Tantalizing Tassie

Heya fellow coconuts, we’re back in sunny Singapore! While we have been somewhat quiet on the blog front, we upped our game on the SippingCoconuts’ Twitter account front. If you haven’t already, do follow up there for more regular quips.

Right now though I’d like to present Tassie to you through our eyes. Gorgeous and secluded Tassie has brought us much joy as a family and much closer to nature, which is food for our soul. Food for our tummies, on the other hand, was also satiated by Tassie’s fresh seafood.

This will be a visually rich post as the pictures definitely gives you more texture to our trip than my developing vocabulary. For those who have been following us, we have mentioned that this trip was primarily to attend the wedding of a couple who is very special and dear to us. We flew in a week earlier to drive around ourselves and it was a relatively ambitious trip, moving from one place to another every single day till the last 3 days when we stayed put for the wedding. You would remember that we also have 2 kids travelling with us, the toddler and the infant. I’m proud to report that we have all survived and remain smiling.

We learnt a few lessons as well on this trip, the most important being that we could have flown in to Launceston, a nearer airport than Hobart, to where our first driving destination was – Cradle Mountain. Quite frankly, we didn’t plan for this trip too well. I was pregnant and putting it off and Mr.C was happy to put it off too. We booked the flights with no real plan then booked the accommodation (effectively planning our route) under time pressure to save $173.34 off the best prices available on a sale night.

Over 1,000km clocked in the short trip, here’s what we did on a map. We originated from Hobart right through to Launceston, up to Cradle Mountain, back to Launceston then over to St.Helens, Freycinet and back to Hobart.

(It does seem tougher than I expected to have a visually rich post and minimal narratives, I quite like writing!)

I did mention Tassie is beautiful, here’s the proof.

Our trip was quite heavy on ice-cream which sometimes was a meal in itself. I let the nutrition conscious mama in me go for a long break this trip and just popped a few chill pills. Sometimes ice-cream filled us up way past lunch that we’d settle for a quick bite around tea-time before dinner! Tsk, never in Singapore would I have allowed that!

On the topic of food, we certain did not hold back on the good food. Tripadvisor was our trusted point of authority on where to have a meal and it did not disappoint. We had some amazing meals, here the pictures do not do enough justice. I’m having flashes of the food we had just writing an intro to it and can almost taste it! These meals came with a high price though, we were hard pressed to find any full meal below AUD30 and typically averages $35. Eating out generally set us back by about $130 a meal (we need 3 full sized meals now and of course dessert and perhaps a sneaky glass of wine).

Mr.C found an amazing oyster farm at Freycinet, which we frequented both days we were there. By far the best oysters I’ve ever had and for just less than a dollar a piece! Fat, juicy and sweet oysters! Mr.C usually doesn’t even eat oysters and here he was, eating into what I thought was a dozen each day for me. Greedy, I know! (Mr.C or me?)

While it would seem that we must have spent an arm and a leg eating out, we did do some culinary magic in the kitchen of the apartments we stayed in which saw us saving some moolah. Speaking of apartments we stayed in, check out what was in the backyard of one of the apartments – alpacas!

Back to the topic of cooking and no, the alpaca was not on the menu! We love to cook and we love making a trip to Woolworths or Coles. Huge supermarkets, fresh vegetables and meat and at very affordable prices! In our 9 days there, we went twice!

The following are some of the pictures of the food that Mr.C cooked (I was busy sorting our the baby’s meals, ahem!).

If you are still with us and have yet to go out and get some food for yourself, then I can move on to what a typical Australian trip would involve – the Australian wildlife! The Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary was very fun as the kangaroos were roaming freely and you could feed them. Mind you, the entrance fees was not cheap at AUD29 an adult and $15 for a child for such a small space and it truly was just limited to the Australian wildlife and not any other (which is totally fine by me, it isn’t a zoo after all!).

Now you might be thinking, this is a pretty indulgent trip. What about some exercise for your health? Well I’m happy to report that we did not neglect our health. Well, Mr.C did not neglect his health. He managed 1 trek in the rain up at Cradle Mountain to see the waterfall and 1 other trek up 900 stairs to see Wineglass Bay, of the the world’s top 10 best beaches according to Lonely Planet. Tasmania is a hidden gem though, one of the best beaches according to Lonely Planet and it was secluded. Crystal clear water, powdery white sand…this picture does it no justice!

Back in Hobart, the highlight for us was Salamanca Market. I thought we wouldn’t be buying much, just the usual coffee that we were indulging in daily and ice cream. Local handcrafted goodies must be expensive right and we don’t buy stuff we don’t need typically. We aren’t shoppers! Boy was I wrong! 2 hours later, I hurried us out of that place but not without some pepperberry, pepperberry jam, stringybark honey, 750ml of Sloe Gin, a Batman poster, some sweets and I don’t quite remember what else!

Of course, we ended with the wedding. It was a joy to see friends and spend the days together. The wedding was gorgeous, with 50 pax which is typical of the Australian weddings I have been to and totally unheard of in Singapore / Malaysia! The elder coconut had fun with the other kids, running around the premise of the hotel that our friends were building whereas the younger coconut was mostly stuck to us, amidst the few times I left him in some willing hands to grab a bite. Mothers everywhere miss holding a lil bub and I capitalise on that, haha!

We left Tassie with lots of fond memories, we certainly enjoyed the relatively quick trip but was happy to be back to the land of chicken rice 😉 You can take the Asian out of Asia but you can’t take Asia out of the Asian 😉