Now this we didn’t expect at all, and is one of the nice things about doodling along with no particular itinerary. We stopped to get a coffee and an unprepossing roadside place, main features being portraits of log trucks on the wall and a smell of cooking fat. And at the back what looked like the usual arts and crafts crap shop.

The coffee was delightful, the homemade meat pies crusty and tasty. while waiting for the food I wandered into the crappy art shop.

Which it turned out was full of some amazing sculptures, huge carvings of 50,000 year old swamp kauri and rimu, inset with resin and stones. At the back was the workshop, which the sculptor was happy for me to look at, then, at the back of that an extensive yard filled with massive trunks – and machinery waiting to turn the trees into sculpting blocks. The guy was an ex-businessman who gave up 16 years ago to carve wood, and seemed very happy doing it. Most of the work was valued at $20,000 and above, and most of it was monumental.  He didn’t want pictures, so I didn’t take any of his work.

He said he was coming to Tasmania next year sometime to pick up serpentine from a mine, might see us then.