The rain continued and the drilling on the boat continued as our air conditioning was installed. With no let up in the weather forecasted, we decided to escape to Eungella National Park, only about 50 miles from Mackay, but up in the rainforest. We travelled up Pioneer Valley through vast plantations of sugar cane until a final very steep climb up into the clouds and our resort at Broken River. It is reckoned to be the best place to spot platypuses in the wild. We arrived around lunchtime and went for a coupled of short walks into the rainforest and spent several hours looking for platypus, with only a very brief sighting. We got back to our cabin, lit the log fire and congratulated ourselves on not seeing any leeches, despite the very damp conditions. We remembered the previous visit to the rain forest near Brisbane with our friends from Harmonie and Storyteller where we all returned from our walk with leeches attached to our feet.

The river was swollen, brown and fast, and on our first visit we spotted fresh water turtles and azure kingfishers. The latter are small birds but quite striking with their deep blue feathers. Apparently they follow playtypus to feed on the digested remains they excrete. However, no platypus. That night we went out with a local naturalist, and saw all sorts of things including owls and luminescent fungi, but still no real sign of platypuses.

The next day we decided to follow a longish trail along the river. We got a lift to the start and headed off. Curiously there were no warning signs on the path. In Australia pretty well all footpaths have signs at the start informing you that this is a "multiple hazard site" - rocks can be slippery, you might trip, fall etc etc. since all paths say pretty much the same thing the notices are effectively meaningless. The rain started pouring - after all this was a rainforest. We could see tumbling rapids through the rainforest. Despite the rain all was going well. We set out with much enjoyment, but after only about 15 minutes we felt our legs itching and on inspection found to our horror that they were covered with leeches that had managed to get inside our trousers and socks. We picked off all we could see, tucked our trousers inside our socks and continued on our way, our enjoyment somewhat diminished. As we went along we found leeches on our hands, our necks, faces and could feel them up our legs. It was too wet to take our boots off or bother with the legs, but we did try to keep them off our hands and necks, and occasionally lowered our trousers to have our upper thighs inspected and leeches removed. In various places trees and bushes had fallen and blocked the track, requiring lots of muddy scrambling. Torrential rain, flooded streams and deep mud we could cope with and still enjoy the walk, but the plague of leeches was too much.

Half a day later, when we got back to our cabin, we took all our clothes off on the veranda outside and inspected each other, before going in. What a sorry sight we were, underclothes, as well as shirts soaked in blood - and where the leeches had stayed on us for significant lengths of time, their anticoagulant kept us bleeding for hours and hours later. These were the vastly swollen leeches we found when we undressed, swollen from long, needle thin threads that could get through socks, to the size of giant slugs.

But, but but after that we saw lots of platypus. Naturally their best appearance was when we were without a camera. However, we got quite a lot of pictures of them swimming up and down the river, cleaning themselves and playing. Watching platypus becomes a very pleasant addiction. You can justify just watching a river, because in another minute, maybe a platypus will appear. If it does there must be more, if it does not appear then perhaps we should give it a few more minutes.