Stanley's Got a Resident Nut
19th June, Port Sorell-Stanley, Tasmania, Australia
Ethel started making a lot of noise last night - the exhaust has a hole that needed patching up, lest we want her to sound like she has a V8 engine (sadly this is not the case), so that was my first task of the day: silence the old lady! A bit of muffler putty, a cutting from a can of coke and some strong wire and we were sorted - time to hit the road once more. Quietly.
Judging distances, or rather judging the time that it might take us to travel distances, can be a little tricky at times in places like Tasmania (where two-lane roads are a not the norm, neither are straight roads). On the basis of how long it took us to reach Port Sorell, I guessed that it would be 2-3 hours before we reached our planned destination, Stanley. We made it in half that time, as the main road that skirts the northern coastline has none of the twists and turns we had gotten used to in the last few days.
The most obvious thing about Stanley is something called 'The Nut'. It looks nothing like a nut, incidentally - that's derived from the Aboriginal name.
The Nut is this huge, great rocky outcrop that sits at the end of the peninsula, overlooking the town of Stanley, and it's very regular in shape, as if someone has taken a big piece of cheese-wire and lopped the top of it off (think Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the mashed potato mountain sculpture, you get the idea).
The Nut: viewed from a different angle it looks less regular in shape, but
still looks formidable against the small town of Stanley.
The ever-changing Tasmanian weather changed once again, for the worst. So we decided to set up base for the day in the nearest caravan park, a place with a great view of The Nut (actually, it's so big I don't imagine that there's anywhere in Stanley that it's not visible from), and wait for the worst of it to blow over.