MONA art gallery and Mt. Wellington 

Tasmania. The name alone conjures wild, hairy, grinning cartoon figures straight out of Disney. Before we came here, it was certainly less substantial in our minds than New Zealand, which is two islands, or Oz, although another island, larger by unimaginable orders of magnitude. And we didn’t change a single time zone to get here. Hobart, its capitol (established 1803), seems a bit like Auckland or Wellington: a city built on lots of hills with winding roads that twist between an extensive coastline and the tops of several mountains that plunge to the water.

David runs nearly to the top of Mt. Nelson on Sunday morning sidewalks of black asphalt without another soul in sight … hardly a car on the road at seven a.m. The roads pass small parks and the houses get grander as the road climbs. Dense gray clouds that threaten rain move swiftly between the wide bay below and the crests of mountains above them in the near distance.

Stephen and Maureen leave to see her sister Linda and sister’s husband, Alan, for breakfast — they are Aussies visiting Hobart themselves — almost as soon as David returns. We shower and have a quick surprise visit with the four Aussies and then we load ourselves into Stephen’s Volvo station wagon and motor over four-lane highways about an hour to a northern suburb of Hobart where we want to spend a good chunk of the afternoon at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).

MONA makes the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain, look like a staid, conservative collection of boring, traditional art. First sight: It is a huge, sprawling complex. Built by a gambling magnate David (“You let me build my high-end, no slots casino, and I’ll build a museum for my art collection and let all Tasmanians in for free) Walsh, it sits on the Derwent River. It is ultra-modern in design — lots of stainless steel, glass, plastic and space-age materials — but also is hewn into the sandstone side of a hill through which you descend three floors in a round elevator that is the core of a circular staircase. The reception area at the bottom of the stairs is one of the slickest bars David has seen.

The main exhibit, the one that takes up much of the space, is called the Museum of Everything. Indeed, its rabbit warren of myriad rooms and nooks and crannies contains wild art of every possible material and size and meaning, though the primary themes of it all may be that the art is “primitive” — made by self-taught artists who often are described as hermits or recluses — and have a counterculture, global-world ethos. It is impossible to take in during a single visit.

A few examples: A machine that drips water in the shape of words that dissipate as they drop, a room of dinosaurs made with discarded types of plastic (tapes, CDs, etc.), a wall of photographs of naked witches, a video of a vast park in Pakistan made by one man, Mek Chand, from stones he quarried from a nearby mountain, a platform projecting into a room filled with and surrounded by machine oil that reflects everything, a 200-foot wall with a row of plaster casts of vaginas of every shape and hair style, a light tunnel by James Terrell that totally trips you out, tables of ball bearings that roll in murmurations under strobe lights. Sex and love and death and future shock are ever present.

We eat lunch in Pharos, a bar overlooking the Derwent River and hills that contains a huge orb inside which a Terrell light show can be had for 40 minutes by prior reservation only. The menu says, “A photon walks into a bar and orders a Moo Brew. ‘How much?’ asks the photon. The bar man answers, ‘For you, there’s no charge.’” The scallop and cauliflower tapas with spiced yogurt are delicious. David gets a real Negroni.

We leave dazed and confused, totally overstimulated in every way, and motor to the top of Mount Wellington (kunanyi). Charles Darwin reached its top on his second try in 1836, saying, “We enjoyed a most extensive view.” No kidding. The vast Derwent estuary stretches as far as we can see in the late afternoon’s dying light, all around Hobart and as far as Port Arthur to the southeast. Cold wind howls over the rocky, nearly barren peak. The stones are dolerite: molten magma cooled into vertical columns between sandstone and schist that has weathered away … a frigid moonscape.

We wind down the steep roads to home where Stephen and Maureen cook a tasty chicken risotto with a lovely salad and we all fall asleep after a day packed with new sights and sounds and vistas and understandings.

Another adventurous and bewildering day in Tasmania.