My next adventure..Down Under!

Next up, Tasmania and Melbourne specifically.
I booked Quantas special promotion which allowed me to stopover at Hobart (Capital of Tasmania) enroute to Melbourne. Total cost was about $1,200. A cheaper alternative would be just to fly to Melbourne direct. Buy a budget airline ticket from Melbourne to Tasmania, only AUD$100-200 round trip!

Some quick and quirky interesting facts about Tasmania & Melbourne and Australia and general. Warning: Heard from tourguides, man sitting beside me on the plane and reading Bill Bryson's book - In a Sunburned Country. Belief with care!

1)On 17th December 1967, Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, went for a swim on Cheviot Beach near his holiday home at Portsea in Victoria. He disappeared beneath the waves and was never seen again. His companions raised the alarm, and what ensued was one of the largest search and rescue operations Australia has ever witnessed. Holt’s body was never found, fuelling many theories regarding his disappearance, ranging from suicide to abduction by a Chinese submarine.

2) The sea between Tasmania and mainland Australia is really quite shallow, some parts just 50m or so! Tasmania and Australia are actually connected, but when the polar caps melted some 10,000-12,000 years ago, the lowlands between them was completely flooded!

3) Australians are generalists by nature. At home, they know abit of electrical work, wood work, cement work etc.

4) Australians believe very much in the 80-20 rule. Spend 20% of their time achieving 80% of their results. So the 80% of their time, they enjoy life!

5) Australians averagely change careers (total change) 7 times in their lifetime.

And the most amazing one of all:

a) At 11:03 PM local time on May 28, 1993, a large-scale seismic disturbance, elsewhere reported as measuring 3.9 on the Richter scale, was detected near the Banjawarn sheep station in remote western Australia. The few observers in the area reported seeing a flash in the sky and hearing an explosion.

b) The blast was 170 times more powerful than the biggest mining explosion ever recorded in the region and was consistent with a meteorite strike, but no crater could be found.

c) In 1995, after the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan had released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system and killed 12 people, it was revealed that the cult owned a 500,000-acre property in western Australia near the site of the mysterious boom.

d)The cult has two former Soviet nuclear engineers in its ranks, hopes eventually to destroy the world, and maybe wanted a bit of practice, eh?

e)In 1997, scientists finally got around to investigating this disquieting possibility. "You take my point," Bryson writes. "This is a country . . . so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world's first nongovernmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed."


WOO HOO! Australia really ROCKS! :)