Nights 326 - 340: Around Hobart

NIGHT  326  -  KEMPTON RV AREA

I’m overtaken with incredulity.  Now that’s a word I don’t use often – ‘incredulity’.  It’s a word easily tangled by the eyes and in the mouth.  It’s a bit of a wanker of a word really.  But it exists for a reason and that reason is to define a feeling like Kempton has made me feel now.

You see, generally, even if I don’t agree with something, I can determine a logic beneath it.  For example, I disagree with much of the political rhetoric we get fed nowadays, but I can understand its logical purpose – to persuade.  As such I’m never rendered incredulous by political speak, no matter how utterly wrong I might think it to be.  I’m aware that some people have vastly differing opinions to mine.  I don’t always like it but I understand how and why it happens.

With the Kempton RV area, however, I can discern no logic at all.   I am left with nothing but disbelief…

because…

…somewhere in Kempton, maybe it was on a dark and stormy night, people decided to refashion the town as ‘RV Friendly’.  To do so meant meeting certain RV-centric criteria.  There are basics that must be provided – a dump point for toilet waste, a flat area providing overnight parking, a public toilet within walking distance.  Kempton has provided these and, although the town isn’t pretty, existing as it does in a heavily logged valley that seems all wind and dust and thirsty yellow pastures, it deserves its new ‘RV Friendly’ status.

 In fact, Kempton goes beyond the basics. On a strictly ‘pay-by-donation’ basis, Kempton also provides powered sites and water taps that can be connected straight to an RV.  You just back in and connect it all up – free if you want it to be.

Which is rare - possibly innovative.

With this in mind, Kempton has made itself an attractive proposition to RVers travelling the A3 highway between Launceston and Hobart.  You could say “kudos to you town council.  You have done much to bring wealth to your town” because so far I can follow this logic.  It makes sense in terms of basic economic theory – attract people to the town and those people will most likely spend money.  Outlay funds for infrastructure to generate revenue through increased tourism.  (“Build it and they will come” Kevin Costner might well say).

 

So we arrived at Kempton, lured by cheap power and water.  It was a blazing hot day and Tasmania had erupted into a series of bush-fires.  Smoke and ash filled the valley as we set the ‘bago up.  With windows and vents closed against the dirty outside air our air conditioner rumbled for hours, sucking the guts out of the cheap (free) power provided. Around 4pm it was agreed that we all deserved an ice cream.  So Morrissey and I exited the dark and cool ‘bago box, seeking treats.

Soon after incredulity struck.

It was 4pm on a normal weekday and, apart from the pub and post office, nothing was opened.

If you’re thinking that surely every town has a general store of some sort then you’d still be right.  Kempton indeed does have a general store.  It’s right there along Main Street, not far from the school, near the turnoff from the highway.  It advertises all the usual ‘necessities’ – milk, bread, paper, ice-creams, soft drinks, etc.  It opens from 8am to 1pm (8am – 12 noon Saturdays, Closed Sundays).

I stood outside it, sweating, breathing in smoke, scratching my head, incredulous.  What the…?

I failed to discern any logic.

Why would the general store close at 1pm?

Don’t people in Kempton ever return home from somewhere?  Seriously, isn’t that when most people buy stuff, on their way home? You’re driving along, thinking, realising “I need butter, milk, eggs”.   So you pull in at the local store.

If it were just about local Kemptonians and their general store I’d have no more to say.  Whatever.  Who cares?  BUT THE TOWN HAS SPENT WIDELY, SUCCESSFULLY ATTRACTING TOURISTS TO STAY THE NIGHT. 

Okay Kempton, so we are here, but surely you realise we had to get here from someplace else.  Surely you realise that we were always going to arrive in the afternoon.  And there are four other RVs beside us. We all pulled in within an hour of each other.  Do you realise though Kempton that when we all leave tomorrow we’ll have added nothing to your economy.  We couldn’t even when we wanted to. 

I just don’t get it. 

So anyway we put $5 in the donation box.  Maybe it would cover costs.

We sounded the horn as we drove out.

Thanks for the facilities you doofus of a town.

I give the Kempton RV area 5 stars out of 5.  Why not?   Power and water on an honesty system. Kempton aint pretty but it gives and gives and you can do so little in return.

NIGHTS  327  -  331  SEVEN MILE BEACH CABINS, SEVEN MILE BEACH

 Bypassing Hobart we booked in to Seven Mile Beach, about 15km east.  It’s on the beach near Hobart airport.  We booked a cabin for Janis, Shana’s mum, with a powered van site right next door for us.

It was our base for exploring Hobart, although it was a pleasant enough place to be on its own.  Most mornings revealed a glassy and inviting ocean.  Most mornings we took a dip. It was bloody cold – I wont kid you that it wasn’t – but tolerable.  Janny’s from NZ and has her own body gauge for water temperature.  If dunking your head beneath water brings on an ‘ice-cream headache’, she says, then it’s too cold.  Anything less than that is fine.  I swam clad only in boardies and my head never once ached.  I knew I had no cause for complaint. 

While there, day trips included:

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) – Mona is an amazing place.  It’s a privately owned and curated art gallery that deliberately attempts to shock.  You start your tour 3 stories underground and work your way back up towards daylight.  I wasn’t shocked by anything I saw but I preferred some things over others.  For instance, I now know that I prefer distance between me and any noise-based installation that attempts to do to your ears what a strobe light does to your eyes.  I’m more comfortable a laser-cut steel chapel that looks like a spider or a statue of Buddha made from collected incense ash that, to represent impermanence, blows a little away as each person passes.  There are also penis and vagina representations aplenty if that’s what you’re after.

 

Salamanca Market – Salamanca has a massive market on a Saturday, the largest I’ve ever been to.  And, unlike say Paddy’s and Parklea in Sydney, or The Vic markets in Melbourne, it doesn’t have stall after stall selling cheap and pointless imported plastic crap.  Instead there’s a strong focus on the hand-made and the artistic, the groovy and the quirky.  And the food stalls!!!  They had all of my senses salivating.

Clifton Beach – wanna hear a joke.  I went again seeking surf.

Howrah – Shana lived in Howrah as a little girl.  It’s a suburb across the river from Hobart, but she doesn’t remember much about it.   Janny remembered more, but her memories were cloudy.  We set off to visit the house they once lived in.  It’s still there, near the middle of a skinny suburban street.  We stopped.  Stories and questions flowed.  Was it…?  Did we…?  We visited the beach where they swam, bought an ice cream at the shop where they once bought ice creams.  

Hobart itself, with its stone buildings and large and leafy cold climate trees, feels very European.  It’s built into a hill, snuggled in against the Antarctic winds.  It’s small, easy to walk from end to end.  We had it in glorious sunshine.  It glistened at its most welcoming.  I know winter could be cold wet and miserable but I became enchanted by it.

 I don’t want to live there though.

We give the Seven Mile Cabins 4 stars out of 5.  The set-up beside Janny was great but we were parked in a thoroughfare.  Anybody who needed to use the camp kitchen or the men’s toilet slid past our side windows.  Some mornings we were woken by the unmistakable rush of someone’s full and threatening bladder driving the body urgently toward relief.

NIGHTS  332 & 333  TARANNA COTTAGES, TARANNA.

At Taranna we spent two nights in a ‘rescued’ two bedroom cottage.  I’m not sure what it was ‘rescued’ from - probably neglect or vandalism - but it was over 100 years old and once stood as the station-masters cottage at Aspley station, wherever that is.  The ‘rescuing’ and relocation to Taranna spruced it up nicely with new foundations, new roofing, a new brick chimney and a new bathroom fit-out.  The floor was original though, wide timber floorboards that groaned arthritically when walked upon. 

The place was mostly good except that the shower consisted more as a series of interconnected drops rather than any real flow. Like rain sweeping across a continent, you got wet in small sections.

Plus the new chimney design allowed the room to fill with smoke.  At one stage we contemplated protecting ourselves by wearing goggles and snorkels - except we had none for Janny.  Smoke-haze aside, and even though it was summer, the blaze and crackle of an open fire provided an ambience well-suited to a recycled cottage in South East Tasmania.

Also highly ambience-tastic was the cheeky echidna living beneath the verandah.  She/he popped out a couple of times to sniff in the sunshine, very cute,  but you can’t pat one.

 

We were here because Port Arthur was nearby.  Janny had been to Port Arthur 30 years ago and wanted to see it again.  I’d always wanted to go and, if I’m being honest, even moreso since the massacre of 1996.  I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this.  I’m sure that for many people Port Arthur now exists as the site of two violent and macabre Australian histories – as a nineteenth century convict prison settlement and the place where 35 twentieth century innocents were senselessly murdered. 

The convict history of Port Arthur is brilliantly reconstructed.  We wandered around for most of the day.  Some structures now only survive as an outer shell, steel props and girders reinforcing them against further deterioration.  Other structures are completely renovated, decorated and furnished exactly as they would have been circa 1840.  It was brilliantly done, but overwhelming.  I stopped reading any historical info after an hour or so.  I loved it though; filled my flash card with snapshots of everything that caught my eye – the good, the bad and the crumbling.

 

Morrissey loved it as well.  It came as a pleasant surprise that dogs were allowed in.  I fear, however, that Morrissey missed the deeper historical significance.  With his hind leg raised, he continually sought to impose himself upon scene after scene.

As to the 1996 massacre, there wasn’t a single shred of anything to mark the incident, or not that I saw anyway. I was disappointed by that but it’s fair enough.  It’s not really something to use as an attractant or as a means to generate profit.

We give Taranna Cabins 3 stars out of 5.  The smoke wafted across everything, sticking to all that it touched (the smell remains weeks later).  Shanzie says the décor reminded her of old people and two dollar shop interpretations and Ye Olde English.  We very much enjoyed the echidna though.

NIGHTS 334 & 335  RICHMOND CARAVAN PARK, RICHMOND

Richmond is a historic town, once of importance during the convict years (where in Tasmania wasn’t?).  Now it’s quaint and relaxed; a short diversion from Hobart to fill in a day or two.

I’d read about and wanted to see the model recreation of old Hobart town.  I was alone in that, Shan’ and Janny preferring coffee and cake (or anything else I suspect).  I loved it and took more photos there than I did at Port Arthur.  It was the tiny model people that captured my imagination.

All the buildings are ‘authentically modelled…based on original plans sourced over years of research’.  They’re impressive.  In and around the buildings there are models of people living their life ‘back in the day’.  The artist/sculptor/maker obviously had fun with them.  There were drunks reeling out of pubs and a prison breakout and secretive couplings in hay wagons and beside the river.  It was sooo cool. 

 

Shana wanted to visit Bonorong, a nearby ‘conservation zoo’.  At Bonorong rescued animals make up many of the exhibits.

 I’m not generally one for animals in cages.  Ridiculously, I feel sad on the animals behalf, imagining they’d much prefer to be frolicking in natural environments.  Bonorong was good though.  It made a difference that Max the baby wombat, for example, had been rescued from the pouch of his road-killed mother, and that a three-legged echidna, having survived dog attack, could now live comfortably thanks to human intervention. To be honest I didn’t care much about the caged tiger snake either way.

 

I give Richmond Caravan Park 2 ½ stars out of 5.  Janny got a brand new cabin – we got a site beside a portable fibreglass ensuite that looked like two Jacuzzis bolted together.   Her bed was comfortable; our site sloped away on two sides.

NIGHT  336  -  SEVEN MILE BEACH CABINS

We returned to the Seven Mile Beach cabins because it was close to the airport.  We’d booked the same cabins as before so came back expecting familiarity.

However, while Shana and I were given exactly the same site, Janny had been moved.  Apparently it suited the park owners to do so.  The people who rented Janny’s cabin after we’d left decided on a longer stay. 

“What’s the point of booking then?” Shana asked when she was told of the move. 

The owner became rude. 

“We saved you a unit didn’t we?” she replied, and then somewhat sarcastically went into a soliloquy about the booking responsibilities of the whole tourism industry.  Maybe we could have argued it further but chose not to.  Choose your battles etc.

I can understand the owners point but it didn’t suit our requirements, or the comfort of those now in the cabin because…

 …as Janny schlepped her stuff to a different cabin, I reversed into our allotted spot, our main sitting area now positioned next to a verandah occupied by two elderly people we’d never met.   The male occupant stood in the doorway and nodded gruffly as I closed our curtains, my face about 2mtrs away from his.  I nodded gruffly back.  He was no doubt unimpressed that we’d invaded their privacy.  I was unhappy they’d taken the cabin we booked.

But it was only for a night and we spent most of that night visiting old friends of Janis’s anyway.  However, despite the owner’s blasé attitude and belief she’d done nothing wrong, the move made 5 people less comfortable than they deserved to be.

This time we give the Seven Mile Beach cabins no stars out of five.  Stuff ‘em. 

NIGHT  337  -  GEEVESTON EX-SERVICEMEN AND WOMENS CLUB PADDOCK, GEEVESTON.

Janny flew out at 6am and we went to Clifton Beach.  Clifton had no surf so we decided to head to the south west region past Hobart to see a few places we’d heard about.

We ended up at Geeveston.  In a paddock.  Alongside the ex-servos club.  Among several ‘lifers’.

 

‘Lifers’ are the true modern gypsies (apart from actual true modern Gypsies).  Having sold all their possessions, ‘lifers’ now live full time on the road.  They own large caravans or fifth wheelers and often travel with a garage full of gear strapped all over their rig.

They don’t go anywhere in a hurry.

‘Lifers’ tend to stay in one spot for a long time.  If they find a place they like then they’ll remain while grass grows long and wild beneath their vans and around their wheels.  Some have gnomes and little wire fences that grab vacant space and fashion it into a mini front yard.  Many have rope clothes lines tied between trees.  Most seem to develop a sense of ownership and entitlement about the area they’ve colonised.

This paddock next to the Ex-Servo in Geeveston is close to town.  Town has a supermarket and all the necessary shops.  It’s near a National Park with all its nature and bushwalks.  Hobart is less than an hour away.  Most importantly, it is free.

For the ‘lifer’ Geeveston has a lot going for it.

For us it was a pretty creek at the end of a paddock.

I give the Geeveston Ex-Service Men and Women’s Club paddock two stars out of five.  It had no fees, a clean toilet, and a pretty creek at the end of the paddock.

 NIGHT  338  -  RANDALS BAY CAR PARK

We got to Randals Bay via the town of Cygnet.  It was Regatta Day in Tassie, a public holiday Monday, and Cygnet is a one of those groovy places that draws a holiday crowd.

While walking amongst the throng the guy in front’s phone rang.  He answered it loudly, saying:

“Mate, you wont believe it…Cygnet… No shit…She’s got me doing the full tourist thing. (Upon saying this the woman beside him hit him playfully).  Yeah, normally I’d rather drink petrol.  (Another hit)”.

In full male mode I empathised.  Cygnet was packed.  People wandered the one main street, stopping to peer through shop windows and gathering in clusters to discuss what they’d just seen.    Motorhomes and caravans crawled along the skinny streets doing laps of the town, the women occupants eagerly watching the streetscape, the men eagle-eyed in search of somewhere to park.  Oestrogen seemed to fill the air in a shimmering summer mist.  And to top it off I saw Pauline Hanson exiting one of the shops, her hair as red as embarrassment.

That was enough for me.

I went back to the ‘bago; set to making our lunch while Shanzie indulged. 

And indulge Shanzie did.

As evening descended, while parked on the gorgeous shores of Randals Bay, Shana said “today has been the best day ever”.  I found the statement surprising and asked her why.  It hadn’t seemed that spectacular to me.  Here’s what she said (in chronological point form);

1/ We bought a big bag of fresh cherries from a stall on the side of the road.  (They were fat balls of fruity perfection).

2/ We pulled into Pagan Cidery for a spontaneous cider tasting.  (They had five varieties and gave us a good swill of each.  We bought a four pack). 

3/  We found a funky town (Cygnet) with a groovy café that made a great soy cap.

4/  I found and bought ‘the best skirt ever’.  (She explained to me why.  Ask her yourself when you see her).

5/  A local gave us an insider tip on a beautiful but sneaky free camping spot (Randals Bay. We had it to ourselves).

6/  I ate fresh oysters straight off the rocks. (She waded out with our shucking knife and four quarters of a lemon).

7/  The whole bay is no-leash dog friendly.  (We hate having Moz on a leash).

8/  We followed a track past an artist’s garden and collected shells on a secluded pristine beach.  (The track wound through the scrub and around a headland.  The garden was full of curiosities; the beach was tiny, clean and covered in shells).

9/  You’re cooking dinner tonight.  (Oh yeah, I’d forgotten).

She’s right.  It was a pretty good day.

 

We give Randals Bay 4 ½ stars out of 5.  It would have been easy to drive straight passed it.  A tiny gorgeous bay, we felt privileged to be there.

NIGHT  339  -  SNUG CARAVAN PARK, SNUG.

Who wouldn’t want to stay in a town called ‘Snug’?  It evokes nights not-yet-too-cold and a doona pulled up beneath your chin.  Snug is a rainy day in front of a log fire; it’s your mum wrapping you tightly in her arms.

It wasn’t much like that though.

Snug has the highway for a main street and a caravan park full of cabins housing workers in hi-viz vests.  These workers kick back, drink heartly, talk and laugh loudly into the night.  Snug also had a very strange young woman, camped next to us in a tent with her mum, who, although travelling with a dog of her own, keep coming over to where Morrissey lay in the shade - to “cheer him up” she said. “I just hate it when dogs look sad” she felt compelled to tell us each time she did it, yelling from outside our door.  We tried to tell her that Morrissey always looked like that; that he wasn’t sad at all.  I even attempted to explain how Morrissey’s often sad-eyed face inspired his name – we having named him after the melancholic and bittersweet lead singer of The Smiths.  It was futile.  She was too young to have heard of The Smiths and too much of a tripper to listen anyway.

 

We give the Snug Caravan Park 2 stars out of 5.  Snug has no Op Shop, something we find unfathomable, and it’s beach bans dogs even though it only exists at low tide.  This isn’t the caravan parks fault, we’re aware of that, but we stand by our scoring process. 

NIGHT  340  -  NORTH CLIFTON BEACH CARPARK.

Travelling like no-consequence bums as we have been is all very good, but responsibility rides with you, even if you attempt to hide it under the seat.  We could hear it calling from beneath the cushions.  We needed to stop somewhere and print stuff out, sign it and send it off.  We seriously needed an Officeworks.

Two hours and one dollar per faxed page later we’d finished our tax returns and finished with Hobart.  It was time to leave.  I couldn’t resist one more look at Clifton Beach though.  A surf check website was saying positive things about conditions aligning.

We avoided Clifton’s main carpark, following a dirt road along past the lagoon, turning right into the north end conservation area.  We followed another dirt road to a carpark behind the dunes. 

 

There was too much wind that afternoon but I’m sure you’ll be happy to read that I was in the water just after dawn.  Cars and surfers arrived en-masse as Clifton Beach put on a pretty good show.  It wasn’t great as far as surf-breaks go but it set me to smiling all day.  

It was a nice way to leave Hobart.

We give North Clifton Beach Carpark one star out of five.  It filled up in the morning, cars and excited surfers disturbing the sleep of Shana and Moz (he, he).  The nearest toilet required a walk along the soft sanded beach to the other end, and the beach was about 1 ½ km long.