Ripe Peach Bike Transport

It’s the little luxuries that bring the most pleasure. Out here traveling Tasmania on my junk store bike, I have to dispense with most of the fancy pleasure in life. Refrigeration, showers, internet, single serving yogurt, underwear, 10 year scotch, a bed….

But that doesn’t mean I’m immune from extravagant pleasures.

Like a perfect Flinders Island peach.

Recently, while traveling Flinders Island, Tasmania, on my bike, I was given a perfect, tree ripen peach. Trouble is, it was the end of the day, I hadn’t gone far that day, so I decided that I would use the peach as an incentive. If I pedaled 30 kilometers the next day, I could eat the peach.

Because you don’t just wolf down a Tasmanian peach. You see here in Tassie, especially Flinders Island, life is hard on peaches. Possums eat them. Frost freezes them. Birds enjoy a mouthful of peach like humans. Which is why many gardeners, to see their green thumbs rewarded, cover their peach trees with netting.

Which raises the question. How do you carry a perfectly ripe peach down gravel roads on a ten dollar bike?

No worry. Since I was almost out of food anyway (at that point in the trip, I had one egg, half a kilo of rice and three swallows of not-10-year-old scotch to my name), it meant the egg carton I carry on the back of my bike was empty. By tearing out one of the cardboard dividers that separated the eggs, I turned my Tasmanian egg carton into a Tasmanian peach carton.

Peach snugly nestled to my remaining egg, I took off the next morning. I was invited into a cottage for lunch so that meant I wasn’t going to starve. So, to celebrate, I ate the peach under the sign that marks the Roaring Forties.

Extravagant!