Veronika Wild

There's quite a lot of snow on the mountain this morning and it's a balmy 8°C here. Running a bit late with my post this week, so here is something to ponder in the meantime. Enjoy! There is a peculiar magic to a Tasmanian winter that mainlanders and other visitors never quite understand until they've lived it. Even if you have managed to cram in a trip around the state, taking in its major cities and maybe Cradle Mountain and Strahan, you may have missed some of the best things of all.     It arrives gently — in the blue-grey light that lingers even at noon, in the woodsmoke curling from chimneys up and down the streets of its quaint C19th villages, in the cold that doesn't so much bite as settle. There’s less traffic and there are even fewer tourists.     Into the Woods There's a lovely campaign by Tourism Tasmania right now about Forest Bathing. Here's how it's done. Take yourself down or more likely up to a forest. Mt. Wellington/Kunyani is clos...

Grand Entrance  I still had one Mother’s Day voucher from my oldest son and his partner for a massage and spa treatment at the Savoy Baths in Hobart, but they’d been heavily booked ever since, so I was delighted when they rang me just before I left Hobart to say that they’d had a cancellation. Unfortunately I was already in town and didn’t have my bathers, but they said that it didn’t matter because they had some which I could borrow. It is absolutely heaven in the middle of winter and it's right in the heart of town, in the Elizabeth Street Mall just a little way down from the Post Office on the other side of the road. The massage was fabulous - soothing music that made me think of horses clip -clopping over the Mongolian Steppe, scented oils, hot stones on my back, and then it was into the heated pool. It’s not that I haven’t had an excellent spa before. My sister once took me to a wonderful one in a tree house at Daylesford (Victoria), but it’s just not something ...