Fraser Island :)

Hey Guys

Well I'm finally cleanish and warmish and back from my journey to the amazing isle of Fraser. Or uh Fraser Island I guess.

I'll admit I was a little apprehensive about going in the first place, but it was amazing!

So I was originally going to do a guided island tour through some company in Hervey Bay, but the guy at Peter Pan's travel convinced me that a self drive would be more of an adventure and I can definately tell you he was right!

The morning of the 18th we all got up and had the free Pancakes that Dingos hostel offers (they were good but they dont have Syrup here!) and checked out. When you go to the island you cant take all your gear with you, so you have to store it in their "secure 3 day storage shed" ... about the only fitting thing in that title is the word shed. well and I guess 3 day or something. But yeah, its an open shed with shelving in it at the back of the car park. Yay. I didnt leave anything valuable though, so no big deal for me. If someone really wanted to steal my dirty clothing they were welcome to it.

after storing our bags, it was time to see our vehichle ... a wonderfully rusted troopie just like surf camp! I was overwhelmed with a sudden pang of longing for our old troopie, or maybe it was just my pancakes threatening to come back up at the thought of 4x4ing on a remote island in that beast with no mechanic available ... who knows?

Anyway, we sorted our gear, checked the handbrake, and did an inspection of the car, making notes of all the dents, rust spots, and broken things on the car. We ended up circling almost the entire diagram of the car on our sheet, it was just that perty. Then we loaded up and headed off down highway towards our barge point.

I'll take this moment to mention a bit about the Fraser crew I was with. There were 10 of us in total; 2 lovely Irish girls, Emma & Helena, 2 English girls, Izzy & Emma, 2 english boys, George & Andy, Ricky who was Irish I think ... Martin from Austria (yes he sounded like Arnie only ... more geeky) and David the most awesome Korean I'll ever meet.

David decided to take the first driving shift, and I'm currently struggling with words on how to describe what it was like being a passenger in his car. hmm... well lets put it this way, he didnt understand much english, so when he was given the 10 second crash course on soft sand 4x4ing he probably only understoon 1 word in maybe 10. It was hilarious! He just powered down the highway, but he got us to the barge landing safely, and even off the barge and onto the island! Now, when you drive these troopies you are told not to go over 60k an hour because they are too top heavy and you just dont know what the beach ahead of you is going to be like. Fair enough, we were all cool with it, but not David. Nope I think he hit 80 as soon as the barge let us off. He did stop and pull to the side of the beach for a minute, and we thought maybe he was waiting for the other groups from the hostel to catch up to us. One group did pull up along side us, most likely to as us where we were going first, but unfortunately, I'll never know what he wanted. David just turned to him and grinned, having figured something out with the gear shift and said "No break, 2nd gear, its gooood!" and then we shot off like a bullet from a gun! After much loud yelling and white knuckled laughing, we got him straightened out on how to drive on the beach. It wasnt easy! But we made it up to Lake Mackenzie safely (phew!)

Unfortunately, it was a bit of a cold and overcast day on Fraser for day 1, so when we got to the Lake, no one really wanted to go swimming. I did go for a quick dip, but regretted it immediately. The water was beautiful, but freezing! On the plus side, I felt much warmer when I got out of the water. We were given safe driving times, and we wanted to make it to a camp site before high tide hit, so we didnt stay too long at the lake. We grabbed some food (bread, meat, cheese and butter yum!) and then loaded up again with a new driver (thank god) and headed back to the beach to find the Maheno Ship Wreck. We took a wrong turn somewhere on our way back to the beach though, and ended up taking about 45 minutes in the bush, lost as could be.

The Ship Wreck was pretty nifty though. The colors on my photos arent very good, jsut because the sun was setting and it was really overcast, but it was pretty we got a few group shots, got some people's running shoes soaked by the incomming tide, and we may or may not have illegally stood on parts of the wreck ... then it was off to pitch our camp site!

We picked a site nice and close to the ship wreck so that the next day we could get more photos, and it wouldnt take us very long to get up to the Northern end of the island to Indian Head and the Champagne pools. Let me just describe our camp site for you. It was a small alcove in the trees behind the dunes. No fires are allowed on Fraser, and because we were doing a self drive, there were no actual camp sites with facilities available to us unless we wanted to pay. So instead we pitched in the camping "areas" right on the beach. It was awesome! You could clearly hear the surf from our site. We had to set up camp early, about 4pm at the latest because the sun set so soon, so it was only about 3:30 when we had all our tents up. We were happily starting in on our beer when David decided to give us an into to Korean rules dodgeball on the beach It was basically the same as regular dodgeball (in the movie) but ... with less english. It was pretty fun except for the one time the ball almost went into the ocean, but we managed to grab it before the tide did, so all was well.

Speaking of the sea, I'll mention right now that we were warned that under no circumstances were we to go into the ocean around Fraser Island. Strong Currents, Jelly fish, and tons of sharks were all pretty good deterents for me, so I needed no second warnings.

We were making dinner when another group from our hostel pulled up and decided to camp with us. It was nice to have a large group to party with, since it was a cold night. It was one of the girl's birthdays, so they pulled out party hats and sparklers and we had a big boozy party including drinking games like Ring of Fire, and a whole lot of goon. We were warned earlier by rangers that girls were not to go bush toileting alone, and let me tell you, there is no quicker way to get to know people than by having to pee in the bushes and look for dingos while drunk. We were all pretty sauced, and sparing you the worst of the details, we had one girl pass out on the beach, had to drag one skinny dipping girl out of the surf, (note the warning about the sea above) had a full scale wrestling match in our camp, a dance party on the roof of the troopie and much much more. It was a fun night. The next morning was even more fun!

We had to be up by sunrise to start striking out camp and packing up to get to the point before HIgh tide hit. I have no idea how, but everyone managed to get up and packed by 8am. We had a quick breakfast of fried eggs and then we loaded up and booted it up the beach as the tide was coming close behind us.

We finally managed to get parked in what we assumed (rightly) was the Indian Heads parking area. Then we started the climb to the single most spectacular view I've seen in Australia so far. On the top of the heads all you can see is gorgeous beach and ocean. While we were climbing we saw a whale slapping its tail in the distance, which was amazingly cool We sat for a while on the top of the heads taking photos, and a couple of the guys decided to test their climbing skills (Helena and I couldnt watch them) I really wanted to see a shark while we were up there, but alas I had to settle for a few Manta Rays and what may have been a turtle. Having had our fill of the view we headed back down for the long beach walk to the Champagne pools. It was about a half an hour over soft sand, but it was pretty all the same. Once we finally got to the pools, we certainly werent disappointed. The tide was going out, so the pools werent very full, but all the same they were pretty!. The pools are basically a bunch of rocks that make something of a natural swimming pool where the constant waves fill them with warm salt water continuously. A couple of the guys decided to go swimming, but considering the warnings posted around and the size of some of the wave breaks, I settled on wading in the water instead.

I was snoozing on the beach with some of the girls when we heard people yelling about something, so I jumped up to discover there was a huge humpback whale breaching no more than 200meters out! It was a truly amazing site. I dont think i've ever seen Whales in the wild before Fraser, but it was very humbling. This whale kept jumping out of the water for about 10 - 15 mins. Unfortunately my camera was not fast enough to catch any good pictures, but I know a couple of the guys got some good ones, so I'll have to steal a couple. By this time the pools were getting very very crowded, and we still had to find a new camp site, so we said our farewells to the pools and started the long walk back to our troopie.

We decided to camp nearer to the southern part of the island for night 2 mostly because we wanted more time at the lakes and less time driving on our last day. We found a pretty good, sheltered site and unloaded our tents. We sent half the group to get more ice and some soft drinks while the rest of us set up the camp. While we were setting up tents we noticed some cans laying a little ways back from where we were setting up. not thinking much of it, we just cleaned them up thinking the last group here just didnt take care of the Island. We noticed not long after that they last group had actually burried the cans, and dingos had dug them up. Great, turns out we've just finished setting up in Dingo central. The area we were in was known for its Dingo population, as the kind ranger who pulled up shortly after we were set up told us. He reinforced the rules about keeping food stored and making sure no one left camp alone, then went on his merry way. Nice guy, not so nice news. Oh well, we were big bad backpackers. We'd be fine We started dinner (mm steak and potatoes) when the rest of the group got back, and that was when the dingos started poking around. It wasnt a big deal at first because we had lots of daylight left, and afterall, there were 10 of us. We finished dinner really quickly since the dingo kept coming back after we chased it off a few times and started throwing all our food containers into the troopie in an attempt to keep the dingos away. They kept coming around all night though, and you can bet that not a single girl went anywhere alone, nor went far. It was also freezing cold so we started our drinking games early. It was a fun night until we ran out of alcohol, and considering how much we had to start with, thats pretty bad. We started off with 2 cases of beer, 2 6packs of shmirnoff, 1 6pack of jim bean, and 8 4litre packs of goon... all gone before 9pm on our second night. Oops! We made it an early night on account of the cold anyway.

The next day didnt give us any break from the cold. it was freezing on the island! We found out when we got back that it was the coldest day in Queensland in 25 yrs! ick. Just our luck. We didnt get out of the car much, but we did go to Lake Wabby (a short walk from the car across some sand dunes and down a small mountain) then we took a "scenic" tour of the wilderness around the lakes. It took us alot longer than we expected and we almost missed our ferry back!

There are many more interesting little stories to relate, but honestly, I've typed this post out twice now, and both times its screwed up and been deleted and I just cant go through it again! Sorry If you really really want you can ask me in email or on msn or something.

in the mean time, more photos for your viewing pleasure:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=30270&l=5d1d4&id=618320647
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=30761&l=ccb64&id=618320647
and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=30765&id=618320647

there ya go folks ciao for now. I'm off to Hervey bay!

Love
Amy