Day 37 - Welcome to the family (or alpaca love)

It’s another early start and it is absolutely freezing. When we go downstairs for our full and fancy English breakfast (even the pups get some bacon!) we are very grateful for heated floors. The B&B owner is rather quirky and we hear her chatting away to herself as she prepares the breakfast. Jazzie has staked out the kitchen door after discovering there was a cat on the other side and she’s prepared to pounce, should it wander into the dining room.

After reconnecting the hired trailer, we headed a little further south to meet our new alpacas. Along the highway we spot ‘Icy roads’ signs for the first time and drove down into the misty Huon Valley on our coldest Tassie day (so far!). We drove through beautiful but frosty countryside on our way to the alpaca farm. We saw the alpacas as we drove up to the gate and it was love at first sight. We’d only seen one fuzzy photo on Gumtree before deciding to get them for the Old Dairy.

We met the owner and her young teen son and they took us down to the small holding yards that the alpacas had spent the night in. They warned us that the alpacas wouldn’t like going up the ramp and into the trailer and they were right. Young Jack (the son) took the brunt of it as he tried to move them in the right direction and his jumper was green with alpaca spit by the time we were done. The owner warned us that once they sat down it was ‘game over’ because you just couldn’t get them to move after that. They were so stubborn that the Bandycoot ended up basically lifting one of them into the trailer, and then, as pack animals, the rest followed. I was barricading one side of the broken ramp with an old piece of timber and having nervous visions of one of them leaping off the ramp in my direction. It was staggeringly cold and I’d lost feeling in my fingers within minutes of getting out of the car. The owner said they’d already had a dozen winter frosts in that part of Tassie.

It was a full day’s drive to get them back to the farm and they were looking rather blow-dried by the time we arrived. They travelled really well and seemed to be in no hurry to get off the trailer once we’d let down the back tray. The mother and son (Elsa and Olaf) were the first to venture out and the matriarch Anna and smaller male Sven soon followed. The Bandycoot was trying to take photos of their first steps into the paddock and before we knew it they were galloping off into the sunset.

The previous owner’s young daughter had named the alpacas after the characters in Frozen, but the Bandycoot decided to rename them on the drive home. Their new names include Paca-punch, back-paca, whacka-paca and paca-man. We really hope they’ll enjoy living here. I’ve already searched the Tassie library resources for a guide to raising alpacas without any luck, so I’ve ordered a book online. Hope it arrives soon!!

Alpacas on the ride home