Eungella got a good write up in the Lonely Planet and quite rightly it should. It is about 70kms west of Mackay at the end of the Pioneer Valley. Eungella sits atop a mountain and there were views from both the caravan park and the hotel over the valley below. It was a great place to chill out for a few days and that is exactly what we did.

The road up the mountain is so steep (12% gradient) and curvy there are signs dissuading trucks and caravans from heading up. We made it up ok and not long after setting up our camp we could see to caravans making their way up. They turned into our neighbours.

Eungella has a National Park with a few excellent walking tracks. We tried a couple of these as well as looking for platypus in the creek at Broken River in the NP. There were more turtles than platypus, hence our video of turtles (we did this more to check if we could get up a video onto the website - it worked). On one of our walks we did hear a deep growling noise through the trees which neither of us knew what it was. We upped the pace for a bit and armed ourselves with broken branches!

The other good thing about Eungella was the free, good internet access at the caravan park. We got to update the website as well as catch up on emails and David got to get on his motorbike forum for hours on end!

We had dinner one night at the local hall. The town puts on a dinner every Friday night for the locals to attend. It was a great setup and an enjoyable meal.

On packing up at Eungella, we headed back down the hill to Finch Hatton Gorge, only 20kms away. We did a short walk initially to one gorge which was quite populated as the other gorge walking track was closed. We had a swim here and the water was freezing! We came across a couple of blokes who said the Locals were still walking the closed track. So we did this and got to the top of a steep walking track to view a second gorge and waterfalls. It was a lovely spot.

From here to Airlie Beach.