As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey, we're posting the chapters here. Last week's entry: Paraguay. Before that: Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today, it's our driving tour of Tasmania.
There’s a wild, end of the earth feeling at the top of Mt. Nelson, looking across Hobart and Storm Bay to the Southern Ocean beyond. Next landfall: Antarctica.
As far back as 1836 they relayed semaphore signals from the penal colony down at Port Arthur on the coast - via right here on this spot on Mount Nelson - to Hobart, up Storm Bay in the harbour.
Out Sandy Bay road, and up the Mount Nelson Road, there are seven switchbacks, all with a name and a sign, "Bend 1" to “Bend 7." Names like "flat," "grating," and "steep" bends.
Cold for summertime. A high of just 14 degrees (58) due to "cold air from the southwest," and much colder at the top, where two guys from Tokyo, here on a research ship, took our picture with Hobart as a backdrop. The sun obliged just then by lighting the valley.
Japanese gentleman number one: "What you say before you take picture?"
"Cheese," we replied.
"What you say?" I asked.
Guy number two: "Cheese."
*****
To know a people, know their food. We filled sacks with local brands, mostly junk food. Cheezels Cheese Puffs, vita-wheat crackers, sliced smoked Tasmanian salmon, Tasmania cheddar with continental pepper from the P.Y. Engana cheese factory ("traditionally made by John Healey") and Cedel peppermint toothpaste.
*****
At night we walked the Hobart wharf for nothing in particular. Had a drink at the Ball & Chain. Didn't at the Whale Pub at "Hobart's oldest hotel," where you can't get service.
The Victoria Pub tried to do the traditional British thing, except it had a blacklight, and kids out for Saturday night. The tourist book said, "Hobart nightlife is centered on the home" but 30 or 50 Hobart kids, all looking as American as anywhere in the U.S., all smoking, geared up for a little light Hobart boogie.
We studied stone buildings and passed a statue turning green like statues everywhere without learning who it was. Just being here on the tip of Tasmania, that was it, gazing out the bay and down toward the end of the world.
Sunday morning at 7:20. Tasmaid milk and coffee. The TV showed little green showers intermittent from not quite Melbourne south all the way to the pole. A "polar weather system." Bright red showers were poppin' way up in Papua New Guinea.
You have to compare Hobart and Reykjavik, Iceland because they're capitals of the two islands most at antipodes. Both towns paint their roofs bright colors. They're comparable in size. Hobart is the last outpost, at 42 degrees south latitude, the end of Australia. But Hobart has a rest-of-the-island that's habitable. In Iceland, you're in Reykjavik or you're frozen.
Hobart mostly slept, save for a street-corner paperboy and a few open takeaways. The suburbs glided away, all lined up with prim little one-story houses, modest but ever-so-kempt.
A town so small shouldn’t have so many one-way streets.
The River Derwent escorted us out of town, then flowed under what they call a "rising bridge," where a thousand black swans preened on either side of the highway. Alongside yellow fields, sheep manure was $2 a bag, and you could buy cherries for $4.95 a kilo.
Ian Savage, a barkeep back along the main road down from the ferry at Launceston, told us not to take the road around Great Lake because it wasn't bitumen all the way. Still, that's the way we headed, aiming to lop off lots of kilometers doing so, or at least make an adventure of trying.
So after Glenorchy and Bridgewater and Brighton and Bagdad, we hit Kempton and spied our turnoff six kilometers further on at a crossroads called Melton Mobray. In these Central Highlands we'd see rocky mountains, glacial lakes and tarns, and farmland yielding to forest. Stubby, twisted trees grew before the higher forests, stunted by relentless winds and winter snows.
Occasional houses and frequent sheep, until just outside Bothwell, we rounded a curve, and out there in front of us a deserted little graveled area stood by the road, guarded by white-painted round steel stakes, like you put around a loading dock so trucks won't hit it.
Inside, a four foot tall rock, shaped like a house, about a foot thick and square with a point at the top, painted white with a green painted roof, little windows and a door painted on, and the legend, "Pub with No Beer." No explanation. Nothing else.
In Bothwell, which was two petrol stations and a visitor's center, the guy at Caltex explained, "Well, that now. You see, a chap who worked for the DMR, he put it there years ago. That's about all I know about it."
At the other gas station: "Just a pull-up place for picnics, I reckon. Dunno the history of it."
*****
Cattle and sheep made these people’s livelihoods. Just around the corner from the Pub with No Beer, a cattle farm sprawled over hundreds of acres on both sides of the road. The house nestled regally, way back from the road, visible for kilometers. Nothing in sight ahead but telephone poles and highway.
Up at a place called Barren Tier, south of Great Lake, the bitumen unceremoniously dumped us onto dirt. A unique topography of ancient, gnarled myrtles with trunks over a meter wide, cut down randomly, their huge trunks and limbs in giant piles spread across the landscape. Some had been burned in what must've been huge, spectacular fires since these piles ranged to 20 feet around. This left stumps and rocks – all, we guessed an effort to reclaim forest as grazing land.
Around Great Lake dumpy little shacks happened in clusters, sometimes attended by a kilometer or so of paved road, but I don't know why anyone would live there. Must be for weekend fishing.
A forest known as the great pine tier rose to our left. Pines, yes, but also the most unusual combination of trees I've ever seen, many unique to Tasmania. Here were local versions of pines and birches and myrtle. Evergreens and deciduous mixed with eucalyptus.
North of Great Lake the gravel road climbed, ultimately to 1200 meters, to a lookout from which the lake and the tiers spread panoramic. This was the apex, a place called Projection Bluff.
The long climb down began with odd naked black rocky cliffs, and a vista opened up of the plain far below. Back in the town of Deloraine, signs to Cradle Mountain took us west over paved road, then way up here to the summit, at 1545 meters, almost as high as Brasstown Bald, the mountain under which we live back in Georgia.
Along this road Mirja gave Lisa our pizza. Last night we'd ordered delivery from Pizza Haven. We brought the five leftover pieces for lunch. But we spied these grazing cows and, well, we stopped to see if cows ate pizza. They do.
One, whose ear was tagged with a red tag that read "Lisa," lumbered over to the fence and ate out of Mirja's hand. Lisa's big fat tongue grabbed whole pieces. Lisa the bovine pizza-loving Tasmanian had us smiling the rest of Tasmania.
*****
Cradle Mountain is another black rock outcrop rising over a low yellow plain, clouds ever teasing its top. It rained off and on at the Cradle Mountain Lodge - not rain really but just the mist in a cloud. Ian Savage said it does this 300 days a year.
Each cabin divided into four identical units with firewood stacked shoulder high at the front door. Inside, high, beam ceilings, heavy wood chairs and a table and benches, a wood stove and a view of nothing but nature. Birds twittered. Cloudy and overcast and cozy, plenty cool enough for a fire at midday.
*****
A young girl guide named Tracy led us up and down muddy mountain paths on horseback. My horse was Cherokee, a brown and white paint. I rode behind Mirja and Tracy through soft mountain grass and tall bristly thistles - a botanist's heathland heaven.
Tracy pointed out the wild "Mountain Pepper Tree" whose leaves taste exactly like (guess)… pepper. The rest of the ride I grabbed handfuls and munched 'em happily till we got back home.
It was almost impossible we were here. Tracy told us they're full year round and book for Christmas by April.
Dennis and Elaine joined us in the tavern. Their two remarkable stories were that they lived five hours west of Brisbane and it was still in Queensland, and that they had seen snow twice in the last two weeks - once at Mt. Wellington near Hobart, and then yesterday for about 15 minutes at the Walls of Jerusalem Park.
They were three weeks into a five week holiday, got to see the end of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and they were staying in a tent.
Dinner was taken with Tasmanian red wine and followed by baked Tassie apples and strawberries.
Then everyone crowded round a feeding area outside bathed in red spotlights, where possums and an alleged wombat or two ate leftovers from the kitchen. All a pile of ferrets to me, mate.
But back at our cabin, Mirja engaged wildlife with delicacies like our cookies and crackers. The little ink-nosed possums were perfectly tame. They'd eat out of your hand and you could pet 'em. The wombats were a little more skittish but not much.
Soon enough came an aggressive little black Tasmanian Devil, hissing and opening his pink mouth wide to scare everybody else away. He was a foot long, smaller than everyone else, but he'd run right up and try to bite the others' tails. Bold and nasty. They're vermin, mate.
I stayed up late Sunday night. It grew perfectly quiet. I opened the window in spite of the cold, to be a part of nature. The fire burned low and I could hear the snoring in the cabin next door.
Sunrise revealed spots of cumulus and a deep blue sky. All the peaks were cloudless. It was autumn cool. Tasmanian cider gum and snow gum grew in the thick yellow button-grass moorland around the stark peak of Cradle Mountain and the smaller Smithie's Peak alongside. At the foot of this panorama, undisturbed deep blue, lay Lake Dove, a tarn, pristine, with nothing man made save for a park service boat shed. An absolutely idyllic, magnificent scene.
Cradle Mountain is a wet place: rain 275 days a year, snow 54 (in the bellwether year of 1967 it snowed 105 days) and cloudless all day only 32.
The soil is acidic, low in nutrients and waterlogged. I discovered that through my sneakers as I tromped off the path through the buttongrass for that one spacial photo. Celery Top Pine, unique to Australia, grows as high as 20 meters on hillsides.
Tiny flowers on King Billy Pines bloomed in such numbers as to turn half the tree white, making for dramatic panoramas because King Billys dotted the hillsides. There were two small patches of snow near the peak of Cradle Mountain. The air was cool, still and bracing. Bees buzzed. We never wanted to leave.
45 kilometers back onto the road we happened onto a panorama so perfect we wanted to build a house on the spot and move in that minute. We were lost and we had been lost and we were glad of it.
Way up here it was still. The only sounds came from loud twittering birds, buzzing flies and a cow in the field before us. Cumulus clouds floated immobile above us, and the peaks of Mt. Roland and Mt. Van Dyke (1040 m) rose before us. Cradle Mountain presented itself as a hazy blue blotch in the far distance to the right, and the Great Western Tiers were similarly barely in view to the left.
If these people ever wanted to sell out, I'd convert to cattle farmer.
Searching for the 1 highway took us through soil as red as Georgia clay, past a crop duster in a funny, tiny red plane (maybe the farmers split the cost of hiring him for the day) and more north than we needed to go, so far that at one point past the village of Forth near the community of Don, we topped a ridge and stared down at the waters of the Bass Strait, at the top of the island again.
But we found highway 1, swung south, and set out to traverse Tasmania via the same route for the second time in three days.
*****
Australia Radio was civilized, intelligent and witty without being deadly stuffy. Chat shows about dirty tricks in wartime and whether Ataturk's secularism helped or harmed Turkey. They did an hour of Luigi Boccherini. Fabulous, the scenery rolling by to a quintet for guitar and strings. I am not sure, however, that I'm sorry we’d miss the program next week called "Bongo Frenzy."
*****
In rural Australia "milk bars" are general stores with a little grill for takeaway food. Full service gasoline is the rule. When we'd stop we'd get the looks a foreigner gets in any country town. Still, people were open and friendly, relaxed, not aggressive. I wondered if there are ever any murders here.
A year later, on 28 April 1996, the Port Arthur massacre claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 21 others mainly at the historic Port Arthur prison colony, a tourist site. A young man named Martin Bryant pleaded guilty and was sentenced 35 life sentences without possibility of parole. It was Australia's deadliest killing spree. The internet was so much newer then that we sent a condolence email to the tourism office there and the lady who replied said she would print and post it.
In the Tasmanian midlands we whipped by what we realized only on passing was a kangaroo dead on the roadside. An echidna, rather like a porcupine but unique to Australia, was a near miss.
People did NOT want a cable car to the top of Mount Wellington. The lead story in the Tasmanian Mercury: No To Cable Car.
We swung left and onto the Abel Tasman bridge to the airport. We clocked 1044 kilometers, or about 650 miles, behind the wheel, on an island that’s maybe 170 miles top to bottom, and 150 side to side.
At Hobart airport 30 locals, some with babies in their arms, filling up the windows to watch friends and relatives taxi out on the Ansett flight to Melbourne, suggested the old days. Poignant and endearing.
The flight featured a news video "followed by a short comedy feature titled 'Simpsons.'" We were over the Bass Strait in a flash, then inland toward Canberra where the descent into Sydney began.
Peter the purser told me someone had a cell phone on.
"How can you tell?"
"Auto-pilot keeps flipping off."
Ansett still had Christmas wreaths at the front of the plane when we left them, on January ninth.
*****
(There are 400 photos from all over Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
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