Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is about 11km south of Brisbane, so was our first stop in our Spaceship campervan. Home for the next two weeks, the van boasts a fridge, DVD player and even an iPod dock. It's pretty compact, but seems to be a popular way to get around, judging by the number of vans we've seen on the road in recent weeks.

Our first day with the car! We were both very excited at the prospect of 5 days on the open road – James driving, me navigating. Tasmania is famous for its stunning views and as we drove out of Hobart, it certainly didn't disappoint. We headed down the Tasman Peninsula, passing long stretches of beach and beautiful countryside – at times it felt like we were back in the UK, driving down to Bath or Gloucester.

Our first stopping point was the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park. This was a fantastic little park dedicated to helping the poor Devil, which is rapidly being wiped out as a result of a contagious facial cancer. Devils also like to eat roadkill, which obviously presents its own occupational hazards. I was expecting the devils to be ugly and also a lot like the Taz from the Warner Brother cartoons – in fact they were incredibly cute indeed. We were lucky enough to be there for feeding time, which was a sight to behold – two little devils chased each other around their area and scrapped over the wallaby on the menu that day. Devils are not fussy eaters, and will munch on everything from fur to bone. The noise of bones crunching from those little animals was pretty unsettling – no wonder the first European settlers referred to them as devils in the first place!

The park was also home to myriad other creatures, including some rather sleepy kangaroos, so we had our first experience of seeing jumping roos in action – actually pretty hilarious, although not quite as funny as an amorous couple we interrupted (see photo).

After that it was on through Eaglehawk Neck to Port Arthur, one of the infamous penal colonies which lined the Tasmanian coast back when it was Van Diemen's land in the 1800s (they actually changed the name of the state to try and disassociate itself from this grisly past). Port Arthur was the place for the worst offenders; those who had offended again after having been convicted for crimes in the UK and shipped to Australia. It was opened in 1834 and the location was picked because it was only reachable either by ship, or along the very narrow Eaglehawk Neck isthmus. It was therefore deemed to be a great place to keep dangerous criminals (many of whom had merely stolen some food or a handkerchief, and had as a result been shipped halfway around the world).

As well as being a penal colony, Port Arthur was a community and a military barracks, but the overwhelming feel of the place is pretty eerie, even today. The huge penitentiary, though largely destroyed by bush fires in the early 20th century, still dominates the skyline. There is an asylum right next to the Separate Prison (where the worst offenders were kept in solitary, silent confinement) because so many of the inmates there went insane. The prison was modelled on the penitentiary at Pentonville in London and the severe practices continued in Australia continued long after they had been deemed too harsh in the UK.

We also stayed until after it got dark and took the ghost tour around the site, which was very spooky – whilst we didn't see any ghosts ourselves, the stories our guide told us gave us the shivers. We visited the 2nd most haunted house in Australia, where an old clergyman is alleged to wander the halls, unhappy with his treatment after his death, when his coffin was passed out through an upstairs window because it was too large to fit down the stairs. But the scariest part was undoubtedly our trip to the surgeon's house, which had a downstairs dissection room. It was cold and dark, and the thought of all the things that had happened down there was pretty disturbing.