"HERE'S a first time for everything. It's my first time in Hobart. I'm also eight months' pregnant (for the first time) and want my travel to be easy. I don't want to hire a car. I want to be driven. I don't want to choose what touristy spots to visit. I want them to be chosen. So, when I land in Hobart, I, for the first time, call up a luxury touring
company.

I join Australian Wild Escape's Port Arthur Discovery Tour. The guide and driver, Nicola, meets me at the impressive Hotel Grand Chancellor.

It's a small group; just myself and Phil and Eileen, a pleasant, well-travelled American couple who tour around the world with "drivers" so they can sample the wines of each region. Not a bad idea, if only I was drinking.

We get into the eight-seater Mercedes and start with a tour around Hobart's popular waterfront and Salamanca areas, past grassy St David's Park (a cemetery where the headstones were removed and cemented together to form an eerie wall), up through some of the more expensive real estate areas of Hobart, where we ooh and aah at the properties and prices. Then we're out on the open road, heading south.

I immediately start to see the benefits of being on a tour. You get asides that you don't get when you hire a car. Did you know that Tassie's "Apple Isle" image is being replaced by the "Opium Isle"
because of the growth of the medicinal poppy industry? I do now.

We zip past hectares of McDonald's potatoes (another aside), a couple of wineries (but don't stop, much to Phil's dismay) and pause briefly
at the historic town of Richmond where we get out to see Australia's oldest bridge. Already it's nearly morning-tea time. Another benefit of being on a tour is that there's none of that "Where should we stop for lunch – here, here or here?" to trawl through.

Nicola picks the out-of-the-way port town of Dunalley Point for morning tea. We sit in the sun, on the Waterfront Cafe's timber deck, looking
out over Boomer Bay. We are across the water from one of Tasmania's anomalies, Gunter Jaeger's "farmhouse for his retirement" (that's what he told the local newspaper it was).

We can see, on a dry outcrop of land in the bay opposite us, what looks like a castle – it's a huge, solitary building like something out of Ireland. The staff at the cafe are used to questions from customers and will provide you with a handy set of binoculars and a laminated newspaper article that fills you in on both the building and the Hobart-based businessman who is building it. He's a nice man who occasionally eats at the cafe, according to staff, but they won't elaborate. He's certainly building an interesting "farmhouse".

Next it's back into the Mercedes, heading for Port Arthur. It's a place that many Australians now associate with the 1996 massacre, when 35
people were killed by a gunman, rather than its colonial past. How do you deal with a history as recent as this? The Port Arthur guidebook recommends that you don't discuss it with staff, and suggests instead a visit to the memorial garden, which incorporates the remains of the Broad Arrow Cafe, to reflect and learn about the events that occurred there. Phil and Eileen don't know about the massacre for most of the tour until they see a memorial plaque with photos of three
staff. "I thought this said 1896 but it's 1996. What happened here?" asks Phil. Nicola, who is guiding us around Port Arthur, fills him in.

Included in the entrance fee to Port Arthur is a 20-minute boat trip on the Marana. It takes you to Point Puer Boys' Prison (where boys from British slums were brought to be rehabilitated) and the Isle of the Dead. If you fancy spending time on a tiny island with 1100 dead folk, you can book a walking tour (the Marana drops you off and picks you up later), but it's not included in this tour.

As Nicola says, when the weather is like this (sunny and mild), it's hard to understand how awful life was for the thousands of convicts who
were sent here after re-offending in other Australian colonies. But to give you some idea, there is the evil-looking solitary-confinement prison, conveniently situated next to the asylum
where most of those in solitary confinement ended up. We end up there for an included-in-tour lunch, as it's now a cafe.

On the way back to Hobart, Nicola drives us through Dootown near the Tasman National Park. It's what Australian holiday towns used to be like, tumbling shacks on the edge of beautiful beaches.

Even I started thinking: "Oh, I could knock that down and build ... " Dootown has a character of its own, with almost all shacks and houses named with a "doo". So there's She'll Doo, Doo Drop In, It'll Doo 4 Now (on a caravan) and more modern interpretations including Just Doo It.

The weather changes and we get back into the Mercedes and head back to Hobart, with stopoffs at the sometimes-blowing blowhole (not when we
are there) and the Tessellated Pavement and Tasman Arch. It's exhausting, all this touring, and it's just lovely to hand yourself over to a company to work out all the hard stuff for you.
"
- Adelaide Advertiser (Jane D'Arcy)
January 2006