Beauty Point.

When I am not needed around camp for activities, which is usually at least 3 days a week, I am trying to get out on my own and see some more of Tassie. With only working 2 days a week you'd think I'd have been heaps of places by now and seen everything there is to see. So many days with so much potential. However, if I am being honest, a lot of those potential adventure days end up looking something like this: sleep in, lay in my bed and try to convince myself to get up, finally get up and get ready for the day, realize its already almost lunch time and I don't really have time to go anywhere very far away, drive to Devonport or Ulverstone or somewhere else close, walk around and look at second hand stores, buy more clothes I'm not going to have room to bring back to Canada, come home. 

I mean it is not really a loss. I am seeing Tassie. I have explored a bunch of the cities and towns around here. And I do love thrifting and I have some pretty great finds to show for it. I also have gotten much better at driving on the opposite side of the road and driving on the opposite side of the road in a town. Its much easier on the highway. But I think the idea I had initially was to do all of these grand touristy things. You know, pet kangaroos and swim with platypuses and stuff. The problem is that I have already done a lot of the touristy things that are quite close to here. Also I had it in my head that it is not as fun doing tourist type things by yourself. But some days I have managed to pull it together, get myself out of bed, and have an adventure. 

A couple weeks ago I had a whole week where I wasn't needed around camp so I figured it would be inexcusably lame of me not to have at least one day where I went somewhere awesome and acted like a complete tourist. I picked the lovely destination of Beauty Point. Beauty Point is the home of the Platypus House as well as Seahorse World. In fact they are right next to each other on the wharf. I had still not seen a platypus nor had I ever seen a seahorse farm. So it seemed perfect. 

It is about an hour and half away and the road is one of those crazy, narrow, windy Tassie highways. If I had to compare this sort of highway to a road in Canada, I would say it is a bit like one of those really long, windy, farm driveways out in the middle of nowhere. They try to call it a two lane road but it really just feels like one of those slightly wider than necessary one way roads, you know, like someone's driveway. They paint a line down the middle and all, but when a car comes in the other direction you pretty much need to swerve onto the non-existent shoulder. So you kind of try to pull as far over as you can without dropping your tire off the road and hope the other vehicle does the same and stays on their side of the line. And you are doing this while driving down a road that is as windy all get out. I'm talking like driving through the rock cuts for an hour. And on top of the that the speed limit is 100 to 110 km and the other cars are all driving that fast. It is obvious from their road construction that they do not have winter here. The main highways are really quite good to drive on, but as soon as you turn off onto a smaller road it is just crazy. And these are not back roads. They are main roads. You just feel like you are ripping down someone's really long driveway. Anyways, not the point. The point is I got up early and drove myself out to Beauty Point to finally meet a platypus. 

I arrived with very little issue in the late morning. I decided to do the Platypus House first. The way it works is that pay your admission and then you go through on a tour with a guide. I got there just as a tour was leaving so it worked out quite well. They teach you a bit about platypuses and echindnas and then they take you to see them. It is called the Platypus House, but they have echidnas as well. They are both monotremes (egg laying mammals). In fact they are the only living monotremes, so it makes sense that they would have them both. I learned that male platypuses have spikey things behind their back legs, sort of spur like, that delivers venom. Yeah, male platypuses are venomous. Who knew. I spent a reasonable amount of time learning about platypuses in my vertebrate zoology course in university when we were doing the monotremes/marsupials section. You'd think my prof would have thought to mention that platypuses are one of the only venomous mammals in the world. You know, duckbill, beaver tail, otter feet, lays eggs, venomous. I feel like that should have been included. Anyways, after we had learned all about them, we were taken to see them. They had 4 platypuses and 3 echidnas. They feed them on every tour so you get to see them swim/waddle around and generally be active. It was great. The light was incredibly poor by the platypus tanks, so my pictures really didn't turn out that well. It is all blur and glass reflection. 

Then I moved on to Seahorse World. To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much. I mean, seahorses are cool, but a whole aquarium/house for just seahorses seemed a little bit much. That's why I did it second. In case I ran out of time and couldn't make it to both. Turns out I had heaps of time. It also turned out that the Seahorse World was way cooler than I expected. They had lots of different varieties of seahorses, sea dragons, and a bunch of other aquatic animals. They had a couple little sharks, sting rays, a giant crab, a bunch of fishes, and the coolest octopus I have ever seen. It danced around its tank the whole time I was there. I got some great pictures. The tanks there were really well lit for the most part too, so my pictures came out nicely. And along with being a sort of seahorse aquarium, Seahorse World is also a seahorse farm. So they breed and sell pot bellied seahorses, which are the seahorse native to the area. 

It ran the same sort of way the Platypus House did. You paid your admission and then had to wait until the next organized tour. The tour took us through the aquarium part with all the seahorse tanks and all the other underwater creatures. But it also took us through the actually farm part as well. So we got to see the nursery tanks filled with tiny little baby seahorses as well as other tanks with them all in different stages of growth right up to the adults that were ready to breed and or sell to aquariums. It was quite cool.

Seahorses have prehensile tails and when something touches their tail, it reflexively contracts and sort of wraps around whatever touched it. Its not a really strong reflex that contracts really hard or anything. But when there are multiple seahorses in a tank they end up constantly getting into knots. Usually they just sort of end up holding tails, but sometimes they end up wrapped around bodies and necks.

Babies!

These are sea dragons. It is a weedy sea dragon. I couldn't get a very good picture. But they are really cool. They really look like little dragons. I guess that's how they got the name.

Here is the amazing octopus. I love that it really looks like he is staring at you.

Seriously, he was so cool. I don't know if it is a he. But it just seems right to say he.

After all this, it was still not too late in the day. So on the way home I stopped in at another big tourist destination  about 15 minutes away in Beaconsfield. The Beaconsfield Mine & Heritage Centre. It is an gold mine that shut down in 2012. But it is most famous for the rock fall and mine collapse that happened in 2006. The collapse killed one man and trapped two men one kilometer underground. They were found alive five days after the collapse and rescue operations took two weeks to finally save them. I think I remember hearing at least a bit about it as it happened back in 2006. Now that the mine is shut down, they have turned the site into a big museum. A lot of it is old equipment and mine ruins but they have added a sort of interpretive centre with a whole room dedicated to the story of the 2006 rescue.  

I also enjoyed this more than I thought I would at first. I figured I have seen my fair share of mines and mining museums/interpretive centres growing up where I did. And some of it was a bit been there seen this a bunch of times already. But some of it was really cool. I really liked the bits about the rescue and some of the ruins were pretty fantastic.