Next to the B&B cottage is an Ice Cream Bean – a huge legume tree with wonderful boughs, and long thick beans with seeds inside them – loved by the local children and enjoyed by fruit tasters as something different.
This seedling is now 6 metres high and it shouldn’t be there – it blocks the view from the balcony to the mountain –in the avenue to the cottage.
Our guests sitting on the balcony late one evening hear a scratching in the boughs of the ice-cream bean, shine the torch to the sound and there looking down on them is a tiny Stripey Possum.
These possums are relatively rare – in the twenty years I have lived here I have only seen 3 – one in a tree only 3 metres away from this location. It is an animal that the guides search for on night walks and rarely find.
The irony is wonderful. Our guests are driving twenty minutes south to do a nightwalk with a guide, who is looking for stripey possums to show them. They don’t see one on the nightwalk, and then return home around 10.30 pm and there is the stripey.
It is there for the next four nights – arriving at about 7.30 and loitering for a couple of hours to feed on the beans.
