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.