1995/11 Australia trip - Eungella |
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We’re now in Finch Hatton, which sounds like a London suburb, but is actually a village outside Eungella national park, about 50 miles inland from Mackay. It’s supposed to be a birdwatchers’ paradise, but we arrived in the dark again, so we don’t know. I do know that there is a frog croaking outside that sounds like he’s had too many Woodbines.
Well, Sunday morning we were up before dawn, with the idea of getting into Eungella early enough to see a duck-billed platypus. As it turned out, we spent a lot of time sitting still and looking at pools of water. The platypus had his feet up, inside his burrow, and was enjoying the Sunday paper. However, the scenery was beautiful, and, when you sit still like that, you tend to see lots of other things you wouldn’t otherwise. So we had lots of false alarms, which turned out to be turtles pretending to be platypuses, and we also saw kingfishers and ducks and frogs. 
After a while we hiked a little way upriver to visit other pools, but no luck there either, though Sandie was lucky enough to go nose to nose with a goanna, which is a big spotted lizard the size of a cat. She also met some little brown animals playing in a heap, which we later found out were probably guinea pigs, descended from escaped pets.
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Eungella National Park (14.03) |
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By this time, the park was starting to fill up with locals from the nearest town, Mackay, on their Sunday afternoon partying, so we moved on. The target was Townsville, which we should have got to before dark, but the short cut we took from the mountains might have been designed by an Englishman. I think it visited every farmhouse in the county before getting back on the main road.
Then we were waved down by two Aussies with a boiled engine. We gave them all the water we had, but they weren’t having much luck. I think their water pump had gone out, but they were more optimistic, so we left them waiting for things to cool down. It was ‘ot again.