Nov 25 - Tassie Day 1

  I slept well on board the Spirit of Tasmania, so of course I woke up before I had to.  I peeked out of the curtains and saw the rising sun and land in the distance.  I contemplated getting up and dressed then and there, but it was warm in bed so I snuck back in.  Of course my getting up and exclaiming "Oo" at the sunrise had stirred Mr Smart from his slumber, so he had to get up and have a peek out of the window himself.  We continued the 'peek and sleep' process until at 5:50am we were properly awakened by the ship-wide wake up call.  By this time, the view was mostly fog with blurs of riverbank on each side.
  We showered and dressed and packed up our things and once we were invited to, we disembarked and headed to the baggage pick up and then to the Hertz rental counter.  The guy who served us there was very helpful and gave us directions and maps to assist us with the remainder of the day.  He also recommended a cafe in Devonport where we could get breakfast.  We hopped into our Kia and headed off to Bella's Cafe.  We had a good breakfast, nothing special but satisfying enough and then went for a small morning walk around the main shopping strip.
  It was peaceful that early on a Sunday morning, all the shops still shut, and the fog clearing to beautiful blue sunny skies as we walked.  We were very amused to note the nature of their alleys.  All cities and towns have alleys and laneways and if you've ever been in Melbourne you'll know that those, while interesting, can be pretty gritty, grimy and grotty.  Graffiti tags everywhere, filthy bins overflowing, and generally covered in I don't want to know what.  The alleys in Devonport were spotless, alleys like you'd have in heaven.  There was little to no graffiti and what we did find, was unexpectedly inspirational.

  With breakfast and a short walk done, we headed off to our first destination for the day, Railton: Town of Topiary.  The name made me giggle.  It was on our way to the main event and Mr Smart thought it sounded like a laugh.  We were both expecting one or two topiary sculptures at the store that was advertising it, but no.  It really is a Town of Topiary.  Almost every house and business on the main street had at least one startlingly good example of the artform.  We both walked up and down the town getting more and more amazed at the creative efforts of so many residents.  It was truly beautiful to witness a spirit of community alive and bringing meaning to the town.
   We saw a topiary elephant and calf, four topiary soldiers at the town's war memorial, a dog chasing after a rider on horseback, a grand scale Tassie Devil, a giraffe, another giraffe poking it's head over the fence, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, a crocodile, a topiary man posting a letter into a topiary mailbox, a man and bullock drawing a plough, a man lounging in a lawn chair reading while his topiary lawnmower sat idle, and a steam train!  It beggared belief and was therefore completely magical.  I would recommend stopping here.

   We also had a coffee break in Railton.  My vanilla slice was nice but alas, two coffees in Tasmania and we've not yet found one equal to the task set by Mr Smart's tastebuds.  The shop that drew us to Railton in the first place failed to open at 9:30am as advertised, so we headed off for our next destination.
  We headed through Sheffield: The Mural Town but we didn't stop because ladies and gentlemen, we were headed for the Promised Land.  That's right, the Israelites were looking in the wrong spot all that time, it's in Tasmania.  I was pretty damnd excited.  We were headed for the Promised Land and the super-happy-fun-place, Tasmazia and the village of Lower Crackpot.  A weird world, governed in dictatorial style by the Laird of Lower Crackport, Brian Inder.  It is an a-maze-ing place!!
  It boast 8 mazes, four hedge mazes and four smaller but still interesting hidden mazes within the larger ones, as well as the one fifth scale village and a pancake eatery.  We tackled the biggest maze first and found a lot of the hidden treasures such as the Three Bears cottage!  You could actually get into it and view the bears at the dinner table but it was intended for kids so Mr Smart had to crawl in and I had to crouch right down.  It took us a good hour to get through the nooks and crannies of The Great Maze.

The Big Bad Mr Smart, huffing and puffing and blowing the house down.

  When we found the way out there were two options, return to the gift shop and pancake eatery or continue on into Lower Crackpot and the remaining mazes.  We opted to return and have lunch before tackling the other three big mazes.  We had a rather nice lunch set to a gorgeous view of Mount Roland in the distance.  Once lunch was done it was once more unto the breach dear friends.

Right to Left: Confusion Maze, Lower Crackpot & Hexagonal Maze

  We walked up through Lower Crackpot to the Confusion Maze, the object of which is to reach the tree at the centre and then make it out again.  Mr Smart beat me to the middle, but I caught him up soon afterwards.  The same could not be said for the Hampton Park Court Replica Maze.  We decided to take a side each of the maze and see who got there first, except that what I chose only took me back to the beginning.  So I switched hands and started again!  Eventually I made it and found Mr Smart chucking to himself under the shade of a tree.
  There was a shortcut to exit so we were almost immediately at the Hexagonal Maze, our final challenge for the day.  We both got hopelessly turned around at least twice and crossed each other's paths a number of times yelling 'It's a dead end'.  But again, we eventually made it to the centre and back out again.  It was great fun.  We had a final look around Lower Crackpot and then headed to the gift shop.

  I bought a Tasmazia carry bag, a souvenir tea towels and a souvenir magnet, some postcards and stamps and a bag of Hansel & Gretal trail mix for Gub.  We sat down and wrote out three postcards, one to Mr Smart's nephew, one to my nephew and one to my neices.  We wanted to write them before we left because Lower Crackpot has it's very own tiny one-fifth scale post office and it's own post mark stamp.
  That done we headed off into the mountains.  Now I'm not kidding about that.. we took our little gutless Kia up some pretty big hills today!  Below is a photo we took from one of the valley points on our journey.  The red arrow indicates where we stopped for the next round of picturesque mountain top photos.

  Our destination was the little town of Mole Creek.  We are staying tonight at the Mole Creek Guest House.  It has this lovely English country style garden at the rear complete with European Bumblebees!  We'd been seeing them all day and I just kept repeating to myself "but there aren't any bumblees in Australia?".  Turns out they have invaded Tasmania and New Zealand and mainland Australia is desperately trying to keep them out.  Fair enough too, but I was still giddy with joy at seeing their fat fluffy buzzy bee-hinds.  Click here for more garden photos.
  We walked a couple of doors down to the local pub and had a decent pub meal sitting out on their deck.  It was in the shade so getting a bit chilly by this time, but the payoff was the 'wild' life.  There was a Daddy Sparrow being followed by his three fluffy chicks, squawking as demandingly as they could.  Mr Smart, being the kind fellow he is, threw a little piece of his burger bun down.  The sparrow pounced on it and then got mobbed by his little brood.  He fed it to them immediately and looked around for more.  Mr Smart obliged and we had a live show with dinner, the sparrow parade.  It was highly adorable.
  We went back down to the garden after dinner.  The girl who checked us in had mentioned that a platypus is sometimes seen in the creek, so since it was now a likely time (dusk) we went to see if we could spot him.  Alas, our efforts were only rewarded with a few fish darting about the place.  So we headed up to our room sans sighting.

  Today's food and exercise were:

• Breakfast was scrambled eggs on buttered toast with two rashers of bacon and mushrooms.  I ate one piece of the toast and I cut the rind off the bacon.
• Morning snack was a vanilla slice with passionfruit icing.  Yummo!
• Exercise was a lot of miles of maze!  Seriously, we were walking solidly for two hours!
• Lunch was a pancake, different but delicious, I suspect it was cornmeal based but also had herbs through it.  This was topped with ham, tomato, pineapple and cheese and grilled.  I also had a 375ml Nippy's Iced Coffee.
• Dinner was lasagna (a nice one!) with vegies, peas, mash, carrots, cauliflower and corn with a 375ml Coke Zero.  They let Mr Smart have veggies with his burger too instead of the traditional chips which was good of them.

  So that's it, blog up to date.  Mr Smart and I are going to watch the Liverpool v. Swansea match tonight and then attempt to get up for our breakfast, served between 8am and 10am.  Wish us luck!
  Jess

PS: Mr Smart tortured me tonight playing I Spy.  He said, something beginning with T.  Turns out it was Tasmania.  Evil genius boyfriend.