Wednesday: last day in Tassie

You know you’ve been eating too much on vacation, when you wake up, wander past all the French bakeries and tempting fresh omelettes and piles of hotcakes and sausages in rolls and decide to sit on the Brooke St Pier and eat an apple out of your pocket, instead. I didn't think my poor abused tummy could handle any more.

Today was the Cadbury Factory Tour. Our guide, Chris, who probably had at least seven grandchildren, ticked me off on his list twice: having forgotten who I was, in the interval between when I greeted him on the pier, and when I clambered onto the bus with all the other chocolate-greedy geezers. Chris expertly piloted the bus the six or seven kilometres to the Cadbury factory, peppering us with historical facts, while my busmates murmured softly to one another and sucked their teeth. The bus was very quiet.



They set us loose in the visitors’ centre of the factory with an hour and half to wander. When we walked through the front door, a friendly lady handed us each a big pack of “Cadbury favourites.” So we were already chewing as we perused historic Cadbury tins, watched an informative DVD, sat down to learn the chocolate making process, and avoided Freddo Frog, a Cadbury icon, who was walking around waving his big white gloves in search of children to terrify. We hurried to the choc shop to fill our big purple bags with discount “Not perfect” chocs, the less attractive or badly-made bars. It was hard not to buy when it was only 80 cents for a crème egg (big signs reminded us that Easter would be here in just a month!) and 2.50 for a full bar—whereas in the shops, eggs are 1.25 and bars are 3 and up. I had to keep reminding myself that I had only paid for 20 kg of baggage on the plane back to Sydney, which meant I had to keep it to less than 20 pounds of chocolate. Sigh.



Back on the bus, I struck up a conversation with Veronique, the only other person under 50, also traveling by herself, from New Caledonia. We chatted our way through the harbour cruise. The master pointed out, in a rolling commentary: Risdon Cove, the site of the first landing in Van Diemen’s Land; Aboriginal cave dwellings; and the new pylons where a vessel knocked down part of the causeway years ago. Back at the pier, I warmed myself, lizardlike, on a sunny bench with a book I borrowed from Kyla, called Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.




There was one more adventure in store for me. I said a fond farewell to Battery Point, loaded up the rental car and drove down to Salamanca, parking in the first available spot. Feeling peaceful and competent, knowing I would be in plenty of time for the flight, I stopped at a little bar in the Square and enjoying a dish of linguine with roasted cherry tomatoes, chicken, pine nuts and goat cheese. Fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, I headed back for the car.

Only, the car wasn’t there. In my haste to park, and watching the GPS, I hadn’t noticed where I had left the car. In increasing consternation, and starting to sweat in the bright sun, I hurried up and down the streets, looping back on myself and wishing every single other car wasn’t a white Kia Rio just like mine, many with Budget rental car plates. It was half an hour later that I finally found the car and roared out of the parking lot only to screech to a halt. Rush hour traffic on the A3. As I stared anxiously at lines of cars in front of me, I finally noticed the small orange paper flapping on the windscreen wiper.

Out past the causeway, the traffic disappeared and I revved the engine, but in spite of my efforts that little piece of paper stuck on bravely. I pulled into the car rental return and read my parking ticket, but it was only $25. Distracted, but an hour and a half early, I blithely left my brand new Lily Allen cd in the car and gave back the keys.



Of course, my flight was delayed by half an hour, but Darryl was able to pick me up at the airport and I was home, clean and asleep before 11. Goodbye Tassie!

Tuesday

Tuesday morning found me up at seven, on the road to Taranna with an apple and a cup of coffee. I rolled into the Tassie Devil Conservation Park at 0915, one of only three early morning visitors. The park is an old farm, given back to the wild. I walked out of the visitor’s centre onto the path and was abruptly alone with the birds and the wind. In the old orchards, even the distant car sounds of the A9 faded. The sunlight dripped to earth through tiny gnarled pears on a few crooked trees. Walking a dirt path, I came to a wooden fence. As I put my shoulder to the heavy door and pushed, a rough-hewn counter weight dropped just beside my head, startling me. I walked through a little enclosure and out through a second door, and found myself in a paddock of about forty kangaroos and wallabies, interspersed with huge white ugly birds which, I thought, may or may not have been cassowaries. The animals were all frozen, motionless, some in mid-hop, and I froze too as every single head swivelled toward me. About sixty pairs of eyes followed me as, nervously avoiding sudden movements, I crossed the long, long length of the paddock, even skirting around the trail where it was blocked by a mama wallaby. With a sense of relief, I reached the heavy gate on the other side and escaped.

Now somewhat lost on the trails, which wound around and crisscrossed each other and were walled in by endless seeming forests of stunted trees and overgrowing weeds, I found the Tassie Devil enclosure just in time for the ten o’clock feeding. Unlike their photos, the Tassie Devils are far from adorable. They snarled and bit and mindlessly screamed at each other, cracked bones with their jaws, licked blood from their snouts, leapt and snapped at the cameras people held over the low fence.
Next was the kangaroo feed. There were now about fifteen visitors in the park, and we followed the park keeper back to the paddock, where the animals which had been so intimidating half an hour before, now scanned the crowd, located the keeper and his big gray bucket of food pellets, and swarmed him in an excited pushing mob. All of us took big double handfuls of pellets and in minutes, every tourist was surrounded by five or six hungry jumpers. Their noses were warm and I felt the coarse fur of their cheeks, and the softer fur of chins, as teeth like slabs scraped at my flat palm. The birds, which I had taken to be cassowaries, were actually just geese who, the park keeper said, stopped by every day about this time for a free feed. The kangaroos didn’t bite, but one Englishwoman sustained a nip from a goose. As I crouched with six animals of assorted sizes happily chewing away, the dominant alpha kangaroo sauntered over, reared up and cuffed a few others out of his way. All seven of us jumped!



At 1145 I saw another Devil feeding, just as unpleasant as the first, and managed to watch part of the Raptor show before buying an awesome t-shirt and hightailing it back to Hobart, for my cycling trip down Mount Wellington. This is me holding a branch with a Tawny Frogmouth, a kind of nightjar:




I made it back at 1300 with just enough time to park, change, and run to the info centre to be picked up with ten other tourists for the journey. We loaded into a van and roared up, up, up, learning the history of the mountain and its trails, and then hopped on bikes at the top and whizzed around the hairpin turns and past hair-raising cliffs, going way too fast and getting windburn on our cold faces and hoping a car wasn’t about to try to pass us. I was relieved when we reached the bottom of the mountain in far less time than it had taken us to drive up it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the last ten minutes of the ride, heading downtown through Battery Point and finishing off at Salamanca.



I walked the ten minutes home, almost light-headed with hunger, showered, and set off down Castray Esplanade in search of somewhere to eat. At last I chose T42, the Tavern at Forty-Two Degrees South. Seated outside on the pier, I had a gorgeous view of the slowly setting sun, yellow in a bright blue sky, the whole scene reflected identically in the harbour but dotted with the shadows of white yachts. Across from me two ladies, maybe in their 40s, with youthfully dyed hair, dined on their salads and chatted with two men. I nearly cried with joy as I ate every last bite of my rocket, blue cheese, and candied walnut salad and confit chicken Maryland, cooked to fall-off-the-bone perfection in a bed of onions and spinach and roast parsnips. The two men left while I was still working on the chicken, but the two ladies stayed, chatting. Then I unwisely ordered dessert, a chocolate whisky mudcake, and moved to a warmer table inside. By the time it came, I was stuffed, but the sun had set and dark flickering tango music was playing and I ate my way slowly through the muddy mountain, picking out the sultanas and laying them in a pile on the side of my plate—what better way to ruin chocolate cake than by raisins, ugh—and accidently licking a forkful of the round white ball that I thought was ice cream, which turned out to be pure cream. Aussies sure love their cream. The two ladies, now seated outside in the dark, had finally ordered mains, which now arrived. The restaurant was nearly empty, but I accidently caught the eye of a man of perhaps 40 who had entered. The waitresses were loitering at the bar, cleaning up with the barmen, and ignoring me and the ladies and the gentleman near me, who kept trying to see what I was writing (my notes for the day, of course). We chatted, a little. He was a German professor of philosophy and he really was feeling the need to expound some life theories. I was falling asleep, but I managed to listen politely for a while before saying goodnight and heading home. I had been in the restaurant two and a half hours. The ladies were still chatting over their espressos.

Monday

My alarm went off at 0630, and I sprang from my lovely bed to the cold floor, swigged milk and pulled briefly into the Bark Mill Bakery—bakery by morning, Tavern by night—and got a hot croissant to eat with the last of my cheese. It was an hour’s drive to Coles Bay in the twilight. Predictably, I got there half an hour early and listened to morning talk radio until 0845, when the last few kids rolled in for the 0830 departure. Not predictably, the radio talk show was called “The Spirit of Things” and the guest on the show was lauding the secularisation of religion with politics. So this is what Tasmanians listen to first thing in the morning. I huddled in my car, the sun now brilliant but the air cold, and waited for the kayaks to arrive.



The wind was chopping the Bay into violent green hurdles, so our kayak tour guides, Jessie and Adam, directed our little convoy of cars down the road to enter the calmer river. There were nine of us, so I shared a double kayak with Jessie, a hearty young lady from the UK who, when she runs out of jobs to do in Oz, wants to live in New Zealand until the jobs run out there. I have always admired these type of carefree adventurers, mostly personal trainers or ski instructors or kayak tour guides, who can be found scattered all over the world. As for Adam, an Aussie, I could hardly understand a word he said—he had one of those heavy brogues, in addition to a rather soft voice.



We saw cormorants, terns, and Pacific gulls, which apparently are suffering a high cholesterol crisis due to the amount of chips (French fries) they eat at tourist shops. We paddled around an oyster farm, being careful not to slip over the oyster beds, that is, except for our obligatory non-English-speaking couple—in this case, Japanese—who paddled directly over the oyster farm, peering delightedly over the side of their kayak, and had to be extricated. After an hour of easy paddling, we pulled up parallel into a bank of rushes for tea. We ate enormous biscuits with and tea or Milo or coffee while Jessie and Adam waded back and forth, passing out sugar and milk with their paddle skirts hiked around their waists. We were back on the beach by 1130.



My park pass didn’t expire til three, so I drove off to find a few more nature walks. Driving up windy, steep, potholed paths seemed to take longer than the hikes themselves; nonetheless I walked around Honeymoon Bay, the Tourville Lighthouse and Sleepy Bay before grabbing a wash and a Tassie calendar at the Visitor Centre, and bidding goodbye to Freycinet.



Back in Swansea, I stopped for a somewhat unsatisfying piece of beer-battered trevalla with salad, so I finished again at the Berry Farm with a wedge of summer pie—apricots, peaches and nectarines with cream and vanilla ice cream. Finally I was ready for the long drive. I stopped only once, for a quick photo at the convict-built Spiky Bridge. The plaque reported that no one really knows why, a hundred and fifty years ago, the bridge had to look Spiky.



I did manage to entertain myself on the road, whenever Perry Como cut out, with the names of the little geographical features I passed—“White Hot Springs”, “Break-me-Neck Hill” which was quickly followed by “Bust-me-Gall Hill”. To name anything along this road appeared to be a simple matter. Pick one word from the following list: Yellow, Rocky, Brushy, Gum, or any Dutch name, and combine with a second word from this list: Rivulet, Hill, Creek, Plains, Banks.



Home at last, sandy and sweaty, and chilled through even after a shower, I wandered out in search of more hot soup. At the crowded famous fish restaurant on the pier, Mures, they quickly found me a table for one.

I relaxed at last, back in civilization, and really enjoyed a rocket salad with cider while waiting for my seafood chowder. After about ten minutes, the waitress asked me if I was done with my salad, but I said no; apparently this created some confusion in her mind, because after half an hour I was still picking over the salad when she came back to ask if I was ready for my seafood chowder now. Apparently she had been loath to bring the soup before I had fully finished with the salad. Luckily, she brought it out within a minute, and it was actually quite good. As I was writing up my notes for the day, she asked if I was a journalist and we had a friendly chat; a few minutes later a waiter came over to say he had heard I was an American—he was from New Mexico. We had a nice chat, too. I finished my chowder and walked back through the dark along the waterfront, looking at the moon.

Sunday in Freycinet

What a funny day! My alarm woke me at 0730, since I was eager to have a nice breakfast at Jackman and McRoss before the Sunday morning rush, and I turned my phone on as I headed for the bathroom. As I was brushing my teeth, I heard the phone ring, stop, and ring again. The second time I hurried out and answered. Setto had been trying to call me all night, and as I spoke with her and booted up my laptop, I saw emails from Aunt Laila and Yasmeen: an earthquake in Chile had sent a tsunami rocketing at 700 mph across the Pacific...towards the east coast of Australia. I checked the news on Google and, in my haste, accidentally read a news bulletin from last year. The tsunami would hit at 0815—in half an hour—and authorities were advising everyone to get one kilometre inland. I felt sick as I looked out to the shiny, sparkling, innocent bay. Hobart was silent. Everyone, it seemed, was still sleeping. Shouldn’t I have heard the noises of evacuation, people yelling, doors slamming, cars roaring, dogs barking? I hung up with Setto, whose long distance bill must have been astronomical, and finally realized the date on the article I had Googled: June 2009. Whoops!

I managed to find an accurate news bulletin from today. Sure enough, the tsunami, such as it was, would hit in the next hour—but it would not reach more than a metre in height. I began to pack for my trip, and stopped to listen to the radio as I loaded my hiking paraphernalia into the car. A Marine Advisory had been issued for boaters and beachgoers, but there was certainly no need for evacuation.
I got onto Skype to reassure Setto, who immediately called Mom in Florida, and in a few moments Yasmeen and Aunt Laila had joined the conversation, and Aunt Laila called Dad. Thus ended the Great Tasmanian Tsunami Crisis and Ensuing Family Six-Way Skype Chaos. Really, though, I am grateful to everyone for looking out for me—and I am humbled by the realisation that had it been a real tsunami, I might not have stood a chance. Unless Tasmania has some sort of air raid sirens, the city of Hobart would have peacefully slept in on Sunday morning until the tsunami wiped out the small, narrow causeways linking the peninsulas together and washed away a majority of the waterfront.



J&M’s was by now thoroughly packed with people, but I managed to fight through the crowds to grab a tomato, egg, and bacon pie with tomato relish. I waited an extra fifteen minutes for coffee—I would have left, but I had already paid, so I left a hasty message of final reassurance on Yasmeen’s cell phone and fled the city, going north.



My first stop was at Buckland Historic Church, but in the chaos of the morning and my speed to get out, I had neglected to use the bathroom. So I got some fleeting glimpses of a lovely graveyard, with headstones dating from the 1830s—I didn’t even know that the English had penetrated this far up the coast in the 1830s. I briefly considered peeing behind one of the huge old gray trees, but more tourists had just stopped, so I checked my phone to see if Yasmeen had somehow called back—no reception—and hopped back in the car. I had left civilization behind, and would have neither cell phone reception nor Internet for the next two days.
The next servo, or gas station, did not have a public toilet. Oz is generally great about providing periodic public toilets, but because of this, I suppose, they think they are entitled to refuse to let even paying customers use the facilities in their convenience stores, servos, and even some fast food places. So I drove the 15k to Orford and bought a caramel slice for the privilege of using the toilet. I was noon, and the cafe and fish and chips shop next door were flooded with customers. The entirety of the town of Orford seemed to be these two shops, full of tourists, at a convenient bend in the road.

The weather was very unTasmanian, hot and sunny, and my nerves were slowly fraying as I wove in and out of dozens of campervans, slowing the drive from 110 to 80 kph (110 is only 68 mph). With relief I pulled into Kate’s Berry Farm, forty five minutes later, and tried to revive my energy with a single dark chocolate salted caramel. Next to me, arrayed across the tables, were all the old couples I had met first at Buckland Church and later in Orford.



Finally, I drove into the tiny town of Swansea. Turning down a dirt road, I parked on the lawn next to the second last cottage, which was Reception. The redheaded young teen inside rummaged helplessly through piles of paperwork on the desk, searching for my reservation, and at last left the room. I heard him pounding up the stairs and calling his stepmother, a purposeful lady who immediately found my reservation, checked me in, hand-drew a map directing me to the town Pub, the Penguin Rookery, the convenience store (she wrote in the hours: 9-4) and a fish and chips shop, and with an air of finality handed me a large jug of milk “to go with your coffee.” I drove off and backed my car into the tiny garden beside the cottage named “Swan,” before turning the correct way between Rose and Swan to find my own cottage, Sherborough Number 3.

The hour’s drive to Freycinet Park flew. I stopped in Coles Bay to sign up for a sea kayaking adventure in the morning, then pulled into the proper parking lot to the famous Wineglass Bay Lookout. I lined up my park pass on the windscreen, and by three o’clock I was charging up the hill—passing old Aussie couples and Indian tourists carrying babies—with my binocs slung around my neck, a waterproof jacket hanging from my waist, my camera, Chapstick, hat, sunnies, MP3 player and headphones, bottle of water, bag of walnuts, car key, and an apple stashed in various places around my body. I rattled. The steep uphill to the Lookout was quite short, as, fueled by restlessness and mental fatigue and a single salted chocolate caramel, I mindlessly thrust upwards.



I stopped with dozens of other tourists to observe the view at the top, but the sun which had shone so fiercely and made me sweat during the long drive, was now hiding behind gray clouds and a fresh breeze had sprung up. So I bounded lightheartedly down the other side, but rain was beginning to spit and sprinkle between the trees. My nose was cold and would remain cold for the next three rainy, cloud-shifting, sand-tossed hours as I followed the path around the thickly forested point, across Hazards Beach, through woods and along cliffs and past the granite quarries back to the carpark.




The sun was low as I drove the hour back to Swansea. Safe in my cottage, I stood unmoving in the shower until motivated by sheer guilt over the amount of water I was wasting. Still, I emerged dripping, turned on the heat lamp, and loitered on the soft towels long after my toilette was done.

As warmly equipped as my sparse wardrobe would allow, I walked out into a pink and fading sky. It was too late to watch the migration of the fairy penguins, but I didn’t really care anymore. I entered the Bark Hill Tavern/Bakery/Cafe/Backpacker’s Lodge, where I inhaled a huge hot bowl of pumpkin soup before taking a breath to look around the cheery, busy tavern, loaded with families and old people in the bistro and young men in the bar. The chill dissipated with the soup. I nibbled desultorily on an undercooked pizza, practically nodding with exhaustion. My nose was warm.

Tassie Day 4, Saturday

On Saturday morning it was a relief to wake around 7 and, instead of getting in the car, walk through the gray morning down to the waterfront. Salamanca Market had just opened, and people were still setting up. My arrival, though, marked a steady trickle of people munching sausage rolls and holding coffees. I bought a plate of tiny pancakes and ate them with butter and lemon as I wandered. Soon people would fill the aisles, undaunted by the rain that spattered fitfully sideways onto the wares, surging in until by eleven I could barely make my way through the happy chattering eating shopping crowds. But while it was still quiet, I saw the handmade candles and wood carvings of Huon pine, locally grown produce, pretty rolls of cloth and facial creams and pure essential oils and handcarved pepper grinders and wall hangings and poster prints and jams—even Bruny Island Cheese Company had a stand and, would you believe, it had cheese! When I couldn’t move in the aisles for the people, I made my way to the tourist centre, waiting in line to buy a Park Pass and eating a round of cow’s milk washed rind cheese with a fresh sourdough roll.



By noon, I was in the car and heading for Port Arthur, unsuspecting that later, I would look back on this day as my favourite part of the trip. At the recommendation of friends, I had been reading Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, a comprehensive history of the convict foundings of Australia, and so I thought I knew what to expect.



I paid my way in—access cost $23 and included a walking tour and a brief boat tour of the harbour. My vague expectations of horror were stirred by my first tour guide, who explained the answer to a frequently asked question—the reason the guides were not dressed in colonial costumes was due to the fear that Port Arthur would turn into a theme park, instead of what it should be: a solemn reminder of a harsh past and a sad history that birthed a country that is, thankfully, better adjusted today.



Anyway, the ruins of the Penitentiary, Chapel, Officers’ Quarters, hospital, asylum and prison were quite creepy enough. Even wandering in broad daylight, I had less than no desire to go on that evening’s after-dark Ghost Tour. The Prison was the worst. Prisoners had their own chapel, where for services each stood, facing straight ahead, unable to look either to his right or his left or speak except to roar out the hymns. Walking down the corridor between the prison cells was like walking a gauntlet. The narrow corridor was built of big rough cobbles and lined with thick, misshapen wooden doors, each with a tiny slit to see into—prisoners were severely punished for looking out— and airholes punched in the bottom. At one end, the roof had collapsed, and the blue canvas cover flapped in the wind, letting in irregular cold blue patches of sky which gave the only lighting in the place. At any moment, I felt, a despairing ghost would burst from one of those huge heavy doors or, worse, one would swing shut behind me and trap me in those silent stone tombs. In a successful attempt at realism, speakers were installed behind the doors so that from every cell came a faint noise as though a punished man still remained inside: the tap tap of a hammer, a faint rustling from one cell, a scratching from another; the worst was one that coughed, listlessly, every few minutes.

The most dreadful was the Solitary Confinement cell, its soundproof stone walls four feet thick, so that to even approach was to walk first through a tunnel, the sound of the wind and the birds cut off as with a knife to leave only the dull quiet of an empty, pitch black stone room. Alone, I wasn’t about to go in—allegedly you were supposed to walk in and close the door behind you and try to imagine—but I could barely get myself to poke my head in, clutching the door with my other hand, humming to myself just in case I would be able to hear faint breathing...and thinking all the time of Lucy and how unwise it was to shut oneself in a wardrobe.



I had managed to thoroughly freak myself out at that point, so I loitered a bit until some other tourists showed up and then followed a big group through the rest of the prison.

In the convict days, Port Arthur was a self-sufficient community, and you probably couldn’t hear the wrens and sparrows and dippers and soughing of the wind through the gums, for the ringing of iron and hiss of fires and shouts of men and thud of axes on wood—but now, the place is returning slowly to nature and it is easy to realize that the men who lived here were six months of ocean, or a lifetime sentence, away from their loved ones and from civilization. They must have felt beyond the moon. The toll of the eight church bells, now a recording, is nonetheless solemn and you can look out to see and feel just one small shiver that is a tiny taste of the desperation, the wishing, and the hopelessness of waiting for a ship to come in that might change one’s fate, for a wife who would earn permission and gather enough money to come live near you, for a response to the single letter you were allowed to send every three months.



Sure enough, for these men, the despair and the hard work, poor diet, and harsh punishment proved too much for many of them. Small wonder that an Asylum had to soon be built to house the unprecedented numbers of convicts who had gone slowly insane. Even the officers and men in charge felt themselves lost in the encroaching wilderness. It is easy to see where they tried to shut out the miseries and emptiness of their new land. They built stone fountains and English gardens, turned their wives’ drawing rooms to face the sea, away from the suffering of the landsmen, and planted wandering roses, pear orchards, and straight lines of blue gums and avenues of English oak. But they could not shut out the sound of the birds, the smell of the wild, and the rush of the wind. It is a lonely place.



It is good to see such a place both returned to the elements but preserved, left to crumble into a natural and austere peace. In this way, maybe, the solemnity and beauty of the place mask the horrors of its all too recent past.



So with a quietened heart, and a prayer for the souls that rest here, I drove back through the sunset to Hobart.

Tassie Day 3, south to Bruny Island

I ate my Illegally Imported Trail Mix for breakfast on the road. Ambitious plans for the day: driving south and west through the Huon Valley to the Tahune Forest Airwalk, a long platform suspended above the forest, and then driving back east and crossing over to Bruny Island, where my chief interest was the cheese shop.

The drive south seemed to be taking longer than anticipated, and I was glad to stop at around ten at the Shipwright’s Museum. I paid six dollars to enter. The shipwright himself was at work on a lovely sailing boat, and in the barn beyond his workshop was the skeleton of another boat which he is building for Tetsuya, the head chef at Sydney’s most famous and most expensive restaurant—apparently $300 per head is a cheap meal. The shipwright showed me how to plane a piece of the famous Huon pine, and I got to keep the shavings, which perfumed my rental car for the rest of the week. On the way out, the friendly lady at the desk warned me that it was another hour’s drive to Tahune.




As it was already nearly noon, I made an executive decision, turned the car east, and returned through Huon toward Bruny Island. A few of the old Huon orchards are still growing, and I stopped once at a roadside stand to pick up a bag of Summer Gala apples: two dollars for about fifteen small, fresh, crisp new apples.



I continued along the coast, counting no less than seven roadkill possums, and arriving at the ferry station just in time to miss the ferry. So I left my car at the front of the line and walked back up the road, gazing out over the lovely pier and the still harbour, and munching another cone of the local ice cream, Valhalla.



The ferry ride was not as scenic as anticipated...



and driving onward, I pulled into the Bruny Island Cheese Company at last—where the girl behind the counter announced that they were sold out of cheeses. SOLD OUT! I, and three or four other prospective customers, looked with longing through the windows of the refrigerated room full of shelves and shelves of new cheese—which hadn’t been inspected yet and therefore was not for sale to the public for another two days. Well, that dashed my hastily-formed plan to try to find a hotel and camp out overnight for the cheese, so I sadly tasted a pickled cherry and then drove on.
Twenty km later I found a small shop selling locally made fudge, which made me feel a little better.

The road was turning rough very quickly. In some places, it was unpaved, and a sign would pop up saying “Slow to 45” then I would peal around a corner only to skid into an instant cloud of reddish gray dust and choking rattling stones. I now turned toward the east, crossing over a narrow neck of land: the Fairy Penguin Rookery! Accompanied by five or six people who had been on the ferry with me earlier, I climbed an enormous staircase to a lovely lookout over the beaches, but unfortunately the nocturnal penguins were hiding down their holes. I did find a dead one on the beach, but neglected to photo it.



It was too late in the day to join any of the wildlife cruises for seals or whales, so, feeling somewhat dejected, I rolled along the gravel and past the duck pond into another Berry Farm. I couldn’t pick my own blueberries, but I did order a piece of berry cake which came heavily loaded with cream and strawberry coulis. The kind man behind the counter gave me a free taste of strawberry Valhalla ice cream, which is amazingly rich, and I sat and ate and fought the wasps off my sweet treat and watched the yellow butterflies dipping about.




Refreshed, or at least sugar high, I drove south and found, at last, South Bruny National Park. I glanced briefly at Captain Cook’s original landing site—pretty much just a rock with a plaque, off the road—and then creaked my way out of the car, stretching cramped limbs, ready to hike.

I set off along the trail past the sites of old whaling pits, mysterious cairns of smooth gray stones, and house foundations from the 1830s. After an hour, the track turned very steeply uphill. Soon panting and sweating, I was now determined to reach the top of what seemed to be a mountain. Sure enough, dizzying drops appeared first on my left, then on my right—I was on a narrow strip surrounded by cliffs, and undergoing what is known in business terms as “escalating commitment”—my pride would simply not let me turn around and concede defeat. This paid off, not when I reached the top, but just before: when a little brown being snuffled into view just off the path to my left. AN ECHIDNA! My first sighting! I completely ignored the view from the top of the mountain, which actually wasn’t that great anyway, and instead hurried down the trail again, nervous about missing the final ferry off the island. In just half an hour I was at the bottom with just enough time to kick off my shoes and wade into the thin, clear, sparkling cold water. I hopped in the car, whizzed around winding corners and skidded through the off-road sections like a pro, and just made the second to last ferry.




It was still daylight, and I unhurriedly drove the 45 minutes home, stopping once to pick up a tiny tub of locally grown raspberries. The sweat had dried over me, and I was now thoroughly chilled and remembering the more unpleasant aspects of living in a cold environment. Unsure which restaurants were good—a Google search and several conversations over the day with Tassie locals had revealed mixed reviews—I walked indecisively through the fading light and rising breeze until , feet aching, I stopped at a lively Italian restaurant in Salamanca Square and ate bland pasta until a lucky snag of one of the waiters got me a fantastically good Tiramisu. The sounds of Friday night revellers echoed along the empty streets and off the water as I made my way to early bed.

Tassie Day 2: Thursday

I finally fell asleep last night curled in a little ball, trying to protect my cold nose and cold toes all at once. I woke up snug and toasty, but I could just about breathe a little white cloud into the air. From the pillow I could look straight out into the blue, blue sky, over broad green ivy wrapped around the decaying balcony, past the ugly little brown bird perched on the wire, and out into the south end of Hobart, the casino rearing its ugly white front behind a forest of yachts and sailing boats in the bay.

I checked out the wares at Jackman and McRoss, the rather famous bakery in Battery Point, a three-miute walk from Kyla’s place, while waiting for my skinny flat white one Equal, then it was off to breakfast at one of the thousands of cafes. At Banjo’s in Salamanca Square, I started with a tiny tomato quiche tart, with little cubes of ham, fresh out of the oven and continued with scrambled eggs and ripped parsley liberally piled over two huge slices of Australian bacon—which is more like thin ham—and two huge flat slices of rather boring toast. Some Fulbright friends, Kate and Mike, were in town but they were exhausted from their week of hiking the Overland Track, and Kate had an interview besides, so after a bit of dawdling I finally jumped in the car around 1030 and took off for Port Arthur.



Today I was much more confident, even getting in the car on the right side without even looking. In fact, I think I drove for the first two or three days with a bit of a smug grin on my face, making exaggeratingly grand hand motions when letting other drivers cut in front of me, and with my windows rolled down and the stereo cranked up, feeling the urge to announce to people at random stop lights, “Look at me! I’m an ambi-driver!”

Half an hour out of Hobart on the two-lane A6—all roads in Tassie seemed to be two-lane except for the ones that were one-lane—I pulled into my first Site of Interest: the Sorrell Berry Farm. I stopped the car triumphantly in the parking lot, rested a moment to calm my adrenaline, and hopped out clutching the wallet, binoculars, and camera that would accompany me to every single place the rest of the week. The two Aussie tourists in front of me were already tasting: apricot jam, blackberry wine, blackberry liquor, tayberry jam (a cross of raspberry with blackberry), cherry wine, boysenberry syrup. The server was liberal with her pouring so instead of trying more drinks, I got a $5 punnet and headed out to pick my own strawberries. No one else had opted to pick this morning so I walked up and down long rows of pears, apricots, apples and of course, ten varieties of strawberries. The fields were silent except for an occasional car on the A6 and the cicadas buzzing distantly over the hills. 500g of strawberries, a jar of apricot jam, and two lime-green Nashi pears later, I was back on the road.



Another forty minutes’ drive on a dramatically windy road brought me to the Pirates Bay lookout, where I stepped out of the car to join the same couple I had just seen at the Berry Farm. I had not yet realized that this would be a trend: there are a limited number of roads in Tasmania, and so whenever you stop at an attraction, you can be sure that every other car on the road is full of tourists with whom you will spend the day. Sometimes you pass them, like when they decide to stop at Copping’s Colonial Convict museum and you don’t, but they are bound to catch up sooner or later at the next Site of Interest. Anyway, I had not yet realized this would be a theme of the trip, so we exchanged smiles and nods and I left them with their picnic lunch and headed off down the side road, which wound and wound and wound about a series of hairpin turns down the cliff towards the sea.



A sign announced the Tesselated Rocks, and it was the first incredibly beautiful scenery I would see. Delighted by the strange geological phenomenon of flat rocks edged like striated pavement into “pans” and “loaves,” I spent two hours in the burning sun hunting for fossils, farther and farther up the beach, leaving most of the tourists about two km behind, until I came round a corner and discovered a blowhole—a long tunnel in the rock where the sea ran in and spouted upward. I watched the glorious nature for nearly an hour, yet unaware of how very many of these beauties are there, untouched and undiscovered in Tasmania. I only left when the rising tide threatened to cut off my promontory from land.



It was getting rather late in the day, and I was hot and getting tired when I pulled off the road at my next stop, the Officers’ Barracks at Eaglehawk Neck, just where the Tasman peninsula joins the mainland. This chokepoint was lined, in the old convict days, with a plain of crushed shell so that human footsteps would make as much noise as possible, and a line of brutish dogs snarled from their iron posts and strained to attack any hapless convict attempting escape. I stood on the Neck, now quiet, and walked the few hundred metres from the road, over the sand dunes to the long white beaches of the east. Swans were curling their black necks along the mud flats in the west.



There was no chance, now, of making it the remaining 26 km to Port Arthur today, and I still hadn’t seen all I wanted to on the peninsula. So I drove on to the Blowhole, bought an enormous dish of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for lunch, and munched while looking with some disappointment on the quiet surf, which was impeding the Blowhole’s usually violent and exciting spumes. Further down the road and much more impressive were the Tasman Arch and the Devil’s Kitchen. All of these geological phenomena result from the sea creating tunnels into the cliffs: part of the roof of the tunnel collapses, creating a hole through which water rushes and spurts up (the Blowhole), a huge tunnel out to the sea (the Tasman Arch), or just a vast crevasse (Devil’s Kitchen, which was vertiginous and spectacular).





Halfway back to Hobart, I got in touch with Kate, but she and Mike didn’t think they had time before their flight to enjoy dinner. So I pulled off the road toward Richmond, the old colonial town which is famous in the tour guides for its arts and crafts and historical old buildings.




Sure enough, Richmond had all of the above, but certainly not in the plural: one tiny art gallery (closed), one wood carving shop (closed), one old gaol (closed for tours for the day), about seven old buildings (all within 100 metres of one another and all occupied by present owners), and a convict bridge. The whole town had maybe 20 other buildings, besides these. I was already a little frustrated, as my GPS had blithely directed me towards the shortest road to Richmond, which happened to be closed off and under construction, and thirty extra km later I was dehydrated, hungry, and not inclined to stare at the ducks under any bridge, even if it had been constructed by convicts...



So it was with relief that I beelined past the gaol and past the historic buildings and straight into the local pub, the lively Richmond Arms, where I was greeted with a cheery shout by the barman. I sat out at a picnic bench and watched the dusk, eating the Richmond Arms chicken: huge pieces of breaded chicken stuffed with squares of ham, in a lovely mustard sauce, surrounded by a vast pile of buttered peas and corn, three roasted potatos, a bowl of salad and, as the centrepiece of my trencherlike plate, a mysterious many-fingered object which proved to be neither chicken nor calamari, but deep fried cauliflower. Finally sated, I headed for Hobart and home.

Tassie Day 1, Still Wednesday

On the plane, I was very aware that I was about to spend a week driving on the left side of the road, and kept playing little mental games with myself like they tell the big athletes to do before the competition: I visualized myself “winning,” that is, adeptly maneuvering through roundabouts and making confident right turns across lanes of oncoming traffic. I distracted myself from worry by chatting with my seatmate, Daniel, a knee surgeon who spoke very shaky English and was on his way to visit a Tasmanian girl he met on a seven day bike ride through the Andes. Or I think that’s what he said, anyway. Then I turned my attention to the plane food menu (Cadbury dairy milk bar, Byron Bay cookie bars, a Traveller Pie with tomato sauce, Tasty Cheese and crackers, all for extremely bloated prices.) I fidgeted while the flight attendant reminded us to “do up our seatbelts” and tried to read the half of the flight magazine which was in Mandarin and got annoyed because someone else had already done both the crossword and the Sudoku. As the plane descended, I flipped on my video camera and managed to get a panorama of the bridges, houses, and complicated inlets of sea and river that are Hobart.



Stepped out of the plane into a beautiful sunset, and the first thing I noticed was the air. Like most cities, Sydney has a unique smell, not strong, but a little musty, maybe the smell of hot red roof tiles and the ocean with a hint of trash and petrol and busy city streets. Tasmania smells empty, like nothing—clean, fresh, sweet flowers here and there wafting on breezes, but in between, nothing—just wild. It was WONDERFUL. We queued up on the tarmac to enter the terminal and I saw the sign: Tasmanian customs. Why would we have to go through Customs, having just come from the same country? Uh oh...Tassie is an island...Then I saw another sign. “Beware the Tasmanian sniffer dog! If you have fruits and vegetables HE WILL FIND YOU! Fines on the spot!” I instantly remembered two things: first, the Customs fine is over 200$; second, I had a bag of dried apricots, cranberries and almonds in the bottom of my backpack. Oh, no, not five minutes in this state and already I was having run ins with the law...and I hadn’t even seen my rental car yet.
I shuffled slowly forward with everyone else, trying to act unconcerned, and wondering what to do. Then the beagle, which at any other time I would have thought was cute, but which now looked cruel, brutish, and slavering, snuffled at the bag of the man in front of me. The security guard pulled him aside. “Sir, do you have any fruits in your bag...” I seized my chance and walked briskly away. Whoops! Sorry, Tasmania!



With an imaginary hue and cry ringing in my ears, I got my baggage and hurried out through the teensy tiny airport to pick up my Budget car, a little white Kia which luckily was already covered in scratches from the last hapless adventurer, which doubtless would camouflage mine. By the time the paperwork was done—and this car rental cost me almost twice as much as the actual flights to Tassie—the sun was setting and my hands were sweating with nerves.

The hour had come. I sat down, gave myself another pep talk, visualized “winning” (i.e. escaping Tassie with both my life and no major insurance claims on the car), adjusted the windows and mirrors and seat, and rolled out of the parking lot. Verrrrry slowly. Thankfully, the drive to Kyla’s place was only twenty minutes and after a false start or two, and having turned on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal multiple times, I made it. I kept just below the 110 kph speed limit on the highway, wondering what that was in miles—it sounded very fast. (It’s less than 70 mph...dur).



My GPS worked perfectly and I arrived at Kyla’s place in historic Battery Point just as twilight set in, casting a purple glow over the small, quaint cottages and crooked streets. After pulling off an incredible left -side parallel parking job, I nervously patted the car goodbye til tomorrow, and went for a walk. It was nine in the evening and the sun was gone, but three little children were skateboarding through the neighbourhood, directly down the middle of the road, heedless of anything else. The neighbourhood felt old, quiet, safe.



My last realization before I went to bed was the rather pathetic one that, why yes, I DID have better Internet reception on this teensy sheep-inhabited farming island than I ever have in my flat back in bustling Sydney.