Whitsundays: Cape Hillsborough

After Bowen we continued down the Eastern seaboard to Cape Hillsborough; where a chap in a campervan shop in Cairns said he'd had Roos coming into his tent. Raz got an 11^th birthday present in a bait and tackle store in Prospertine. The fish shirt wearing owner gave Raz a great rod with a free reel; saying that we that we had caught him at a “weak moment”. There were varnished skulls of a “GT”, Golden Travelly and Spanish mackerel on the wall. Massive.

At Cape Hilsborough there are plenty of Ross.  There is a large grey Roo which grazes and lounges around and some wallabies, one with a joey, his little head involuntarily nodding as mum lurchers and lunches around. Occasionally he scraps soil and gets a bit of tucker if she lunges low enough. As we were finishing off our Spag B I noticed a little furry creature with a longish tail approach and over-sized eyes, like Puss in Skrek. Is it a tree kangaroo, a mouse kangaroo or a bush baby? It's very cute –and the kids all want one. We get our last apple, and offer it to the furry creature. It loves it. It loves us! It is so cute when it eats that we get a banana as well. A car drives by and the creature runs up the tree. We shine our torch up there and see that there are loads of cute furry creatures running up and down the branches.

A local woman who lives near Eungella, where the platapuses are and you get toads in your toilet, said it was a possum, possum. She told us that they shouldn't be fed - oppps - and that they get into everything. Later they get into our bucket of mangoes and start attacking the bins in team formation.

We spend Sunday morning catching up on kids school work – half and hour of groaning before we can actually get down to work - and then we walk over to Wedge Island, which hangs onto the tip of Cape Hilsborough by a sand causeway. On the way back, Raz and I, wanting a longer walk, started to walk out to turtle point along the bush track, but as usual got freaked out by all the crazy wildlife scurrying about in the bush; mainly lizards, but could be the puff ball adder or red bellied black snake. When we got back Bear managed to sing the whole of Elbow’s Grounds for Divorce whilst balancing on Raz’s shoulders in the pool. Not sure this counts as a literacy session.