TASMANIA -TRAVELS WITH MY LEICA

I've just spent 8 days in Tasmania .It is a beautiful place -spectacular scenery , wilderness ,great wine,beer and food.Colonial architecture.Spectacular driving roads with very little traffic and even a world class museum of modern art as well as an interesting motor museum .
Image above is looking north towards the Bay of Fires on the east coast  .A Photoshop stitch of 8 hand held images taken with the Leica X1.

Prior to this  the last time I visited Tasmania as a tourist was when I competed in the 1996 Targa Tasmania in my 1968 Mini Cooper S .The Targa is a 5 day speed event held over some of Tasmania's most demanding roads . Co-driver Owen and myself were not a lightweight crew for such a small car and we were  helped by the wet, slippery conditions .Sadly the very high cost and time required meant that this was the only time I have ever competed in the Targa  .

Photo below is of our car competing on one of the Targa mountain sections -I'm driving .I drove over some of the same Targa road sections last week and from a crappy, small, rolly polly rental car it's very difficult to believe that we achieved such fast times in the Mini on such difficult roads but it is different when you have track tyres,full race gear and a five point harness and a car set up to handle and ,of course, the whole width of the road to drive on and hopefully no one coming in the opposite direction.

Some more picture postcard images of Tasmania from last week .Although Tasmania is considered economically deprived to the visitor it looks reasonably prosperous and tidy with the old colonial buildings painted and usually being used and with generally well maintained infrastructure.It looks in very good shape in comparison with similar regions of the US with their rundown towns and rusting bridges which I drove through last year .