldn’t decide yet. Next day we decided to cancel rest of our booking, which we had to do through Wotif. They ended up being very helpful actually!

Read on, day 2.

It’s a year already. I guess time flies when you’re having fun. And yes, Sydney is a fun city, with the beaches and national parks.
And the web development community is pretty active here too. After all, it is Sydney where Google Maps started it’s life, for example. Sydney hosted several large web-related conferences last year, like Web Directions South, SANS, Jacob Nielsen, OzIA, RuxCon, Search Engine Boothcamp, Adobe workshops, Apple workshops, … Upcoming are Search Summit, WebDU, … Often there are Web Standards Group meetings, php-user and flash-user group meeting, WebJam, the first BarCamp un-conference, OWASP meetings (although pretty small group, and not so regular), … So Sydney keeps us busy.

A spelling mistake takes German tourist 13,000km off-course. It could happen to you too…

I’ve been geotagging my Sydney photos on Flickr using MultiMap, which gives you the longitude and latitude, and then add links to Google Maps satellite photos of the location. It’s either the location of the subject of the photo or the approximate point of view where the picture was taken. The pictures with satellite photo links can be found here, or just browse my Sydney collection and click the link when one’s included.
More about geotagging on Wikipedia.

Happy birthday to us, as Belgium is a respectable 175 years young this year. It has quite an interesting story. Read it in short at wikipedia, watch the trailer, or download the dvd.

This weekend the new cultural season opened in Brugge, called Corpus05, with the human body as center piece. It started yesterday (saturday) morning at 7 am with 2000 naked people, gathering in the poring rain, for a photo shoot with Spencer Tunick (check here for a photo special)(and no, I didn’t participate). This morning (Sunday), I was awake at 7 am (yes sad, I know), and took a shower. As I came out of the shower (around 8) I heard a noise from outside. I first though someone was playing a didgeridoo, until I opened the back door, and heard it was a Tibetan monk chanting. It was really loud. I thought I might come from the kiosk in the park. But in fact it was coming from the Belfry tower. I went to see what was going on. Apparently the police wasn’t informed either, there were 2 motorbikes, a van, and some more cars. It was indeed part of the Corpus05 happening, but it wasn’t too well indicated anywhere. This Sunday, every hour, there will be chanting from the belfry tower: a Tibetan monk, old Dutch religious song, Jewish liturgical songs, shaman, Islamic, gospel, Byzantine, poetry, hip hop … all day every hour, for 15 minutes. Have a listen.