Monday, November 12:
last day on the Freycinet,
and return to Hobart

Wallaby, walking and dragging tail (big image, small).

Wallaby, hopping (big image, small).

Unknown bird (big image, small).

From my journal: «We were invited down to the beach for a breakfast snack, mostly raisin and other fruit breads, toasted, with coffee and tea to choose from. Very pleasant — not all participated, though.

«The walk back uphill was far more of a strain than I would have expected, and this made me wary about my capabilities for any later action. So, when the one optional walk was described, I asked how far, how long, and how high up it would go, I decided to declare that I would stay behind. Later, Mark said that he was glad that I had made that choice, especially in view of the rigorousness that lay ahead. But let me describe lunch:

Returning to the lodge after breakfast (big image, small).

«There were four very different pizzas, including one with a corn-meal crust. Pumpkin and red onion with pine nuts; mushroom and four-cheese; salami and black olives; and salmon-avocado-brie with rocket (arugula) on top. This last was the one with the corn-meal crust. And a salad, imaginative as usual. And a preparation of chick-pea mash topped with roasted broccoli, but I had no room to try this. Everything that I had was excellent.»

Blurry shot of the lunch table, showing Daniel serving (big image, small).

While everybody else was out on their walk, I stayed in the lounge mostly, reading and perhaps working on my photographs. Since we had our computers along with us, we could review the day’s snapshots, and process them with Photoshop as might be called for. And I suppose I packed up my stuff into the basic two bags, a suitcase and a big back-pack. My journal explains:

«We set aside our two items of luggage to be taken onto the bus and driven back to Hobart, and prepared ourselves for the final walk out of the Freycinet Experience. The route was to walk down to the beach with minimal impedimenta [I had just a small back-pack, large enough for my camera] and continue further north (remember that we had walked northward to the lodge the preceding afternoon) to a place where we could turn west, inland, to meet up with the bus. It was apparently only 3½ miles, but we were walking in sand, [not the wet sand left by the retreating tide, either, since the tide was full high, and we had to walk in dry sand] and the headwind was fierce. To me, it was as if I was walking uphill all the way. Here I had been hoping to heal my strained muscles and tendons, and I was being challenged once again.

«This was a truly difficult walk. I decided to follow Mark’s lead and put my Tilley hat inside my fleece pullover: there had been no hope of keeping it in place on my head, so strong was the wind. But Mark had brought along a stocking cap to protect his baldness from the sun, while I had not been so foresighted. So, under a veiled sun, with strong reflection from the sand, I walked bareheaded through the searing wind. My face even now [I was writing the evening of the next day] is seriously sunburned, and the top of my head burnt, but not seriously.

«I trudged, step by step, sometimes finding sand freshly wet and not so yielding, sometimes through the soft and hindering unwet sand. I was finding it very tough going…

«At any rate, I did finally make it to the end. Mark says that was about 15-20 minutes after he got there, and since we and Marianne were the stragglers, we have no idea how long all the others had been waiting for Mark, I’m sure that my slowness delayed the bus’s departure at least a half-hour. And this was important, because Glenn and Heidi had a 5:30 flight out of Hobart. But we did get them to the airport in good time, so all was well.

«We got dropped off by the bus again at The Old Wool Store, from which we walked to our restaurant, Ettie’s.»

«At Ettie’s», my journal continues, «we shared a large portion of very fine olives for a starter, and I had a main dish of saffron stracci with “blue swimmer crab” and capers. Now to me, blue swimmer crab is Callinectes sapidus, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, which may be eaten in any number of ways, but which I like best as whole soft-shell crab, fried. But this crab was picked out of its shell, and was very pleasant. The fragments were small, more of a garnish to the very fine pasta than the main feature of the dish. Dessert was an armagnac custard, nice but not something to try to duplicate.»

From Ettie’s, we went back to the hotel, where this time we had landed a suite with a washing machine! You may be sure that we took full advantage of our luck, and were pleased to see that the management happily supplied us with laundry detergent, free of charge. You may imagine that this put us in a very good mood for the next day’s adventure. Read all about that on the page for 13 November.