History and apricots

Here I sit at our campsite outside Ye Old Buckland Inn, in Buckland, absolutely replete after an evening meal of garlic-marinated mussels, cheeses and fresh apricots . . . all from Tasmania.

We’re still eating and drinking our way around the State, after the usual gargantuan feasts at Christmas. One of Nigel’s colleagues, invited for Christmas lunch, turned up with a huge bowl full of raspberries from his garden, so there has been no shortage of fruits.

John virtually strapped back on his builder’s belt over Christmas to help Nigel build a

hu-u-ge cubby house for 9-year-old Erin. They beavered away at it for a few days to the frame complete, leaving Nigel to start putting on the cladding when we left Smithton on Dec 27. The roof has been ordered but currently is just plastic tarps.



Erin on the verandah of her cubby house.



It is so big that Nigel says it will be his doghouse, and Tracey has her eye on it for an art studio when the kids get too big to be interested.

As we’d pretty well ‘done’ the North Coast, we headed south along the Lake Highway, past the great highland lakes . . . and it was freezing! we spent a night deep in a forest clearing beside a babbling river. Lovely!

A highlight was a visit to the Waddamanna Power Station Museum, deep in a valley. It had been Australia’s first hydro-electric power station in 1916 and it is splendid that, although decommissioned, it now hosts an exhibition of the early power stations’ equipment.



One of the garage-store wall adornments.



Across more mountain roads we went to the historic Midlands town of Bothwell, settled in the 1820s by mostly Scottish people. This is reflected in the street signs, which all have a tartan background. It was also where, on a property owned by a Scottish chap, Australia’s first golf was played in the 1830s.

The interesting thing was that we had to pay our $15 overnight fee to be in the town campground to the chap in the garage-store, the walls of which are adorned with stuffed deer heads. It’s a huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ area of Tasmania, with lots of keen fishermen on the lakes and apparently fallow deer are quite feral in the hills around, so that store sells ammo, lots of hunting magazines and even raffle tickets for a five-day sambar deer hunt on the mainland.

Then on we came to the lovely old historic town of Richmond, full of weekend visitors as it’s only a short distance from Hobart, and it was a lovely day.

The ducks under the convict-built bridge must be the best-fed in Australia as lots of kids were throwing bread to them. We walked and walked, visiting the sombre old convict gaol as well as a model of Old Hobart Town, incredibly well done.



Hobart Town, as it was in the 1820s.



In  driving around the district  . . . stopping to buy cheeses, local chocolate, and the afore-mentioned mussels . . . we noted how terribly dry the hills looked, then took a back road to get to the east coast highway. That’s when we found an orchard selling apricots, for just $4 a kilo so went completely nuts and bought 10kg. Those we don’t eat fresh we’ll stew for desserts and breakfast fruit.

By sheer chance it turned out to be the orchard John had been talking about for weeks. He’d seen a Landline program on ABC-TV ages ago featuring an Aussie couple who’d left the high life as IT experts in Hong Kong to establish an apricot orchard in Tassie, concentrating on supplying the European market at this time of the year. By the look of the huge orchard and the processing shed, it’s all going well . . . and the apricots are wonderful!

Highs and lows

A Merry Christmas to all!

We are back in Smithton with Nigel and family, preparing for Christmas, so I probably won’t post another blog until after Boxing Day.

As we continued our progress westwards across the north of Tasmania, we really did experience the highs and lows of this island state. From a breathtaking view of the Alum Cliffs, rearing into the sky above a deep river gorge, we then plunged under the mountains themselves in the caves west of Deloraine.



One of the glorious bits of stalactite
sculpture in the caves.



One thing’s for sure. No overweight people could possibly manage to tour the Marakoopa and King Solomon’s Cave systems. We thoroughly enjoyed the tours but there were some rather squeezy bits to navigate along the way. Seeing the fabulous shapes formed by water dripping through limestone for literally millions of years, hearing the stories of how the caves were discovered, and listening to underground streams rushing by makes one feel totally insignificant as a contemporary human being.

Once we’d come out into the daylight, we continued wandering the mountain areas, spending the night at a place called Gowrie Park, a former Hydro Tasmania town, now a camping and caravan park. Opposite was a modern shed system for what everyone down here calls ‘the Hydro’ and it was painted in a fabulous mural fashion, showing the development of many mountain streams into sources of electricity. What made it even more impressive was that the whole thing was painted on corrugated iron.



This Sheffield mural from the 1980s is painted on brick, but
the weatherboards depicted are so real one can almost
touch them.



It was a taste of the next day’s highlight, a visit to the mural town of Sheffield. We’d thoroughly recommend taking the audio tour of the murals (available at the tourist centre) as the explanations and details are wonderful. It took us most of a rainy morning, with a stop for a coffee and scones at a delightful little café in one of the town’s old buildings. It was outside that café that we met two of Sheffield’s characters, Ludo and his alpaca named Pedro.

When he heard we were from northern NSW, he told us about visiting Lismore and The Channon, crossing Bass Strait most years to get away from the Tasmanian winters. He took Pedro to the special school in Lismore, delighting the children.



One of the letter boxes outside Wilmot.



On we drove to Railton, a town making a special attraction out of topiary, and later on, after yet more mountain driving, we came to Wilmot, which specializes in interesting letter boxes. It is also the site of a still-operating general store that was the first G J Coles store. It was one of Mr G J Coles’ sons who started a variety store in Melbourne, with nothing costing more than two shillings and sixpence, which later developed into the Coles-Myer retail empire.

After a night in a seafront caravan park in Devonport, being entertained by the sight of the Spirit of Tasmania emerging from the river entrance, and the local high school’s leavers’ dinner at the nearby surf club, AND a virtual Watership Down outside, with rabbits and pademelons everywhere, we collected a new mudguard we had ordered for the truck, and set off along the coast, still travelling west. First port of call was a berry farm where we picked a huge punnet of tayberries, a cross between blackberries and raspberries. Yum!



The little coastal town of Penguin featured a
 special Christmas coat for its permanent
 statue of  what else but a penguin.



It was disappointing to find that a camping spot at Sisters Beach had just been closed only days before, making it now for day use only, and we fell in love with beautiful, beautiful Boat Harbour Beach nearby (no camping and barely room for just a few houses) before settling in for the night behind the Rocky Cape tavern.

That meant we were close to the Rocky Cape National Park the next morning, which we explored before driving on to Smithton in plenty of time for the annual Christmas parade that evening, led by all the emergency vehicles from around the district, all tinselled up, drivers wearing Santa caps, and sirens blaring and bleeping.

All along this north-west coast is a rich agricultural area, so we’ve seen huge dairy farms, fields of opium poppies everywhere (Tasmania supplies 50% of the world’s medicinal needs for morphine and codeine), pyrethrum daisies, onions, potatoes, carrots, even some wheat, as well as beef cattle and sheep.

Here in Smithton is a huge new powdered milk factory, an abalone processing facility, an abattoir, a potato chip freezing factory and some timber works, so it’s quite an industrial place.

And here it is we’ll rest for a few days, enjoy Christmas, then get on the road again to explore the centre, the east coast, south and west coast of this lovely island.

Cold weather in Tasmanian summer

After our stint at the north-east corner of Tasmania, we headed south along the east coast, again by back roads, and prowled around an area north of St Helens, where we found a great little beach camping area.

This is part of the Bay of Fires conservation area. The bay is so called because red algae has stained the rocks at each headland and the sand is absolutely snow white. Unfortunately it rained quite a lot for the night we were there so we set off the next day for the relatively civilized centre of St Helens, a nice little coastal town where we bought coral prawns from a roadside vendor who catches them on his father’s trawler . . . out from Mackay!

Then we headed inland, stopping first at the famous Pyengana cheese factory for a tasting and some purchases, then heading into the mountains to see Tasmania’s tallest (90 metres) waterfall, St Columba’s.

It WAS dramatic, particularly standing at the viewing platform, right under the falls, after a walk through almost tropical rainforest, particularly what are called manferns, taller than most men.



Wild foxgloves and blue gum forests, high in the mountains.



We actually headed further into the mountains to see another waterfall, but as we drove higher and higher through the blue gum forests, the fog . . . or low cloud . . .intensified, so we turned back, but not before reaching a sign showing where the West Pyengana School had stood from 1927 to 1942. It had been a little timber village, but is now taken over by the wild foxgloves found in a lot of Tassie’s forest areas.

The story is that they were introduced by Chinese miners in the 19^th century, who extracted the digitalis, but they are now gloriously found all over the place. If the birds carry the seed, then there must be a lot of Tasmanian birds without heart problems!



The town hall, scene of an excellent Saturday market.



We ended that day camped at the back of the Weldborough pub, once the heart of a thriving tin-mining village in the forest, with lots of Chinese there. The hotel has existed, in one incarnation or another, since 1886, and now boasts the distinction of being the only pub in Tasmania to stock every one of the beers produced by the state’s micro breweries. It also stocks a lot of ciders so we gave them a taste test while having a hu-u-u-ge meal that night.



On we went the next day to Derby, the centre of major tin-mining for many years. The Saturday market was being held in the town hall, so we found some bits and pieces for Christmas with the family, and met some of the locals. There were more at the excellent Tin Dragon Centre, which told the story of tin-mining; and at the old schoolhouse museum next door, manned that morning by a volunteer who was highly informative and most interesting.



Just one of the old trees at Legerwood.



We found we’d spent the whole morning in Derby, so after visiting Legerwood, where some WWI memorial trees which had become unsafe were chainsaw-sculpted to remain as memorials, found a great little camping ground at Myrtle Park, right next to the St Patrick’s River. It also had been the centre of a community called Targa, this time based on timber, and the camping ground includes a hall that used to be the school as well as a cricket pitch and wonderful picnic grounds.



Jacobs Ladder, on the way to the ski village.



We awoke the next morning to a frost outside (and this was Dec 17!) and only 8C inside, but once our diesel heater had been switched on, we didn’t get out of bed until it was a civilized 19C. We continued with the cold weather as we ascended that morning to the Ben Lomond National Park, including a ski village at the top of an horrendous ascent called Jacobs Ladder. Not much happening in summer, and still horribly cold, but we pulled up and had lunch there while surveying the bleak landscape.

It seemed like a different world to enter Launceston about 50km later, admiring the peacocks at Cataract Gorge and finding a place to stay just outside, so I could at last get some laundry done.

Tomorrow: Main mission, to find some more raspberries and start exploring the towns and villages west of Launceston.

Eating well and often

Just after we had our wonderful hot chocolate breakfast on arrival in Tasmania, we vowed to eat and drink our way around this island.

We’ve certainly done that during the past few days.

First we bought cherries, just picked, as well as nectarines and apricots, at a large orchard; then strawberries at another farm, as well as strawberries in jelly that we had for dessert. After I had indulged in a wine tasting at Pipers Brook vineyard (John can’t touch a drop as it’s zero allowance for truck drivers, which is what we’re travelling in) . . . and bought a couple of bottles . . . we found a farm that was picking the first of the raspberries for the season.



The Bridstowe lavender farm where we indulged in
lavender-flavoured scones.



So for breakfast today we had raspberries on our cereal, the big bag of cherries is just about gone, and we polished off lunch with some apricots.

As well as stuffing ourselves with fruit, and lavender-flavoured scones, we’ve also had some wonderful experiences. First there was the mining and heritage museum at Beaconsfield. It is quite the best museum of its type I’ve ever seen, with the older section built in and around the ruins of a building used by a mine on the site that closed in 1914. The newer section, featuring the Beaconsfield mine rescue in 2006, was built in 2008. It’s a very moving display and showed how the whole town was holding its breath until those two men walked out alive.

There are collections of old machinery and daily living implements as well as one man’s hobby (or obsession) of knobs turned on a wood lathe, representing 150 different types of timber. This lines a walkway and is most impressive.

We spent day touring the eastern and western banks ofthe Tamar Valley, just stopping in Launceston to collect some info from the tourist centre. We ended at Low Head, the ocean entrance on the eastern bank, and spent the night in a caravan park there. It’s a town full of history, with the pilot’s cottage enclave particularly gorgeous.

On our way, we drove in and out of Bell Bay, centre of heavy industry and aluminium smelting that was a huge surprise in the sleepy river valley.

The next day we headed as far east as we could manage, currently spending a couple of days at Petal Point. If you have a map of Tasmania, look for Cape Portland, which is at the top north-east corner. Petal Point is just across the bay from that cape, and is just a camping area set in fairly windswept heath country. A few people seem to have set up camp among the scrubby trees but we chose an open site overlooking the sea.

There have been some wildlife surprises here, among them a black feral cat which emerged from the heath at sunset. Later, around 9pm in Tasmania’s long twilight, I was delighted to see my first live wombat in the wild. Any others I’ve spotted have been roadkill in southern NSW, Victoria and Tasmania. There was also a rabbit not far from the wombat.



A couple of free-loaders we spotted as we unfolded
 some chairs



Then this morning, when we open the folding chairs we’d left standing folded up by the side of the van overnight, we found each contained a couple of  tiny brown frogs, who were pretty miffed at being turfed out.

We have walked and walked on the long sandy beach, watching a few people put to sea in small boats; chatted to one of the locals (from Scottsdale) who was preparing for his family’s annual month-long stay over Christmas; then were interrupted in the middle of eating cherries outside with a westerly front coming through, so down came the awning and we retired inside to watch scuds of rain arriving.

As we look north we can see the mountains on Cape Barren Island and Flinders Island, and to the east are the towers of a huge wind farm currently being built by Hydro Tasmania. Costing close to $400 million, it will have 56 towers and will start generating electricity in February, with the whole thing complete and on line by July, and capable of supplying 50,000 homes with electricity. The Scottsdale local told us he’d seen one of the blades for just one tower coming through this morning on the road into this area. That blade was 44 metres long.



The view from our Petal Point campsite across to the
Musselroe wind farm, with two incomplete towers visible.



We’ll probably move on some time tomorrow, still sticking to the back roads and making our way to the northern part of the east coast. We’re due back in Smithton, in the far north-west in seven days, to prepare for Christmas, so will spend that time exploring the byways and valleys west of Launceston, gradually working our way west.

Amid chocolate and trains

And so we came to Tasmania, aboard the Spirit of Tasmania, on relatively calm seas, dining well in the restaurant and sleeping deeply in our cabin until 5am when we woke to see Devonport approaching.

It had been a long wait, along with other motorhomes and cars towing caravans, to board the ship, and our vehicles were garaged with all the semi-trailers, but this meant we were among the first off.

Once clear of the quarantine check (no fruit or vegies into Tassie) we sped south and decided to indulge ourselves with breakfast at the House of Anvers. This is a Belgian chocolatier’s headquarters in a lovely old house and garden. No, we didn’t actually have chocolate for breakfast (croissants and pesto mushrooms), but we DID have steaming pots of hot chocolate.

We had most of the day to fill before heading west to Smithton and the family, as nobody was home until early afternoon. So back we went to Devonport, drove around, walked the Mersey River foreshore and found a splendid sculpture of the Spirit of the Sea at the river entrance, along with poignant memorials to 17 young district men who had died in the Vietnam war.



The little railmotor in which we had a short ride
at the Don Railway Museum.



We also checked out the gloriously-striped lighthouse on the seafront before driving out to the Don Railway Museum. We thought we were a bit early but it was open and we had a ride on one of its trains along a line to the seafront and back. There were only four of us on board. The driver was one of the volunteers, mostly elderly, who work on restoration of a big collection of locos and rolling stock. Another showed us around some of the current projects and we were fascinated by a big wooden box full of the biggest spanners we’d ever seen.

It seems that each works on a specific bolt on a specific loco or carriage. Some of the oldest carriages dated back to the 1870s and it seems railways stitched Tasmania together, particularly on the west coast where there were few roads.

Then we pottered on to Smithton, and the family. We were in charge of the two youngest for the weekend as Nigel and Tracey were off to a concert in a Launceston vineyard and the eldest had things to do in Burnie.



Callum and Erin Somerville fooling about on a tandem bike
on the riverfront near their home in Smithton.



It was a busy weekend. First the nearby Stanley show (very windy but good fun), some fishing off the nearby wharves (their house is on the eastern esplanade of the Duck River), some walking and shopping and generally keeping the household going until parents returned on the Sunday night.

We left on Monday, aiming to get as far east along the northern coast as we could, but we dillied and dallied and got distracted in various places . . . and by gloriously delicious berry icecream near Port Sorell . .. so only reached Beaconsfield by mid-afternoon and made camp in the showgrounds there, meeting some Queenslanders who had already been in Tasmania for 10 weeks and will not leave until Anzac Day.

Today, we’ll visit the local gold mining museum, then explore the Tamar Valley. Life continues to be very good.

PS. The bathing boxes I featured in the previous blog were at Brighton Beach, not St Kilda. I hadn't realised we had driven so far south when I took the photo.

Just nine hours by ferry from Tasmania

This is the last blogpost from mainland soil, as for the next two months we’ll be in Tasmania.



The colourful bathing boxes.



We are filling in a few hours before we board the ferry, parked in a little area just south of the St Kilda beach and its famous bathing boxes.

Last night we stayed at a delightful caravan park at Mornington, obviously on Mornington Peninsula, and drove up the beach-side road on the western side of Port Phillip Bay to Station Pier, where we’ll return later this afternoon to board the Spirit of Tasmania.

This drive was mainly for us to know the way, which was dead simple, and we found the Spirit absolutely dwarfed by a hu-u-u-ge cruise ship pulled in on the other side of the pier.

So we then turned around, and found this little park where we can watch the sailing craft on the bay, as well as people parasailing, and the arrival of huge bulk cargo ships.

Melbourne is sunny and pleasant, a big change from the past few days when we were at Lakes Entrance and endured westerly gales and scudding rain most of the time.

We took a boat cruise a little way into the lakes system, which is immense and claimed to be five times the size of Sydney Harbour. This involved bouncing around in the chop as we passed the entrance from the sea, but things quietened down once we started getting into the lakes themselves. Lunch was at the Metung pub, then we set off again for Lakes Entrance . . . virtually blown home by the wind.

There were only 6 on board the boat which could take 47 (that’s the minimum they need to do a cruise) as several groups had cancelled when the weather got bad. We were so glad we went as the bird life on the lakes includes great flocks of black swans and pelicans. I’d never seen so many swans gathered in one place before.

The wind was so strong that night that even the motorhome was rocking, and of course we had taken down the awning the day before.

Just one of the Lakes Entrance sculptures, an army nurse
 and wheelchair. Part of the huge fishing fleet is in the
background

We were entranced by some chainsaw sculptures carved into huge tree stumps along the main street of Lakes Entrance. They commemorate the maritime history of the area, as well as a set which commemorate World War I veterans, including nurses and Simpson and his donkey, all ‘growing’ out of the tree stumps.

Last night we had to make sure we had eaten all our fruit and vegies as we can’t take any into Tasmania. And of course, there was just one onion left, and as we really didn’t fancy onion on toast for breakfast, I donated it to the receptionist at the caravan park.

Bermagui bliss

On a cool morning in Bermagui, a bit different from the couple of days we spent in a very hot Canberra, we’ve just walked along the beach, then re-stocked the pantry with some essentials, including fresh fish.

After our quiet time in a couple of national parks, Canberra was a shock to the system, but we had a great time with John’s brother and sister-in-law.

Pebbly Beach, in the Murramarang National Park just north of Bateman’s Bay was a favourite, particularly for encounters with wildlife. Even on the way there we called in at Bendalong, with John regaling me with tales of how for years people fed stingrays there. And would you believe it, as we pulled into a little beach near the headland, there were two people feeding stingrays!

I haven’t seen that since I was with a friend on Rottnest Island about 5 years ago.

The female satin bowerbird trying to clean up our
avocado dip (note her bright blue eyes).

And once we had established ourselves at Pebbly Beach, noting a rather geriatric wallaby lying on the grass nearby with one ear that couldn’t prick anymore, in swooped a rather super bird with green markings and bright blue eyes (a quick glance at our bird book identified her as a female satin bowerbird) who was all over us, literally.

As we sat outside, she jumped up on my lap, found a crumb on my shorts, then onto the arm of the chair. Later on she jumped onto my foot as I sat with legs crossed. It was a perch later favoured by a couple of rainbow lorikeets, much to our delight, but we weren’t quick enough to photograph them. The ranger’s wife, who came around later to collect our camping fee, told us they had probably been fed by past visitors, which had made them so trusting.

The female bowerbird later came diving in to pinch a nut from our drinks table, and after we’d cleaned up a bowl of avocado dip, she came looking to see if any was left.

And the wallabies! They were basking in the sun on ledges close to the sea, feeding on the grass, totally unafraid of people walking among them and generally being a delight for some of the overseas people among the day visitors to the park. Hardly anyone spent the night there so we were able to witness the usual late afternoon mayhem with rosellas and lorikeets flying from one tree to another, all making a huge racket until suddenly, as night fell, they all became silent.



Bermagui breakfast . . . our new Oz eggrings have their first
 outing for a beachside meal we enjoyed.



But back to the present. Yesterday we travelled from Canberra to Moruya, then south to Bermagui, not taking main roads when we could find a back road. So we went south from Queanbeyan to the little old mining town of Captains Flat, then east along forest and mountain roads (and they were mountainous!) until we were down in the Araluen valley where peaches and nectarines are ripening, and then headed for the coast.