We flew from Sydney to Tasmania. It was a big change. On the luggage carousel, there was a sculpture of a seal going around and around.
We rented a car and drove to the thriving metropolis of Nubeena. The city was basically our hotel, a supermarket and a restaurant. The main reason we stayed there was to visit Port Arthur. It was a penal colony and it was built by convicts. I thought penal meant something inappropriate, but, it is short for penalty. So, Port Arthur was a big jail city.
Did you know that in the 1800s people were thrown in jail for 7 years for stealing bread and a fork? The convicts had to ride in a boat from England to Australia and a lot of them died on the way there. I also learned that the English people changed the rules to only pay the boat captains for the convicts that got to Australia alive, so, after that, a lot more convicts made it all the way to Australia.
I was obsessed with finding something called Quigley’s Cage from the map we got because I thought Quigley was an animal. It turns out that Quigley is some crazy guy. He was in solitary confinement, but, nobody liked being near him, so, they moved him to a padded confinement area. They had a whole building called the Separate Prison that they put all of the criminals in who didn’t do what they were supposed to do.
After Port Arthur, we saw the Remarkable Cave, the Blowhole and Tasman’s Arch which are all geological formations around Port Arthur. Best of all, we saw a TASMANIAN DEVIL crossing the street. That was really cool, because, they had a huge fire in January that burned a lot of this area and killed a lot of the animals.