We spent much of the day exploring the trails, waterfalls, and giant trees of Mt Fields National Park
We had a late lunch further down the Tyenna River at a café called The Possum Shed in a little town called Westerway. They do have opossums there at night, but the big daytime draw there was a resident platypus who lives in a burrow just beneath the balcony tables.
We stayed for over an hour until the café closed, but never saw any sign of her. This has happened every time we have tried to spot one of these elusive creatures in the wild, so we weren’t too surprised. We still had some more time to spare, so we walked the riverbank just downstream to look for more. We were just about to pack up and leave when we spotted not one, but two of them! We were so excited to have finally seen these strange, patchwork animals in their own environment.
Finally we see platypus, the riverbank just across from the small school - apparently sigthtings are practically a given here (we later found)
Mostly, they spent their time submerged, sifting through the mud for food, like little worms or crustaceans. In between, they would surface to chew their catch, get a breath and scratch a few air bubbles into their coats for buoyancy on the next dive. It’s easy to see why the first Europeans to see specimens returned from Australia thought the creatures were a taxidermist’s poorly executed joke. Who would believe an otter with a beaver’s tail and a duck’s bill was real? Oh, also they are mammals that lay eggs and they can cause enormous pain with a venomous kick. C’mon, explorers, you’ve been dipping too deep into the rum rations again! Nope, they are real. Maryanne had one of them swimming so close to her feet that the telephoto she was using couldn’t focus. They are strangely adorable, although it would be a bad idea to try to pick one up to cuddle.
The Derwent Valley is also home to a number of major hops growing enterprises - I've never seen hops and was quite fascinated (its how most beers start off). It's no wonder they have so many breweries in Tassie!
Since we'd had such poor luck finding platypus before, we had pre-organized a guided kayak tour for the early evening, down a section of the Derwent into which the Tyenna feeds. The trip was billed as a platypus tour. We did see a few from a distance, which we could recognize as such because we have our eye in now. We were never really close enough to look at them. Mostly, the tour was a nice meander down a pretty, slow section of the river with just a few mild rapids thrown in to spice things up. Maryanne went over the side in one of these. Even though the water was pretty cold, she remained perfectly calm while I used my kayak as a tug to push her out of the rapids. Then the guide arrived, righted her boat and helped her back aboard no worse for wear.
And a fun Kayak trip with Tassie Bound Adventures (photo credit to them)
Back out of the water, we felt like we needed to see some platypus a bit closer up than the kayaking had allowed for, so we returned to Westerway in the hopes of getting another up-close platypus encounter there. YES! As it was getting cooler and nearing sunset, the platypuses were much more active. The light quickly became too low for photography to work, so we just sat as the only two people on the bank marveling at one of Earth’s strangest and rarest creatures, and the fact that they were actually outnumbering us at the moment. Never in either of our wildest childhood dreams did we ever think we would someday be sitting with them swimming at our feet.
More fun watching the platypus in Westerway. One swims right up to the bank I'm standing on, as Kyle gets a video of another doing the same.
It had been a long and wonderful day. We had planned to top it off with dinner at the Bush Inn, Australia’s longest continually operated pub, but they were closed on Mondays, so we never got the chance. Much closer to home, we discovered a place that does pretty amazing pizza, so it worked out okay.
The following day, it was time to take a break from the fun to finish most of the rest of the chores on our job lists. I mainly hunched over our engines while Maryanne went out to buy provisions for the next month or so. When we were both done, we headed back to the Bush Inn and finally had a meal there. It was okay – pretty typical pub fare, but nothing that has obviously benefitted from almost two hundred years of culinary refinement. Still, it’s a nice spot in a quaint building along a lazy river, so it made for a nice ending to a hard day.
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