We are now back in Rockhampton again this evening for our final night on the road for a while, before heading on to Brisbane tomorrow where we will be staying for a few months in order to finance the rest of our trip around the country.

After our walk to nowhere on Thursday we were looking forward to a nice easy day on Friday as we headed into Townsville to find somewhere to stay and somewhere to watch England's first World Cup game. The latter proved simple enough as several of the bars on the main strip were showing the match, but unfortunately we chose the campsite for the intellectually challenged and it took us an hour just to get checked in! This process wasn't helped by the woman at reception trying to get us to set up camp in a spot that didn't exist, but once we got through to her that we needed somewhere other than concrete to put our tent up we finally had ourselves ready.

After spending the afternoon wandering around the town and catching a couple of hours sleep early in the evening, we headed to the bar just after one in the morning to watch the game and left a couple of hours later feeling very unimpressed! Despite the ridiculous hour we got back to our tent we still managed to set off quite early yesterday morning knowing that we had a long drive ahead of us as we headed south along the coast once more.

After a couple of hours we turned off the Bruce highway and headed up towards Eungella National Park. Once we arrived we had a search around the information booths to see if there was anywhere to stay for the night, but with the rain coming down we decided we would head on a little further. Before we moved on we walked down to the river to see if we could spot one of the most elusive animals in the Australian wild - the Duck-Billed Platypus.

We walked down to the river here a few people were huddled around the hand rail under the bridge looking into the water below. After just a few seconds we saw what everyone else was looking at as a platypus came to the surface for a swim around before diving back under the water again. This went on for a few minutes and it was amazing to see one of these animals in the wild especially so close a we could see them better out here than in any of the zoo's we have been to. After a little while we moved up to the road and onto the bridge to get a different view, and from directly above the river we could see the platypus diving down through the water before disappearing into the depths below.

After about half an hour the rain really started to pick up so we headed back to the car for some shelter and made our way back to the main highway to continue our journey south a little further until we arrived in Mackay. After one night's sleep we continued on and spent the whole of today driving, arriving in Rockhampton earlier this evening and soon had our tent set up by the river ready for the night. After dinner we sat outside chatting to a lady who was cycling up the coast - just her, her tent and her bike...and she was about sixty-five!!

Tomorrow we are heading onto Brisbane where we are hoping to stay for a few months to work, before moving onto pastures new.