Tuesday - Devonport to Smithton

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A stunning seaside drive through "our bit" of Tassie - Devonport to Smithton

For the first time this morning, turned off the alarm and went back to sleep so had a leisurely rise at 8.30am. Lovely collaborative breakfast - I made stewed mushrooms, boiled eggs and Turkish toast, and Eric made grilled tomatoes with vine wrapped cheese, reheated some of last night's leftover potatoes and carrots and fried some slices of Polish sausage- is this the first time I have eaten carrot for breakfast? It was delicious!

Reasonably speedy pack up, (hindered only slightly by having to fashion a sink plug out of the foil lid from a tub of yoghurt). Off to the supermarket for a few more supplies - bought four different types of apples and 2 punnets of gleaming, immaculate blackberries! Berries remain such an incredible novelty to me, as during my 40 years living in Cairns, "fresh" berries have only become available in the last decade, and because of the great distance these most delicate fruit have to travel, they are always a shadow of their former selves and seldom worth the $8-$10 a punnet that they cost. Earlier we bought a bottle of scotch and a bottle of gin in a "two-for" deal and this has turned out to be a slight mistake. The scotch is fine but the gin is pretty shocking. I usually drink gin with just a dash of soda, but found last night that the nasty taste of the gin needed something more flavourful to mask it. Today I shall make blackberry gin cocktails and I think that will do it! (For the record : Windsor Gin. Don't go there!!)

Off up the road in a westerly direction. This is our first visit to this part of the state and from afar, we have identified it as the most likely place we will want to settle, so this is an exciting day's travel. Within ten minutes I have decided that we were correct. This is the prettiest part of the state that we have seen (and we are getting close to having seen all of it now) with rolling green pastures on one side and an unbelievably clear, blue and green ocean on the other. The road hugs the coast much like the Great Ocean Road and the road to Port Douglas at home and is incredibly scenic. Dotted along it are the loveliest little towns - most notably Stanley and Penguin, as well as a few larger centres like Burnie that will yield anything we need. (Ulverstone has the most incongruous, ugly statue/clock on the road into town - what a monstrosity!) We pull into Boat Harbour beach, which is achingly beautiful, and buy some fresh crumbed whiting fillets - scrumptious! In Stanley we stop at Hursey's seafoods and marvel at their tanks of live giant lobsters. They also have live, freshly caught fish in tanks and you can buy them live, or despatched and filleted. However, we decide to leave the seafood meal for tomorrow and have chicken tonight. In Wynyard A little grocer across the road has a sign out advertising fresh peas, which I must have as it has been my lifelong ambition to eat peas freshly stripped from their pods - by me! Fresh peas in the pod are on item I have seen for sale in Cairns once in my life, in a rare moment when some very sorry examples were on the shelf for $18/kilo in Coles.



We detour into to Table Cape and are extremely glad we did. The view from the lookout is extraordinary and there is a beautiful lighthouse that can be reached by a 45 minute return walk (we are feeling a little overwalked and just looked at it from the lookout). The most wonderful thing for me about this stop, though, is finding a huge field of onions growing beside the lookout. I have never actually seen an onion field and it smells amazing! More fields of poppies all along this road as well.

Smithton is the town we have identified as most likely to be our "local" town when we buy land and settle here, so we curiously examine it. It is small, with a couple of streets of shops and does have a Woolworths supermarket, which will probably be the most important facility it has to offer for us. We hope/plan to be mostly self-sufficient but not in a ridiculously labour intensive way, so we will need to buy dry goods such as flour etc. We buy a chicken ("air-chilled for tenderness"....??) and some potatoes and pumpkin for roasting. With these few provisions to hand we follow the simple directions to this night's accommodation - the "Island View Spa Cottage". This is our one "luxury" accommodation of the trip. We like to stay in beautiful accommodations but we leave these occasions for days when we are going to have plenty of free time to just stay in and enjoy the facilities. Days when we are going to be mostly travelling or sightseeing seems like a waste of all that splendour and we opt for budget stays on those days. I had first spotted this cottage on the internet a few years ago and have been looking forward to being here ever since. It is everything I hoped for, and more. Perched high on a hill, far from any other residence with a sweeping view overlooking Duck Bay. The cottage is welcoming, stylish and fully equipped, and we immediately set to lighting the beautifully stacked firebox on the verandah and filling the huge verandah spa and we are soon soaking fireside in steaming hot water with cold beer in hand, watching birds and boats cruising silently far below. Bliss!

After a long soak we get dry in front of the fire and move inside to prep dinner, lighting the fire in there as well. There is abundant tinder dry firewood. In several other accommodations we have had with fires, we have had some kind of struggle getting or keeping it lit due to poor maintenance of the chimney or flue (or at one accommodation, setting off the smoke alarm every single time we open the door to add more wood!) and for folks from the tropics, the prospect of sitting in front of the fire is an important attraction, and it is disappointing and frustrating when this turns out to be hard to put into practice. Here it is completely effortless. We strike a single match and within moments we have a happy, crackling fire.

Out the kitchen window I notice a tiny, plump black bird with bright blue markings menacing his reflection in the mirror of the Rio. Soon a couple more and some matching drab little brown ones join him, scurrying about on the car. They remind us of our splendid cheekyblack and white Willy Wagtails from home, and we guess that they are some kind of wagtails.
The method I usually use to roast chickens yields delicious flesh, but does not produce golden, crispy skin. I consult the internet in search of something better, and decide to follow Kylie Kwong's "Radical roast chicken recipe". I push some garlic butter under the skin of the chook, crank the oven up as high as it goes, cover the chook with foil and roast it for 30 minutes. I then turn the oven down to 180 degrees, remove the foil and finish it for another half an hour. At the conclusion, the skin is a golden honey colour and it is crisp and tender - perfect! The flesh is delightfully moist and tender - a triumph. Thanks Kylie! Eric gave me one of Kylie's chinese cooking books for my birthday and I have had one splendid success after another cooking from it - now Kylie is my hero of roast chook as well!

Eric made some wonderful roast Dutch cream potatoes, and some butternut pumpkin which were fantastic, despite him having to cope with my strange oven temperature regime prescribed for the chicken and a stove timer that we did not hear . I had the joy of podding peas (yay! it was a joy. I want to do it again, forever!) and they were amazing, sweet and tender. We ate on the verandah, overlooking the bay and watched a couple of strangely shaped boats come in, deck laden with mounds of some kind of black objects....coal? (Sea coal??) Even with binoculars we can't make out what it is. I do a Google search of Smithton's industries and the only one involving the sea that I can find is abalone - were these black piles abalone?

We settle in to watch a little tennis - second night of the Australian open and LLeyton Hewitt is playing a long, slogging but not particularly entertaining match against Nalbandian. Much more entertaining was the late night arrival of a plump mother and baby possum onto our verandah. They were quite tame and eagerly took pieces of apple from my hands. The baby was very keen to climb the verandah posts and to explore the table and my empty blackberry gin cocktail glass (which was a successful use of the unpleasant gin, by the way!) I even got to give it a pat!
On that delightful note, and with LLeyton and Nalbandian grimly struggling into a fifth set, we leave them to it and head for bed on beautiful crisp sheets, our first sleeping in what will probably become our new part of the world.

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Comments

[gene oates]

sea coal mystery solved
howdy, just stumbled across your blog, the funny shaped boats with the black cargo would be oyster punts. the oysters are kept in black plastic netting baskets. thought i better let you know because that sort of thing keeps me awake at night :)