Discovering Tasmania

    The island of Tasmania is separated from mainland Australia by the Bass Strait. The island is a place of natural beauty and has more than 2,000 km of walking tracks and 18 national parks. If you go on a tour, you'll discover a wild and beautiful place where the people are friendly and the food is delicious. If you don't like walking, there are other tours you can choose from including a river cruise and cycling. You can also combine your tour with fishing, sailing or sunbathing on the beach. 

    One of the most incredible places to walk is along the Tarkine coast which is located in the north-west of Tasmania. It's such a wild and remote area that you can easily complete your walk without seeing anyone apart from the members of your group and your two guides. The area contains the largest temperate rainforest in Australia which is home to more than 50 endangered species. It is also home to many Aboriginal Heritage Sites. Your guides will provide you with plenty of information about the area as you complete that part of your tour. During your tour, you'll come across rivers, mountain ranges, spectacular waterfalls, wildlife and long wild beaches. It will be an experience you won't easily forget. 

Tour Itinerary:

Day 1:

    You're picked up from your hotel in the town of Launceston and driven to the Tarkine. You then complete a three-hour walk through the forest before arriving at your camp at Mystery Creek. There you will enjoy a delicious meal cooked by your guides.

Day 2:

    After breakfast, you continue deeper into the rainforest, passing some of the tallest trees in the world as you go, and stopping for lunch and then camp in the evening.

Day 3:

    The highlight of today's hike is the Tarkine Falls, a beautiful 15-metre waterfall.

Day 4:

    Today you can stay at the camp and bathe in the Tarkine Falls, or you can go for a day hike for more fantastic views of the forest.

Day 5:

    After a last hike through the forest, you are picked up at about 4:00 p.m. and you arrive in Launceston at around 7:00 p.m.

    The tour includes two professional guides, transport to and from the rainforest, all food while on the tours and all safety equipment. You should buy or hire recommended camping equipment including: backpacks, sleeping bags, sleep mats, head torches, rain coats and trousers.

    Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest thinkers in the world, began his career as an artist. Very little is known about Leonardo's early life. He was born in 1452 in the town of Vinci. As a boy, Leonardo showed a great interest in drawing, sculpting and observing nature.

    However, because Leonardo was born to parents who were not married to each other, he was barred from some studies and professions. He trained as an artist after moving to Florence with his father in the 1460s. It was an exciting time to be in Florence, one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Leonardo trained with one of the city's very successful artists, Andrea del Verrocchio. He was a painter, sculptor and gold worker. Verrocchio told his students that they needed to understand the body's bones and muscles when drawing people.

    Leonardo took the teacher's advice very seriously. He spent several periods of his life studying the human body by taking apart and examining dead bodies. While training as an artist, Leonardo also learned about and improved on relatively new painting methods at the time. One was the use of perspective(透视) to show depth. A method called “sfumato” helped to create a cloudy effect to suggest distance. “Chiaroscuro” is a method using light and shade as a painterly effect.

    Leonardo's first known portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D. C. He made this painting of a young woman named Ginevra de' Benci around 1474. The woman has a pale face with dark hair. In the distance, Leonardo painted the Italian countryside.

    He soon received attention for his extraordinary artistic skills. Around 1475 he was asked to draw an angel in Verrocchio's painting “Baptism of Christ.” One story says that when Verrocchio saw Leonardo's addition to the painting, he was so amazed by his student's skill that he said he would never paint again.

    Charlie studied in a famous college for four years. He studied hard and did well in all his subjects. He hoped to become a good teacher. This year he left the college and began to work in a middle school. He likes his students and is strict with them. He does his best to make his classes lively and interesting.

    One day he carefully explained a chemical reaction to the students of Grade 2 in the chemistry lab.

    “Be careful, everyone,” he said loudly. “Before I make the experiment, there're twenty five atoms of carbon (碳原子), but after I finish it, there're twenty four atoms of carbon left!”

He stopped to watch the classroom and hoped his students would go on explaining it. But the young men looked at each other and nobody answered him. He had to ask,

    “What happens? What makes the atom lost?”

    The classroom was very quiet and none of the students looked at their teacher.

    “Who can tell us where it has gone?”

    Suddenly a soft voice came from the back row, “We did not see anybody leave the lab!”

    Most heroes are not super. They don't appear in comic books, on television, or in movies. They just do what they believe needs to be done to make their world a better place. Bike Batman is one of them.

    Bike Batman is a 30-year-old married engineer who lives in Seattle, Washington. He's a cyclist who also buys and sells bikes as a hobby.

    About three years ago, he was looking for a bike for his wife. He found one on Craigslist, a website where people list things they want to sell. As he often does, he also looked at Bike Index, a popular website that allows users to register their bikes and post reports when they're taken. The bike, which he was considering purchasing, clearly matched one reported stolen on Bike Index. Then he called the person who claimed to be the bike's owner and arranged to meet him— supposedly to complete the sale. When the two men met, Bike Batman told the thief, "You've got two options. You can wait until a police officer gets here, or you can just get out of here." You can imagine what the thief did.

    After that first success, Bike Batman developed a safer routine. When he sees questionable bike ads on Craigslist, he cross-references(对照) the image with bikes reported on Bike Index. Once he has confirmed it with the owner, he arranges a meet-up with the thief and will call the Seattle police department so that officers can participate in the action. In more than half of the 22 cases in which he has got back and returned bikes, the thieves have been arrested. In one case, Bike Batman even helped a family recover a wide range of prized possessions that suspects had stolen during a home burglary.

    His nickname came from a discussion with a police officer who suggested he be called "Robin Hood". Since he wasn't exactly stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, "Batman" seemed a better fit. The idea of a superhero punishing criminals feels pretty silly to him, but the main reason he continues his work is to keep up Seattle's reputation as a friendly city.

Dear Graham,

    My partner and I have recently lost a pet quite suddenly. Normal life is continuing with so much sadness for my pet meant so much to me. Lots of people won't understand my feeling this way about the death of an animal. This obviously isn't the first time someone in my life has passed away: when I was younger we lost elderly relatives who I loved very much, and naturally much-loved family pets died occasionally too. But this has hit me so much harder. I put so much love into the relationship and I'm just finding it hard to get my head around the fact that it's gone.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this.

ANON, VIA EMAIL

Dear Anon,

    Something you loved deeply has gone from your life, so of course you are sad. We love our pets differently from family members or friends and part of that is because we know they will probably die before us. Our time with our dogs or cats is precious precisely because we understand it is limited.

    As humans, we go through most of life understanding we would die one day. But animals don't. We are the keeper of the secret. Of course, living a life unencumbered(不受妨碍) by thoughts of death means that our pets, in general, lead very simple, happy lives. It's one of the reasons why they are such a joy to be round. You are, of course, correct when you say that many people don't understand your grief, so don't talk to them. Share your feelings with like-minded souls. I'm sure a simple search online will reveal many practical advice for moving on.

    And when you are ready, you can welcome another animal into your life and then you will enjoy happiness again.

GRAHAM, VIA EMAIL

    Moments before I could lift my case to put it in the plane's overhead locker ahead of our recent holiday to Europe, my father gently urged me to stop. He held the thick handles of the case and lifted it with his thin arms, pushing it into place with a sigh. “You should relax and be the lady, and let me do the heavy tasks,” he said seriously. “In the future, someone special will come into your life and take over such tasks from me, but that will never happen if you do everything yourself.”

    I was stunned into silence. This was not the father I remembered from childhood, who trained me to study hard at school, asked me to earn my own pocket money as a teenager at a local coffee shop, and even taught me household chores so that my life alone in London wouldn't turn into a mess. But then, eight years after I left home and started a new life in the UK, I realized for the first time that my dad still has expectations for me to be like a princess and to stay dependent and delicate, which were considered necessary qualities of women in traditional China.

    Well, that came a little late. Little did Dad know that over the three years of my university life, I moved flats five times all by myself, dragging suitcases of books and clothes, and waiting for the taxi in the rain while holding tight onto cardboard boxes. Meanwhile, living in the UK – a country currently led by a female prime minister – I have never thought there is anything girls cannot do. Most of my female friends are professionals working in the City of London, and after work, we frequently go down to the pub for a drink, just like the guys do – something my mother never did.

    I wondered how I might make Dad understand the new world his little girl has entered. Perhaps one day, he will realize the “someone special” in my life will appreciate my confidence and independence above dependence, and admit that times have changed.