Hobart Tours For Seniors Travel

Hobart was our unanimous choice for our long-awaited girl’s weekend away.  It’s a lively place, with a waterfront that buzzes with action around the surrounding restaurants, pubs, cafes and clubs. Yet as we found, Hobart is a city of contradictions. It has all the advantages of city services but its population of 185,000 has retained a sense of community. So the locals are laidback and friendly despite their urban surroundings. See our best Hobart tours experience that you can also try.

Hobart’s Salamanca precinct is just a pad beyond the fishing fleet and punts selling seafood fresh as summer rain. Bands, buskers and more than 300 stallholders gather every Saturday in the historic Sullivans Cove precinct for the city’s famed Salamanca Market, which sells everything from hand-crafted wooden sushi trays to organic vegetables, alongside artist studios and cafes.

Our first experience of Hobart tours is in the Salamanca Market. Salamanca Market regularly attracts large crowds for it is as eclectic as anywhere in Australia, if not more. It is arguably one of the few authentic market experiences left in Australia.  It is not touristy but seems to have a genuine mix of old and new from emerging designers to handcraft wooden toys.  Not to mention a variety of food stalls displaying local produce.

After spending many several hours at the market and contributing substantially to the local economy through our purchases, we headed back to our Apartment Somerset on the Pier, armed with our Bruny Island cheeses, bread, and olives to compliment our Clover Hill sparkling wine.

Tasmania is a gourmet paradise, where people live close to the land and the sea and there is an easy flow from harvest to plate. The island State is a place where a fantastic lifestyle and innovative ideas accompany a temperate climate. The island has four distinct seasons that make it perfect for producing prime cheeses, mouth-watering berries ripened slowly for maximum flavour, wide-ranging vegetables, stone fruits, herbs,  premium beef, specialty honey, mushrooms, chocolate and fudge, cool-climate wines, and some of Australia’s leading beers. Whether you are browsing at a local market stall or dining in a restaurant, visitors to Tasmania are spoilt for choice.

Our hotel, Somerset on the Pier offered a wonderful place to base ourselves for the weekend. The apartments are located on the pier at Battery Point and the location is fantastic.  The apartments have great views overlooking the water. There are plenty of restaurants underneath with access to the pier. The apartments were well-appointed with all the modern conveniences you could ask for.  Just don’t leave your smelly Bruny Island cheese in the bin within the apartment, it will stink the apartment and the hallway out!  The staff was great and I can honestly say there was really nothing bad to say about this place.

We ate dinner at Plum Restaurant, just off Salamanca Place.  I can honestly say, it was one of the best meals I have had in a very long time and would be up there with any fine dining experience you would have in any international city.  The prices were extremely reasonable for both food and wine.  You would pay at least double for this standard of dining in Sydney or Melbourne. We visited a couple of pubs around Salamanca Place after dinner.  The area has such an old-fashioned feel about it, you really feel like you have stepped back in time.

As successful as it has been in its contemporary reinvention, scratch the surface of this picture-perfect city and you’ll discover a seamy past, built on convicts, merchants, and whalers. This is Australia’s second oldest city, after Sydney, and you can touch the marks of a convict chisel on a public building, down a beer at a pub named after one of the colony’s corrupt ministers of the cloth, or stroll along streets of original workers cottages in Battery Point.

Bronwyn White

Bronwyn White is a travel and tourism industry professional with more than 30 years of experience.  Her special interest is helping retirees, semi-retired baby boomers enjoy the dream of travel.  She loves to help them plan and get the most out of this time.

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