Eungella National Park

Someone we met along the way recommended that we go to Eungella National Park and walk the gorge and see platypuses. They weren’t wrong – it was a great place!

And, we DID see platypuses! During the 20 years that I’ve lived in Australia, I’ve been to several places that claim to have platypuses, but have never seen any…until now!

(For those of you that are English Language nerds like me, we decided to google what the plural of “platypus” is. Turns out that both “platypuses” and “platypi” are excepted. But, some have pointed out that since the word derives from 2 Greek words, the plural really should be “platypodes”. However, when we showed up at the park they were using “platypus” as the plural… ?)

Sugar Cane

This is sugar cane territory. The caravan park we stayed at in Mirani was surrounded by sugar cane fields. Our daughter discovered a new found love of raw sugar cane. She kept asking for more and more.

Hatton Finch Gorge

We took a walk up the Hatton Finch Gorge. It was a very pretty walk up, up, up along the river and gorge with several waterfalls and swimming holes. At one point though we had to do a river crossing over rocks with a rapidly flowing river. R decided not to risk further hip injuries and stayed there instead of finishing the walk up the hundreds of steps up to the top watering hole (good call!)

Eungella Park – Broken River

After the gorge walk, we drove up a very steep, zig zag road to the top of the mountain.

We continued on to Broken River where we were told we had a chance to see platypuses at dusk. We got there about an hour before sunset and we were in luck! We ended up seeing about 5 platypuses and tons of turtles.

We were so amazed to platypuses that we stayed for ages just watching them. How lucky that we got to see them!