Nirvana and the NSW Northern Rivers

This tour was born out of a customer query – a Californian family asked if someone could take them fishing off the Tweed-Byron coast. And they asked if someone might cook the fish they caught.

But they didn’t want any old fish, caught on a line, off a beach. They wanted a big fancy prize fish – hooked from a boat offshore, out of the deep. Something tasty, like a coral trout, or a mahi-mahi. And they didn’t want just anyone cooking a fish like that.

Tour company co-owner Alex Baker booked a private fishing charter, and rang an old friend – trained at Noma (the five-times World No.1 Restaurant in Copenhagen), the Byron Bay-raised masterchef, Ben Devlin – and asked if he could cook the fish in his awarded Northern Rivers restaurant, Pipit.

Which is why I’m here – two months on – at dawn, passing through the bar at Tweed Heads, trolling for lunch. Those Californians enjoyed the experience so much, Baker decided to sell their tour as his tour, calling it “From Ocean To Paper & Plate”.

But he says that’s the whole point of his new travel company, Reveling. He can handcraft anything to make it fit what people want. He calls it “Northern Rivers bespoke”, with a wry chuckle.

Between watching humpbacks surface, and pods of dolphins surf the bow, I pull in a hefty red nannygai, which fights me all the way to the boat. We motor back and make the 20-minute drive south to Devlin’s restaurant in the sleepy coastal town, Pottsville. Devlin is waiting and his restaurant, I see, is shut to everyone but me. “Northern Rivers exclusivity,” Baker says, with the same chuckle.

Baker’s business plan was to create private tours of his native Northern Rivers and showcase the character of the region. He wants us to eat where the locals eat – and do what the locals do – but with none of the crowds, and none of the time constraints of their everyday lives. He wanted utopia – or what many city-dwellers see as utopia – to feel even more utopian.

And that’s why I’m here sitting smug at Devlin’s open-plan bar/ kitchen, watching him sculpt a multi-course meal from the nannygai I fished out of his ocean; with a whole afternoon to consume it.

Devlin takes a print of the fish first – using a 19th century Japanese ink tradition, called Kyotoki. Then he dissects my prize catch like a surgeon. Watching him work from up close feels like I’m trespassing in his brain. Renowned for working with local Indigenous ingredients and techniques, he rolls my fish in local paperbark and smokes it. “Smells like bushfire,” he says.

Above him, dried fish carcasses protrude, alongside seaweed hanging out to dry. My banquet is playing out in slow motion – now Devlin is fusing local lobster with macadamia and emu egg custard. “This has to be one of the best regions for produce in Australia,” he says, brimming with local pride. Eventually, I finish in a sweet haze of butane-torch-roasted marshmallow, blended with local lemon myrtle.

But I’m really only getting started. Baker has built me the ultimate gourmet weekend for foodies, adding his full-day “Northern Rivers Farm Gate Trail” tour to today’s fishing adventure.

“The Farm Gate Trail might be my favourite,” Baker says. “Because of the people you meet, the internationals especially can’t get over the characters they meet.”

It helps, I bet, that they’re hunkered down in some of the most fertile – and visually arresting – farmland on Australia’s eastern seaboard. The Byron region is famed for many things but what’s too often forgotten is its extraordinary hinterland, sculpted courtesy of a “slow”, 3 million-year-long lava flow, within an enormous volcano. There are few flat areas in the Northern Rivers; most of the landscape is as dramatic as Hawaii, and just as green.

Baker transports me to my lodging, Amaroo Bangalow, luxury cabins built along one of the volcano’s many ridges, outside Bangalow. Here we have 85 hectares of land and I’m sharing it with two mating platypuses, a handful of koalas, 40 head of black Angus cattle and a coop of chooks.

Owners Mike and Kathy Tomkins have been working for a decade to return a once-neglected dairy farm to rainforest, planting 45,000 native trees. At sunset, when the resident yellow-tailed black cockatoos come home to roost in a symphony of noise – “kee-owww, keeee-oww” – I plant my feet in the basalt soil, and watch how the green hills roll to the horizon.

Baker arrives the next morning, and we’re soon on the road to our first stop on the food safari – a coffee plantation and cafe built along another green ridgeline of the big volcano. Zentveld’s Coffee is smack-bang in the middle of celebrity-ville, outside the hamlet of Newrybar. Liam Hemsworth owns a property next door – but co-owner Rebecca Zentveld is proof Byron’s farmers didn’t all sell up to Hollywood for plush retirement plans.

For 33 years, she’s been growing and producing rare – for Australia, at least – single-estate, single-origin coffee. She walks me – with cocker spaniel, Hunter, by her feet – to a coffee plantation below the cafe. The soil smells about as sweet as chocolate, and the kookaburras are making an unearthly racket.

Zentveld’s 84-year-old mother-in-law, June, races past on a quad bike, waving a hello. “She tells me I better keep up when I ride with her,” Zentveld says. Afterwards, we settle on the cafe’s back patio in the sunshine sampling her finest beans. “This area was part of The Big Scrub,” Zentveld says. “The third-most biodiverse ecosystem in Australia. Most of it got chopped down, we’re trying to return it to the paradise it was.”

Baker drives me 25 minutes north – passing honesty stalls spruiking avocados for $2 a bag – to another long green ridge. But this one is so close to the centre of the Tweed Volcano, I can clearly see its steep, basalt-rock peak – Mount Warning, or Wollumbin, as it’s known to the local Bundjalung people, meaning Cloud Catcher.

The Tweed is the state’s most fertile food bowl, and I’m at the dead-heart of it here in Cudgen, Kingscliff’s secret hinterland. Baker has engineered an itinerary based around surprises. There’s a fair crowd here at Tropical Fruit World at lunchtime, but I’m taken immediately by golf cart into my own private shaded orchard.

“This idea partially came from one of Sweden’s richest men,” Baker says. “He wanted a lunch he couldn’t have anywhere else.” There’s a long table set up just for us, and Mexican-born head chef Armando Enriquez Icaza is preparing a five-course lunch.

We’re surrounded entirely by fruit trees – this 71-hectare estate grows 566 varieties of fruit, the world’s largest collection of tropical fruits in one location. Canistel arancini comes served with macadamia and pesto, then grilled mandarin chicken with achiote glaze, coconut, farm ginger and turmeric rice.

Bob Brinsmead, the farm’s 93-year-old owner who created this place from a rundown grazing farm 53 years ago, drives past on a quad bike, stopping to chat fruit. I finish lunch with a farm fruit salad, sampling fruits with names like sapodilla, moringa, mamey sapote and canistel (the latter served in a panna cotta tart).

Lunch lingers without a time frame, though I suspect that’s what Baker wants me to think. Every time we move on, someone’s there to greet us. Baker feels as much travel buddy as guide – but I know he’s hiding the frantic texting he’s doing to ensure today flows like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

We’ll finish it at the region’s best-loved distillery, Husk. There’s a different angle on Wollumbin here; now, we’re seeing it from the north, a photographer’s favoured viewpoint. Husk was the dream of a local couple who had the idea to start Australia’s first farm-to-bottle rum distillery on their 60-hectare property.

Along the way, they happened to create the world’s first colour-changing gin, made with butterfly pea flower. They’re offering me private access into their runaway success story, and giving me the chance to craft a rum cocktail they might put on their menu if it’s tasty enough.

Husk seems a fitting kind of place to finish – these rum cocktails free the last of any city tension, while making my head a little fuzzy – not unlike Wollumbin against that fading blue sky before sunset, among the cane fields and beside the blue Tweed River.

Northern Rivers bespoke, Northern Rivers exclusivity – some things in life might still be priceless.

THE DETAILS

TOUR
Reveling crafts bespoke experiences such as Ocean: From Paper To Plate and Northern Rivers Farm Gate Trail, based around budget and group size (tours suit couples, groups or multi-generational families) from $2000. See reveling.co/australia

STAY
Amaroo Bangalow offer three cabins, a loft-style unit and a pavilion for communal gatherings for up to eight adults and six children (exclusively booked) from $850 a night. It can be booked as part of a Reveling experience. See amaroobangalow.com

FLY
Fly to Coolangatta or Byron-Ballina with Qantas, Virgin Australia or Jetstar.

MORE
visitnsw.com

The writer travelled courtesy of Reveling and Amaroo Bangalow.

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