Bay of Fires
Still enthused by the culinary delights consumed at Eureka, we drove down to Binalong Bay. What a nice place. This is certainly one of the absolute highlights of our trip. Fantastic apartment (thru Air Bob again, I mean AirBnB but since autocorrection insists on either Air Bob wtf? Or Airbus we’ll use Air Bob henceforth), great views over the bay from both verandah and bedroom, induction cooktop, lots of space, superclean, supercomfortable, supernice. Bay of Fires is simply amazing, great beaches, fantastic coastline, red (lichen covered) rocks, lots of wildlife. Especially tons of kookaburras and I fell in love with their laughs, so to speak. I even downloaded 15 different sound files to use on my phone, the Reisebegleitung loves it already. 😉 Nice hiking all around as well, Eureka Farm within driving distance, what more could you wish for? Wish we could’ve stayed longer, but that’s another downside of Tasmania – no accommodation allows for cancellation, so you can’t really improvise too much in the busy season.
Half an hour’s drive from St Helens is a dairy which apparently pays enough money to appear in all brochures and guidebooks. It’s in Pyengana, which for simplicity’s sake I’ll call Pyongyang henceforth. But it’s really not worth the sidetrip in my opinion. They only do cheddar. Nice cheddar, to be sure. But just cheddar. This might be exciting to Aussies and Kiwis, but I think cheese is definitely one area where we Europeans have evolved a lot more. 😁
St Helens itself is a cute little town with the best supermarket in Tasmania, the local IGA. Great selection of goods, amazing, wish we had this in Berlin.
St Helens was also the place where I could finally settle our tyre problem. We’d blown a tyre on new year’s day in Coles Bay, fortunately only while leaving the driveway, not going faster than 40 or 50 K and only a couple of hundred meters from the yard. So we turned around, got back into the apartment, found the one spot where there sometimes was mobile reception and called europcar’s roadside assistance. Because after looking at the tools included we decided to let a pro do it, they were just better toys. Seriously europcar, this is Bullshit, either provide real tools or forget about it altogether. Anyway, it took less than 90mins for RACT to arrive and 5 mins to change the tyre. A closer look at both rear tyres showed that they were completely bald. So no wonder one of them blew and no wonder I had the feeling the car was a bit wonky on rainy roads. Fuck you, Europcar! Fuck you, Europcar! Fuck you, Europcar! Fuck you, Europcar! Fuck you, Europcar!
Did you get that message? One more time: Fuck you Europcar! So we needed to get the other tyre changed and a new spare but finding a tyre shop wasn’t so easy, so it had to wait until St Helens. Where finally a Bartbruder helped us out. I’ve grown so much chest hair since, just from hanging around in the garage with all these butch fellas and the smell of oil, rubber, and sweat. Roooooooaaaaar!
Next stop: Eureka Farm, then Port Sorell, and Narawntapu National Park.