Bernie, Tasmania

We docked at Bernie at about 8:00 this morning. It is a gray and cloudy day with temps about 65. I’m hoping it might clear this afternoon for our tour to Wings Wildlife Park. We waited until 8:30 to go to the buffet for breakfast so that all the morning tour people would already be gone. After we ate we looked down at the pier and saw a person in a red robe greeting people getting off the ship. We quickly came back to the cabin for the camera and went down to meet him. He is the Mayor of Bernie and he and his wife greet all the cruise ships. They will have 23 this year - three of which are this week. We talked with them for some time and I was disappointed to learn that they have penguins here…. But they don’t come into shore until after 6:00pm and we sail at 5:30. I want to stay and see the penguins!

Our tour was wonderful. We were in a 55 passenger bus with only about 25 people so Jim and I could each have a window. We drove through some wonderful country side and small towns. It is very pretty here with all the flowers, but our guide said they are in a drought so the fields are dry.

Wings Wildlife Park is a private family run animal rehabilitation center. It is a great place to visit as you can get in the pens with a number of the animals to feed them. We saw the Tasmanian Devils just as they were being fed. They are cute but quite vicious - I wouldn’t want to have one mad at me. They also had wombats, koalas, kangaroos, birds, reptiles, emus, and even a couple camels and a buffalo. Since there wasn’t a guide around when we got to those pens I couldn’t ask how they received them.

The Koalas were very cute but I fell in love with a baby wombat… they wouldn’t let me bring him back home with me. I also really liked the pen with the kangaroos; we got a handful of grain and were able to hand-feed them. There was a mother with a baby - he was out of the pouch eating leaves as I approached. Even though I was very slow and stayed fairly far away he ran back and jumped into the pouch. In about a minute you could see him turn himself over (that can’t be too comfortable for mama) and out came his head. He stayed in there the rest of the time even as we were feeding mama kangaroo.

We had over 2 hours to explore the park and then the bus took a slightly different route back to the ship. We traveled through some mountains that were very beautiful with all the unique trees and large ferns. Our guide was pretty good and named many of the trees and other flora we were seeing and also points of interest. For a ship tour I give this one a high rating.
When we got back to the ship there was a Pipe band playing on the dock for our sail-away. We watched them for a few minutes and got a few pictures and then went to the finals of the boar-building contest. There were 4 entries - one tipped and lost the required cargo (a six-pack). Two of the boats were quite exceptional; their builders had put a lot of time building them. The other two were just trays with plastic bottles underneath for flotation and a bit of decoration on top. The winner was the one built by the kids even though the “Ghetto Princess” the other detailed one was probably better … it’s hard when you are competing against kids.

Cruisephobic - I am aware that we can check the news and stocks via the web... and we have also had FOX network all along, but it's been easier (at least more pleasant)to be oblivious!