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.