Revolver

After coming back to my motel room on the Thursday night after having been to the Dark Mofo Winterfeast which I wrote about in this post in the link below -
Dark Mofo Winter Feast 2016 
I was thumbing through some leaflets and saw that the tallest building in Hobart had a revolving restaurant as its top 17th floor and was open for lunch only on Fridays, which I thought was odd, but being Friday the next day here was my chance to check out the food and the view, so I booked a table and the next day made my way up to the top of the building for lunch.

The revolving restaurant on the 17th floor of the building

The floor with the tables on revolves around the top of the building at about one revolution per hour, which is about the time it takes to have a three-course meal and a coffee.

The cloudy view of Mt. Wellington/Kunanyi on the day

The view of Hobart was magnificent from up here.

Hoboats of Hobart?-)

Looking towards the Tasman Bridge

Looking at the Tasman Bridge, which I would have to travel over on the following Monday to drive down to Port Arthur, I couldn't help but recall hearing on the news as a child back in Brisbane about the ship that hit the bridge and tearing it in two.
"The Tasman Bridge disaster occurred on the evening of 5 January 1975, in Hobart, the capital city of Australia's island state of Tasmania, when a bulk ore carrier travelling up the Derwent River collided with several pylons of the Tasman Bridge, causing a large section of the bridge deck to collapse onto the ship and into the river below. 
Twelve people were killed, including seven crew on board the ship, and the five occupants of four cars which fell 45 m (150 feet) after driving off the bridge. 
The disaster severed the main link between Hobart and its eastern suburbs and is notable for the social impacts that resulted from the loss of such an important road artery."
Tasman Bridge disaster

A plaque on the side of the eastern bridge support

I couldn't help noticing that the highest part of the bridge was about as high as this building and that driving your car off that broken bridge in 1975 would have been like driving your car out this window.
A chilling thought indeed.

The Derwent River looks more like a harbour than a river as it spreads out in the Hobart reach.

Ironically, and somewhat callously, I had ordered duck for my main meal, and it arrived when the floor had revolved around for me to be able to see the ducks frolicking on the beach below my motel room, which was housed in the building with the green roof in the above photo.

Duck breast as my main course

The ducks outside my motel room at Wrest Point Casino

I can imagine how horrific those two photos above must seem to vegetarians, and I did practice vegetarianism for a year once myself, but I realized that this world we live in is pretty much a

"dog eat dog" world when it comes to that wicked old witch which we refer to as "Mother Nature".
The fact of life is that nature is ruthless, and if you have ever studied biology, you notice the world of nature is not a Walt Disney movie.

Those cute animals eat, kill and gang rape each other on a regular basis ... read Lyall Watson's excellent book,'Dark Nature', where he writes how drakes have been seen to gang rape a lone female duck swimming alone in the water to the point of drowning her ... hardly a script for a nice Disney animal movie.

I'm not trying to excuse my lunch choice by telling you of horror stories from nature, and while I could probably not bring myself to kill a duck, I will eat one if it's on the menu at my local Chinese restaurant.

I guess that's also the reason I could never seriously take up Buddhism, because I could never see myself taking up vegetarianism again in this lifetime, as much as I admire Buddhist practices.   

Looking up from the beach to the revolving restaurant

Birds on the beach at Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, Tasmania

Caution duck crossing?!

I found it ironic (there's that word I love to use again) that the casino has a duck crossing sign as you drive into the casino grounds, but also serves duck on the menu:-)

You can sit here and watch the ducks
frolic on the beach before you

The Mt. Wellington dessert served while
 looking at the real thing out the window

The dessert was named after Hobart's highest mountain, Mt. Wellington and came out above a bowl of dry ice, which gave the dessert a foggy appearance, much like the real mountain had today.

The cloudy view of Mt. Wellington/Kunanyi on the day

I didn't know it yet, but Mt. Wellington/Kunanyi would be the place that I would see and touch snow for the first time in my life when I took a bus to the top of the mountain on Saturday.
It was also a place of another Hobart tragedy in 1967 when scores of people lost their lives in a bushfire that ripped through the mountain and surrounds.    
"The 1967 Tasmanian fires were an Australian natural disaster which occurred on 7 February 1967, an event which came to be known as the Black Tuesday bushfires. They were the most deadly bushfires that Tasmania has ever experienced, leaving 62 people dead, 900 injured and over seven thousand homeless."
1967 Tasmanian fires

Snow at the top of Mt. Wellington/Kunanyi

Wrest Point Casino as seen from Mt. Wellington/Kunanyi

Looking down at my little blue car,
third from the left, top row of five

It is amazing how your life seems so insignificant when you see your car, or motel from a distance.

Coffee and chocolate, nature's medicine to finish off the meal and one complete revolution of the Hobart skyline. 

One of my winning tickets on the day,
I was on a roll

And as luck would have it, playing 2 and 10 spot keno before and after my lunch got the cost of the lunch back into my pocket and then I headed off to look around the MONA art gallery up the road ... but that is for another post.

Welcome to MONA. The X represents sex and the + represents death

I have a lot of fond memories from my time in Hobart and could quite easily see myself living down here sometime in the future.
Either way, I plan to return one day soon.

The first snow I have ever held in my life

This was the first real snowman that I ever saw in my life, as well.

The entrance to MONA looking up the
Derwent River to Hobart city centre

Ironically, Hobart was one of the furthest points on my round road-trip to home:-)