wineglass bay

Wineglass Bay has a really good branding campaign. It's in all the top 10 lists for Tasmania. Chinese tourists drive here for the day from Launceston and Hobart.

This is not Wineglass Bay. This is Coles Bay, where I went kayaking at sunset. To see Wineglass Bay, you have the climb the saddle between the 2nd and 3rd mountain. After an hour, you get a great view.

Instead, I went for this kind of wine glass, filled with Tasmanian chardonnay. And possibly the best salmon I've ever had.

I really wanted to try the abalone sashimi or the prawns, but it was an oyster farm, so slurped down 6 oysters too.

Back to the national park.

Please leave your drone at home. Also your single-use plastic water bottle. The park service office has a tap for your refillables. And you have a choice of still or sparkling!

I headed up to the lighthouse, which faces east. If you go 1000 kilometers east across the Tasman Sea, you wind up on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. This is what Abel Tasman, for whom Tasmania and the Tasman Sea are named, did.

Also Abel Tasman National Park, where years ago I went kayaking with Steffi. 

I took some time to laze around before kayaking, since I wasn't climbing to the Wineglass Bay looked. The smooth orange granite reminded me of Georgian Bay, Ontario, a place I went to years after seeing a picture of it in Toronto.

I can't help it, I like rocks. And kayaking.

The shells were great too. It was low tide, and more and more shoreline and fossils were exposed.

I put my camera in the dry bag, so you won't see pictures of the rays we say or the sea eagle or the gorgeous oyster catchers, which apparently, don't catch oysters. One of the guides was my paddling partner, which made it extra easy. Did I mention the home-baked cookies? We paddled around 6 kilometers. Conditions were perfect.

I had plenty of time to think about past kayaking adventures: in San Francisco Bay with Keith and the Napa River with Pam; in Catalina with Susan; at Elkhorn Slough with Alexis, Jonah, and Jim after Joyce's wedding; at Hopewell in the Marlborough Sounds with Hidde and Okarito with Charlotte; and with my mom in the Oleta River.

Hard to imagine a better day.