On Sunday morning we made our way to Stanley in the far North West. We followed the coast road wherever possible. We continue to be amazed at the flowers – gardens along the roads are just a mass of flowers and in many cases the roadsides are also lined with flowers.
We travelled on through Burnie where we stopped for a pit stop and a quick look at the wharf area where they appeared to be unloading a large pile of woodchips. One particular town where the flowers were particularly beautiful was along the coast road coming into Seabrook. As we headed west the weather started to deteriorate with cloud developing and the winds increasing. By the time we got to Stanley and pulled up at a lookout we were looking for our jumpers and holding on to the lookout rails so that we didn’t blow away. We looked across to “The Nut” and we could see a very steep winding up the side of the mountain – considering the state of Mums knees and the strength of the winds we were beginning to reconsider our thoughts about climbing The Nut, but we decided to go and have a closer look. Arriving at the bottom of the mountain we made a few enquiries about the state of the track – we were told that the chairlift was still operating and it wasn’t rocking too much so things were OK. We packed ourselves a bit of a kit, raincoats, water, chocolate etc. and set off up the track which turned out to be poured concrete not steps so mum decided to give it a go. It was fairly steep and slow going – some young ones zoomed past but we didn’t go far before we passed one of them laying flat on his back trying to recover. We made it to the summit and then circumnavigated the Mountaintop – the views were quite spectacular. Getting back down was another challenge for mum as going down was much harder on her knees than going up, so she walked backwards a good deal of the way. We booked into our cabin and then had a rest before going out for a look around and buy some fish and chips for tea. Then it was time for the Platypus and Penguin Tours. There were only four of us on the Platypus Tour. The tour guide took us out through several properties to a couple of property dams. He warned us that it would be difficult to see platypi that night because of the wind causing ripples on the water. However, as we approached the dam he exclaimed, “There’s one that has just come up over the dam wall – too late he’s gone down again. About this time we started to think we were getting our legs pulled but following instructions we followed along and sure enough a bl----dy platypus surfaced briefly then disappeared. We had several more sightings but they were fairly skittish. We returned to Stanley, picked up another passenger and proceeded to the Penguin Rookery at the base of “The Nut”. By this time it was dark and the Penguins were just starting to come in from the sea. They are delightful creatures, but they looked so clumsy with those little webbed feet. Still, they climbed over the rocks and up steep banks to get to their nests. Many of the nests were actually made by the locals who have built some 160 of them in an effort to re-establish the colony that had been reduced to only 8 breeding pairs. Local schools are involved – great effort!
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