Red Wine Express

The CB and I lived in Tasmania, Zeehan to be precise, for three years. She taught primary school in Queenstown, Roseberry and Zeehan and I worked at the Renison tin mine and played rugby on the weekends. Tassie is a great place to visit but for us, our recent visit was a trip down memory lane also. So as we drove past Rugby Park in Hobart and I said “I played a sevens tournament there and we made the semi finals”, by the time I got to the word “tournament” I was greeted by hoots of derision emanating from my three female travel companions. The CB said she didn’t even remember. That episode was at the end of the holiday but was pretty indicative of the attitude to the rugby part of the nostalgia trip. But this is my blog so some of the memories of my glorious three year career with the West Coast Green Machine will adorn this post.

From the day we all agreed to do this trip my overwhelming desire was to have a beer at the Central Hotel in Zeehan. I have fallen off more stools in that pub than any other in the world. Okay, it was only twice (that I can remember) but the events that caused these alcohol induced plummets were indeed momentous. One was a going away piss-up for someone and I can’t remember what the other one was. I do however, remember walking into the bedroom wardrobe at home after one of these occasions. I blame the publican for locking us in after closing time.

Anyway, much to my chagrin when we got there, it was permanently closed. After a bit of research I discovered that I could have bought it for $390,000 a couple of years ago but on mentioning this to the CB, the look said it all. We would not be moving into the back room at the Central any time soon.

The Central was our rugby clubhouse before we built our own.  Actually we sited it rather than built it. Our club president was the underground manager at the nearby Mount Lyell copper mine and he happened to find a disused building which was thrown on the back of a truck and deposited on a concrete slab next to our playing arena 30km away in Zeehan. Alas, all that remains of the clubhouse is the slab. So that nostalgia trip was stymied as well.

I was two and zero as we headed out to the golf club which, great relief, was still there, still had old mine shafts in the middle of it and still looked like you could lose your ball in the middle of the fairway after the grass was mown. Notwithstanding it is still the only course where I have played in an official competition (once) and won. I then retired undefeated. The clubhouse was still there but like many of the buildings I once frequented (including our home) it was the worst for wear.

Our old house on the corner of Gellibrand and Fowell Streets had a shed where I built my barbecue from old zinc smelter bricks and the bit of fence I erected was gone. And it was blue whereas it had started out green and was pink when we left which sounds a bit like a sad version of Edward Scissorhands’ street. It was a company house so choices were limited to what you were told you would get. At $2/week rent I didn’t care what the outside looked like.

The CB got to stand outside the school room she taught in, right across the road from our house. The school seems to have done alright out of Julia Gillard’s Building the Education Revolution with a relatively new hall or gymnasium or whatever that no doubt cost five times what it would have cost if organised by non-politicians.

We drove past the shop where I was laughed at for wearing shorts on a Sunday morning in winter, having just ducked out to get the newspaper. Then there was the shop where the CB bought me the very first Australian Penthouse with the recently defected red bikini girl, Liliana Gasinskaya on the cover (and inside minus the bikini). Across the road is the Gaiety Theatre where we played basketball when it was raining too hard for rugby training. As the old-timers used to say “if you have to play in it, you should train in it”. We were wimps.

Just outside Zeehan is a particularly treacherous piece of s-bendy road which our car took, at speed, upside down one wet Saturday night. There were no wives present just three players and one of them (me) was sitting in the back of the car nursing a broken nose from that afternoon’s activities. More accurately, as we slid down the road I was sitting on the ceiling – seatbelts weren’t compulsory back then. On this recent occasion I wanted to stop and see if we could find the carton of beer which was flung into the bushes after the car was put back on it wheels. But I was out-voted. Miraculously the car, a little Mazda 808 still went. Back then what we now call hatch-backs were called fast-back cars. We had the only fast-front car in Zeehan. More miraculously, the car stayed on the road despite its unconventional trajectory and no one was hurt.

Away from Zeehan we regularly stayed at the Penny Royal Hotel in Launceston. This was our hotel of choice when we visited for rugby games. On one particular Saturday morning there, I picked up the newspaper to find out Keith Moon had died or more correctly inflicted death upon himself, inadvertently I assume. Later that morning we (there were three players and three wives there) watched the Australian Wallabies inflict a rare but incredible defeat on the All Blacks. Incredible because Wallabies loose forward Greg Cornelsen scored four tries, a feat (against the men in black) which is yet to be equalled I believe. That afternoon our team, the northern competition premiers, played the southern competition premiers and we got towelled. It was quite a memorable day.

As we drove around the state many fond memories and some not so fond (see above re Mazda 808) came flooding back. Considering the amount of rain the west coast of Tasmania gets, “flooding” is rather appropriate. Great place to visit but wouldn’t like to live there (again). No, that’s unfair. There are many nice homely spots in Tassie. Go check it out.

Last year the CB and I visited the Highlands of Scotland. The weather alternated between bleak, sunny, atrocious and average, every day. It was summer. The only difference between the Highlands and Tasmania’s south west is that while we’ve been here in the south west the weather in mid-autumn has been consistently atrocious. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you can marshal a bottle of port, a few red wines, a roaring fire and double glazing to your defence against the elements. And thus it was so. Oh, and there are no men in skirts that I could locate despite the name of the town.

Still, Strathgordon is a long way to go to sit in front of a fire. Fortunately the view through the double glazing was spectacular. The white sandy beaches of Lake Pedder and the bare mountains dusted with snow like icing sugar on grey, craggy cakes provided a perfect backdrop to the lounge chairs round the open fire. Occasionally, when the rain relented we rushed outside to snap a few photos then beat a hasty retreat back to the sanctuary of the Lake Pedder Wilderness Lodge, an excellent, welcoming and hospitable sanctuary I have to say.

It “only” rains for 270 days a year down here and for the other 95 there are bush fires. We saw the evidence. Black charred trees and pristine white snow provide quite a contrast. And now, a couple of months after the last major fire there’s a smattering of green as the tree ferns spit new fans skywards and leaves start to sprout rather incongruously from tree trunks. Fortunately the wilderness areas here are massive and the fires only impacted a small percentage before the tireless firies got things under control. Thanks guys for another job very well done.

Strahan is the only port on the west coast of Tasmania. In fact it’s the only town of any significance on the west coast because if you go west from Tasmania, the first land fall is Argentina. So the weather has quite a long run-up before assaulting poor little Tassie. So why would anyone want to live here? I guess that’s one of the reasons the harshest penal colony in Australia’s colonial history was put on Sarah Island, a few miles away from Strahan in Macquarie Harbour. Now, with its infamous history well and truly behind it, it’s a picturesque little maritime town with terrible weather.

Strahan is also something of a holiday destination. When the CB and I lived in Zeehan (about 40km from Strahan) we were surprised (initially) to learn that some of the locals went to Strahan for their holidays. Some of them hadn’t been to the eastern side of Tassie and considered the north island of Australia to be “overseas”. Salt of the earth people but somewhat insular.

One of the country’s most famous rivers – the Gordon – empties into Macquarie Harbour which incidentally is 6 times as big as Sydney Harbour but has only a 60m wide access to the ocean hence the two lighthouses which attempted, not always successfully, to guide ships into and out of the harbour. Why you would attempt that at night is mystifying, but some did and suffered the consequences.

The Gordon is famous environmentally and by extension politically. You can look it up. Suffice to say it was almost dammed (not damned) but due to political intervention, wasn’t. So a boat trip to Hell’s Gates, the entrance to the harbour, and then down the Gordon was very much on the agenda. And they were serving booze from the get-go which was 9.00am once we were underway so the incentive to do an all day (or most day) tour was irresistible.

Hell’s Gates is very much as the name suggests. Having spent all of my working life in the mining industry I am here to tell you the people on the front of our 34m catamaran, when we passed through the Gates would have been required to wear life jackets, safety harnesses and hard-hats at least and no kids would have been allowed if a mine manager rather than a tour operator was running that boat. But the boat proprietors were obviously oblivious to the risks of having their clients flung to the deck or worse still, overboard as the boat bucked and tossed like a tasered kangaroo. Notwithstanding we all had a jolly good laugh afterwards then settled back for the trip to the Gordon River.

On our Gordon River cruise we had occasion to stop in the heritage area and do a 400m boardwalk through the impenetrable rain forest. While GF2 rushed off to find a spot to have a smoke in the strictly non-smoking dripping wet rain forest, GF1 was taking pictures of everything moss and fungus to add to her extensive photographic collection of such things, the size of which would fill a full set of Encyclopaedias Brittanica. I thought she would be the only person on the planet to engage in such activity. I was wrong. There are 50 or so others with similar interests and they were all on our boat.

Macquarie Harbour is also home to countless fish farms. All I remember about the operation of these things is the fish are the size of your little finger when introduced, are left for 12-18 months then when they are five or six kilos they’re sucked up by a pipe into a boat and despatched to your plate. Sucked up by a pipe – where are the vegans swimming out to these fish farms in the freezing water and chaining themselves to the easily accessible pipe infrastructures to protest this fish sucking. Surely this would be much more effective than invading an abattoir or a nicely temperate farm. Apparently not in the fairyland they occupy.

The CB and I had ever so briefly been to Stanley many (many) years ago and it obviously never registered what a charming, picturesque place it is even if, like all other Tasmanian coastal towns it is exposed to elements which would have daunted the most intrepid of explorers.

I did most of the planning for this trip (after a suggestion from GF1) and up to now it’s been a resounding success which is just as well. Can you imagine (if you are a man) being in a car for hours on end with three disgruntled females. But I hadn’t expected the response to cute little Stanley. It was positively orgasmic. The place is full of neat, immaculately presented period houses and they all seem to have views to die for. As we were leaving yesterday, GF2 demanded the car be stopped so she could get out and buy a house. And then there’s The Nut, a large rock that sticks up out of the land (50%) and the sea (the other 50%) like a miniature Ayre’s Rock.

And there’s penguins. Back along the coast a few kilometres there’s a place called Penguin but their attempt to corner the region’s penguin driven tourist economy failed when word got out that there are penguins all along the coast. Common as bums they are, but they still generate the sort of reaction generally reserved for tiny babies and puppies. So we duly went down to the sea wall / boat ramp / wharf a couple of nights ago to watch and listen as the juvenile penguins whinged and whined for their food like so many tiny babies.

The old pub in Stanley was a welcome respite after a few hours in the car and for an hour or so, we were the only ones there. “How’s the serenity” one might say if one was in an iconic Australian movie or in a quiet (when the bloody jukebox was on recess) country pub. But eventually we were joined by other tourists and perhaps the odd local.

Now we’re all of the friendly persuasion and are quite happy to converse with those of a similar bent. Unfortunately GF1 inadvertently opened a conversation with a gentleman who had ignored the two women he was with but was happy to talk at us with a relent that would have done the ever persevering Wylie Coyote proud. I tried to do a Road Runner on him to shut him up by saying I was holidaying with my three wives and this was the one time of the year they are allowed out in public, but he was unphased. Admittedly my “wives” were wearing jeans and skirts rather than freedom sacks and we were in a pub and we were drinking so my attempt at cultural intervention failed miserably. I should have said I was a Mormon.

But back to The Nut which so dominates this place. There’s a chairlift that takes you to the top which never gets more than a few feet off the ground. GF1 who doesn’t like heights, figured this was her kind of chairlift after the somewhat more challenging experience of the largest single span for a chairlift in the world over the Cataract Gorge in Launceston. During the 2km circumnavigation of the top of The Nut the clouds and rain moved in. This was more like the Tasmania we knew and loved in our three year Tasmanian sojourn many years ago.

Up to last week, in my long(ish) and mostly satisfying life I estimate I had seen around four sea horses. This rather obvious deficiency was spectacularly righted when GF1 insisted we visit the sea horse farm at Beauty Point north of Launceston. Incidentally, and I digress, there was a general complaint among my female travelling companions regarding the fact that most if not all things in this part of the world are named after men. Then I pointed out that Beauty Point is in fact named after a female….cow. Hurt feelings were not assuaged I’m afraid.

Anyway I am now an expert on the reproductive ins and outs (if you’ll excuse the expression) of the seahorse. I know there are 54 species of seahorse of which 23 are in Australia. I’ve seen them in their thousands and they are exported to aquariums all over the world. I’ve even held one and let it twirl its long tail round my finger. But I still don’t know what you call a tank full of sea horses – a herd, a school, a posse, maybe a saddle of sea horses.

And who knew there were things such as hand fish which look like a miniature version of Thing from The Adams Family. They are almost extinct and of one species there are estimated to be only 70 adults left in the world, all of them in the Derwent River. When they sit on the river bed and don’t move much you’d think that would be an open invitation to predators to partake of the hand fish buffet. So it’s not surprising there aren’t many left.

Up to now the trip’s been mostly about animals (Tasmanian Devils, platypuses (platipi?), echidnas (hello Randall you cute little three legged critter), kangaroos, the aforementioned sea horses, wombats and assorted bird and snakes. Oh, and bridges – Richmond Bridge, Batman Bridge and the Hobart bridge that was hit by a barge many years ago, collapsing one of the spans. I had the t-shirt to prove it which in hindsight was a bit morbid and insensitive because there were fatalities. But we joke about everything provided there has been a respectable interval between tragedy and comedy. Why were the Japanese crying poor after the Fukushima tsunami. I saw one house with eight cars and four boats in the driveway. See what I mean.

Time to switch from animal to mineral and The Nut at Stanley.

I could have started this travel saga by saying that I don’t know how or why I allowed myself to be talked into it and you would be none the wiser. But that would be disingenuous. I actually volunteered to embark on a 10 day holiday with three women. Admittedly one is the child bride and the other two, GF1 and GF2, are good friends who I’ve worked with and socialised with for many years so it won’t be heaven or hell but it will be a lot of fun

We’re now four days in and I haven’t had a chance to add to this because the days have been as packed as a porn stars jocks. And we’ve pretty much been left to our own devices as it’s Easter and Tasmania is closed apart from the touristy stuff. So driving has been quite leisurely and just as well because we didn’t want to be snapped by one of the four speed cameras in Hobart, the locations of which the hire car lady kindly revealed. I won’t reveal the name of the hire car company or the authorities may send Constable Dan Adams of Liawenee after her. That would give him something to do because the town he patrols has a grand total of no people apart from him. It’s that sort of public servant to public ratio which puts Tassie in the same mendicant status as Greece and California.

Politeness is a state-wide trait which makes the people a delight to interact with. We found the only French waiter who has been privileged enough to be given a working visa to wait tables in restaurants in Tasmania. His countrymen (and women presumably) would be permitted to scowl at diners in the less courteous parts of Melbourne and most of the city nosheries in Sydney, but not here because of the politeness directive. Luigi, as we christened him (Italian I know, but we’re on vacation so the normal rules don’t apply) was the Manuel (Spanish I know etc etc) of Hobart – bumbling, eager to please to the point of obsequiousness and somewhat forgetful. We ordered four entrees and four mains. Three entrees arrived together and three mains arrived together. A 75% strike rate in some activities, baseball for example, would be exceptional. When it comes to delivering meals in a high end restaurant it’s a 13 on the par 3 12th at Augusta National. But as soon as he was reminded in a very non-Fawlty Towers way, I might add, he immediately offered the missing meals free of charge. This offer was obviously accepted. That meant an extra 60 bucks for booze so were we happy – bet your life we were.

Just in case you were wondering about the brown sign reference, tourist signs are brown and GF1 was running shotgun on them. There are millions of them even in a tiny place like this so while we didn’t check them all out we did our share.