Where Our Clockwise Tour Goes Wrong...

Dave and I rock up to Grandvewe Cheesery about 40 minutes south of Hobart and love what we see from the start. A rolling green countryside dotted with sheep, a couple friendly dogs lazing around, and a fantastic view of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel with Bruny Island (full of national parks) on the opposite side. And of course cheese...and wine. And a sheep-milking station. Woohoo, we're in heaven!

We didn't have any plans for the rest of the day (or solid plans for the rest of our weeks in Tassie!), so we walked into the cheesery hoping the folks there would have some good recommendations on where to find free campsites in the area and where we should head next (after taking full advantage of the tasting of course). We had a general idea that we would go south for a little before heading back up north (on the west side of the island) - doing hikes here and there and checking out all the national parks - including Cradle Mountain which is Tassie's must-see, must-do hike.

It was James who walked us through the tasting - such AMAZING cheeses: Birchs Bay Blonde, Ewe Bewety, Friesland Fog, and Primavera, to name a few. Turns out James is good friends with the owners - his 'day' job is to lead intense hiking trips in national parks in Tassie (and other cool places like Nepal) which means he usually is out of town. And when he's not he comes into the cheesery to take people through tastings. The place he works for (Wilderness Travel) is based in Berkeley so we had a lot to talk about. Eventually he asked us where we were heading...perfect: "Actually, we wanted to ask you if you had any suggestions...". He loved that - and took us to a map of Tassie to show us where we should head. But after a little while longer of chatting he asked if we would like to work a bit on the farm - they're always looking for volunteers (WWOOFers: Willing Workers On Organic Farms) but they're out of accommodation. No problem, we said. We're self-sufficient with our tent and all (and we're not registered WWOOFers but we'll work damn hard!). He went to the back and had a little chat with the owners and voila! We had what we ended up calling an 'internship'. At a cheesery. MAKING CHEESE!

Best part - James offered up some space in his home for us to stay, so we didn't even have to camp out.  He lived 2km from the cheesery so our commute to 'work' was all of 3 minutes long.  And his house...wow.  A view of the D'entrecasteaux Channel and the north end of Bruny Island.  You could sit and stare out the massive windows at the ferry going back and forth and the most incredible sun rises and sun sets and full moon nights.  And lining his 2km driveway to the cheesery were all sorts of blackberry bushes - which we took full advantage of until our fingers were blue (literally...).

So we took a little bit of a drive along the coast then headed to James' place a couple hours later when he was to be getting home from work.  He had given us good directions in case he was a little late getting back, which was fortunate since he didn't show up for another hour or two.  Turns out he was hosting a party for Ricky, a full-timer on the farm, and so we landed right in the middle of a pretty fun, crazy gathering.  I'll just say that we ended up getting to know everyone really well that night - a pretty hilarious event given we had just met them.

But enough chat...on to some photos.  This is absolutely one of my favorite cheeses...until I tried the Friesland Fog (more on that one later).  This is more like a really tasty parmesan with lavender all over it - ah, heaven.

Stella, Ricky's homeopathic guard dog.  Vicious little thing, really kept the unwanted folks away - Ricky lives in the same house we were staying in (and so does Stella).

A little bit of a view of James' place - this is his porch, huge windows on the left overlooking Bruny Island to the right.  And see that patch of weeds and goop?  I cleaned that up all nice - our exchange for staying at James' was yardwork, and suffice it to say we did a damn good job at it.  And I haven't even shown you what progress Dave made!

View from his place on a nice day.

On our second night at his place (after our first day working in the cheesery) James took us fishing.  We caught a couple flathead and he made us fresh fish curry which was nothing short of delicious.

I think there's something on my line!

I don't know how this happened, but I was allowed to take over the driving of the boat.  I'm not even looking at where I'm going, we're all in trouble now.  Well, James is saluting me, so I must be doing something right.

Back at the house - a view from the living room looking out towards the water.

Several hours of work later, check out my fancy job on the garden!

Now on to scenes at the farm and cheesery.  Here Dave's cutting the blue cheese.  You can see how there's a big open window from the tasting room in.  People would stand there for a while, I suppose we must have looked like pros and like we knew what we were doing!

Perfect slices of yummy blue.  What?  A chunk fell off that one you just cut?  No problem, I'll clean it up for you.

Lovely Daniella doing the packaging.  Little did we know that the blue cheese wasn't supposed to be packaged in those particular pouches (it's for the harder cheeses), but we were on such a roll that we didn't get told until we were nearly done (we had just done several rounds of the harder, more parmesan-like cheeses which do go into those particular bags).  No problems though - we ended up making that packaging work.

Ah, when the milk was being heated up and cooled down then cut into cubes to seperate the curds and whey - yum!  As Cheryl, the cheesemaker that was teaching us everything we learned, would say - it's liquid gold!  No spilling, no un-sanitized hands, no wasting of any kind allowed.  This is the Friesland Fog that was my favorite - tasted better than a spoonful of butter or cream, and when it was nearly done they would tap some grape-vine ash over it.  But more importantly, yum, it tasted so good.

Ewe Beauty in their hoops.  They would sit in these stainless steel trays with the whey dripping out of it. The whey would be caught in buckets and re-used in some way.

One of the aging rooms - this one is a tiny one that is just the display for the folks coming in for tastings.

We took part in some of the packaging too.  So I took a sticker from my favorite cheese and put it on Barry's ute.  Now Barry will forever remember that we took his ute all the way down to Tassie (well, we left another mark of our use - a nice chip in the window...oops).  But in our defense we left the ute so much cleaner than its ever been probably since it was bought years and years ago.  I think Barry really appreciated that.

Homeopathic Stella, still diligently guarding the house.

Ah Dave, what are we going to do with you?  Get your feet right, man.

We had frequent coffee breaks out on the nice porch area.  Cheryl was not only a master cheesemaker but an amazing coffeemaker too.  Bonus!

That's the life.

Loved the new friends we made, the cheesemaking skills we learned and the home we can always go back to in Birch's Bay, Tasmania.  I could travel like this forever - it really has renewed my faith in humanity.

And now for some pictures I've snagged from Dave's camera.  This is 420 liters of liquid gold sheeps milk.  I could probably put a serious dent in that milk if I was given the opportunity...

A break on the porch to say goodbye to leaving fellow WWOOFers.

Mmm, huge rounds of cheese.  These are worth several thousand dollars each.

Cute little lambs.  And a goat.

View of the cheesery as you drive in.

Ovine Accommodation...aka sheep milking station.

Inside the Ovine Accomodation.  Cute little milking stations, obviously much smaller (and tidier!) than the ones for the cows I worked with a few months back.

Water pump issues at the cheesery...this was a theme of our trip apparently.  But that, I think, is a story for another day.

This next picture was from one fantastic night we had making cheese until 9pm.  And we made a lot of cheese.  The whole thing was a mess - again, a pump (pumping whey) broke, we had whey all over the floor, we had curds in our hairnets, our arms were up past our elbows "tickling" the cheese, man it was fun. Cheryl kept saying how she would have been so stressed out had we not been there to help out and make it a fun event instead of a disaster.  We got a very nice invite to her place the next week so she could 'wine and dine' us to thank us for our help.  We happily agreed and had a really fun night at her place - ate some really good food, drank lots of wine, and played Wii until all hours of the morning.  Anyway, you can kind of see chaos in action here.  And at one point I grabbed Dave's water bottle and filled it up with whey for later drinking. :)

Not sure if this is the same night, but here I am curled up and passed out by the fireplace at James's place with Stella.

A view from the outside into the cheese-making room - shhh, quiet...cheesemakers hard at work.

And Ricky - with customers at the tasting table.

The tasting spread.

My fave, the Friesland Fog cheese along with the Pinot Paste - you can see with the Fog where it's been ashed around the sides and in the middle (two bricks get stacked on top of each other).

A little bit of an assembly line packing up the marinated cheese.  WOW, was this ever good - I literally ate a ton of it with a spoon.  Spooned it up.  Right into my belly.  Man, it's good that's not my permanent job, I'd have to be rolled back home everyday.

That's right: literally spooning it into my mouth.  One of the perks of being an apprentice cheesemaker!

And why, do you ask, has our clockwise tour gone wrong at this point?  Well, maybe not
wrong, but it certainly fell by the wayside.  We spent about 2/3 of our trip on a sheep farm.  So much for the must-see Cradle Mountain.  The way we figured it, Cradle Mountain will always be there - an opportunity to make cheese and hang out with cool folks in Tassie is something we couldn't pass up.