Thursday 25th January 2018

Woke up bright and breezy in beautiful Strahan – beautiful flat Strahan … seems like everywhere we’ve stayed in recent times has been hilly (and hot) … so today was the day for a run (there was no putting it off)! Steve and I headed out for a 45 minute out and back run … it was fabulous running through Strahan, along the harbour side and by the beach. It got hotter and hotter though so I resorted to walking the last 10 minutes or so. Felt good to be out jogging again – vowed to keep it up on a daily basis now!! Oh yeh!!

Came back to find that Greg had been out shopping and bacon and eggs were on the breakfast menu. Kaye and I left our two men to cook said breakfast while we went and had a game of badminton on the grass outside our lodge … much giggling and ‘a few’ rallies … but great exercise and stretching all the same!!

After a delicious breakfast we took off on a walk to explore Strahan – a walk through People’s Park into the rainforest had been recommended. Wow … it was a fabulous walk, again tall tall trees and overgrown ferns of many types, beautiful streams running through in an array of colours, and at the end we reached the Hogarth Falls – so so beautiful.

As you can see, the water is a strange colour here – it is due to the presence of tannin in the water. Tannin is leached out of the peat substrate upon which certain vegetation communities (such as tea tree scrub and rainforest) grow. (As you can probably tell, I had to google that bit)!!!!

The tannin is found in the Strahan sea water too, as we found out when we went to the beach that afternoon. We had decided some down time was needed and so some lazing around on the sand, reading time and beach picnic was next on the agenda. A very mellow afternoon – hot but not too hot – a swim was required for cooling purposes though and that was interesting … so warm but it was like swimming in Coca Cola or tea … it was amazingly clear through the colour though … and we had been told it was perfectly harmless. There were lots of other people swimming, mostly children I must admit … and inflatables!!

On the way home from the beach we caught a waft of cooking from Molly’s cafe – roast dinner was on the menu for the evening … so you can guess where we rocked up an hour later. Roast beef, roast potatoes and all the trimmings – just the ticket. We were right next door to a bottle shop too which was so convenient as the cafe was BYO (bring your own)!! As soon as we wolfed the delicious food down, we hot footed it back to the river to resume our platypus hunt. One hour later …. we had seen so many ripples, an abundance of bubbles, we could even hear movement …. but we DID NOT see one duck bill platypus. 😟 Gutted!!!