Fraser Island

The adventures down under just continue to get better and better. It’s incredible how each trip I take is so amazing that it can’t be topped, yet the next trip actually is even more unbelievable. Anyway, this time the setting was the world’s largest sand island, Fraser Island. We had all just finished up classes, so some friends and I decided to get out of cold and rainy Sydney and head north. It actually wasn’t that easy, for me anyway, because I had been quite concerned about how much money I was spending and what I had left. Luckily, I have amazing friends here that are just pushy enough and they convinced me that this would be worth it. Wow, they were right! So thank you Courtney, Joelle, and Ania!

So it all began bright and early Sunday morning when we caught a 7:30 flight to Hervey Bay, which has the smallest commercial airport I have ever seen. Seriously, they have only one gate and just two planes fly into and out of the airport each day. So, we arrived at about 9:15 and had an easy ride to our hostel. We had quite a relaxed day on the beach where I collected heaps of coral and shells to bring back with me and as always, a day at the beach with Dom would not be complete without some good frisbee action. We got to bed fairly early, because early the next day our adventure on Fraser would begin.

We woke up at about 5:45 on Monday morning to get ready for briefing at 6:30. So what we got ourselves into was a three day, two night self-guided tour around Fraser Island. Now, self-guided means there is no tour guide involved and you do everything on your own. So we would be driving ourselves around the island, finding our own campsites and cooking our own food. Sounds easy enough, right? Well our group of friends totaled 6 and the overall groups consisted of 10 people, so we were a little bit concerned about being put with people we wouldn’t get along with. Also, at the briefing we got the feeling like there wasn’t really as much freedom to do whatever we wanted, because they told us that they wanted all three groups to stay together and camp together. Naturally, keeping 30 people together and wanting to do the same things would be difficult. So, all of the excitement that we had built up was toned down just a bit after the briefing.

Well, the four others that got put in a group with us turned out to be great people and we all got along just fine. The others were Jonas and Aurelia, a young couple from Germany traveling around Australia before going back home and starting their studies. Then we had a French couple, David and Audrey, who were doing the same thing, but had been going for a bit longer. They arrived in Australia, bought a camper van and just started driving to all their destinations. And the group of friends that I came with from Sydney was Dom, my German mate who everyone knows by now, Mike from New York, goes to Cornell, Courtney from Atlanta, goes to Georgia Tech, Joelle a Canadian that lives in Washington DC, but goes to McGill in Canada, and lastly our token Aussie, Ania! Everyone in our group seemed to have pretty much the same mentality about Fraser Island, unlike the other groups. The other groups seemed to want much more for it to be a party and be real crazy, however our group was more relaxed and chill about it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely fun to be social and meet tons of people from all over the world, but here I was much more interested in enjoying the beauty of Fraser Island, tossing around the frisbee in the dark as wild dingos wandered around and the stars and Milky Way galaxy shines brightly above us. I would have many more opportunities to meet people, but how many other times would I be able to enjoy nature in this way?

Anyway, back to the actual trip itself. Each group was given all the supplies needed except for the food, so we had to make a stop at Woolies before heading to the island. This in itself was quite difficult, considering the group only knew each other for maybe an hour and wasn’t sure what kind of foods everyone liked. But we made it out ok after spending only about $250, which isn’t too bad when you split it up among 10 people. After somehow fitting everything and ourselves into the truck, we were off toward the barge that would take us on to Fraser. Our first driver designated was Jonas, since he had experience driving on the other side of the road, but he did an amazing job backing the truck down onto the barge and we let him know about it. Then we had a 40 minute ride out to the island and we were set off on our own. Pretty quickly our group broke away from the others since they were being pretty slow about everything. We wanted to get going as quickly as possible!

Now, we knew that we’d be driving on sand most of the time and there was the possibility of getting stuck. That’s why we needed four-wheel drive vehicles, but I had no idea the roads would be so bad and so bumpy. We learned straight away from the beginning, it was not going to be an easy ride. There were so many times throughout the trip that it really felt like we were going to tip over or get stuck, but we never did…sort of. But it was mainly because we had such legendary drivers!

Our first stop was Lake McKenzie, which we had all heard of because it’s the most well-known lake on Fraser. The water there is just so clean and fresh, it was like being in a swimming pool, but without the chlorine taste, so that was a real treat. It was a little bit cold, but it was worth it to get in. It was so nice and refreshing and it actually ended up counting as our shower for the day J. Dom and I had our first intense frisbee session on Fraser here at Lake McKenzie, too, so even though I had already been in Lake McKenzie and felt nice and clean, it didn’t last too long because I was rolling around and diving in the sand to catch Dom’s crazy throws. We also had our first dingo sighting here at Lake McKenzie. We were all in the water, except Joelle, and the dingo just wandered up to our towels looking for any kind of snack, but found Joelle instead who quickly shouted it away.

As for the dingos, we were warned quite a bit about them. They can be dangerous and have been known to attack and kill small children. Basically, it’s illegal to feed them or leave food out for them. Over time, people had been feeding them, making them more brave around humans. This is a problem because they are wild animals and can be aggressive about getting food, especially if it’s a mother with babies. So the idea is to get people to stop feeding them so that they won’t want to come around humans. As it is, it’s hard not to want to feed them, because they look so thin and friendly. But that is all part of their scheme. It was so neat though that they would just come up almost out of nowhere and be right there by you. We probably saw around 15 over the three days which was far more than I expected we would.

So after Lake McKenzie, we continued on driving toward the eastern beach to look for a campsite. Well, it didn’t exactly end up being that easy. Somewhere along the way we took a wrong turn and began driving west and didn’t realize it until we were at the west coast with not much daylight left. This was a problem because we are not allowed to camp on the west side of the island and we are also not supposed to drive at night. There was also this absolutely idiotic guy on the west coast who told us we were on the east side and that we couldn’t camp on the east side, we had to go back to the west side on the other side of the island. He said all of this even though the sun was setting right there in the west. There is a pretty good chance that he was using his Aussie sarcasm to seriously mess with us, but in any case we knew we couldn’t stay there. So, we decided to just turn around and keep driving until we got to the eastern beach. David was the lucky hero who got the pleasure of driving at night. It took us about a little more than an hour to get to the eastern beach and it was so hard to see all the holes in the road, so it was a wicked crazy ride that night. Luckily, we did finally get there safe and stopped at the first campsite area we could find. We had to set up camp and cook dinner in the dark, but it wasn’t too bad. If anything, the whole adventure that night provided us with a good group bonding experience. After we were all set up, it was time to relax with everyone, have some beers, hear about each other’s experiences in Australia so far and just enjoy everyone’s company. We also had a late night Tim Tam Slam and Dom and I also had to try out the glow in the dark frisbee.

The next morning Dom and I woke up just in time to catch the sunrise and other’s followed soon thereafter. The mornings on Fraser were quite cold, but it was well worth it to see that sunrise. After breakfast, I walked out to the ocean to rinse out my bowl and as I began walking back to the campsite I saw a dingo walking towards me from down the beach. I stopped to watch it and it ended up walking up pretty close to me and gave me that look as if to say, “I’m hungry, give me some food!” But I resisted and finally started walking back, but the dingo just followed me. It wandered around quite close to the campsite and gave us all some great photo opportunities. Finally, David ran it off, because like we were told, we want to try to get them a little less used to being around humans. It’s really cool though that they come up real close to us like that.

After we got the truck packed up, it was my turn to drive and we set off for Indian Head. It was surprisingly easy to get used to driving on the other side of the vehicle and shifting with my left hand, since it was a manual transmission. I didn’t really have to worry about driving on the other side of the road too much because there really isn’t a traditional road and not many other cars passing. It’s pretty funny how sitting in the back as a passenger it feels like the driver doesn’t have much control of the vehicle and it makes you uneasy sometimes, but when you are driving, you feel so much in control and actually you are. So it was actually much easier to be driving than riding in the back. I didn’t have to drive on nearly as bad of roads as David and Jonas since most of it was just along the nice smooth beach.

After about an hour, we arrived at Indian Head, a huge rock formation with an incredible view of the island and ocean. It was even sort of scary at some points, because there are no guard rails or warning signs and it was a very far fall down to the bottom. In the water we could see some sting rays and David, Audrey and Aurelia even saw some whales far off in the distance. I did get to see quite a few whales myself later on the trip, thankfully. After spending a good hour or so at Indian Head, we moved on to the Champagne Pools, which ended up being crap because the tide was out and there wasn’t much water in the pools. But we finally met back up with the other two groups we were supposed to be with. We didn’t last too long with them though, because we had lunch and were ready to go, so we left them behind once again.

We headed off to search for our next campsite, stopping along the way at a campground to wash up our dishes. We found a place along the beach again, but did actually camp along with the other two groups this night. And we arrived and got set up before dark, too, which was a plus! Before dinner, a few of us decided to climb the big hill at the back of our campsite in hopes of getting a nice few of the sunset. However, the vegetation got extremely thick and the hill was much larger than we anticipated, so we just stopped at a comfortable place and took pictures of the horizon in the east. Sounds a little strange considering the sun sets in the west, but it was still really nice to be up there and look down and out over the ocean.

We finally decided to go back down to the campsite and this was much, much quicker since we could basically just slide down the sand. It was quite dirty and potentially dangerous, but still heaps of fun. When we got down, we began cooking our spaghetti dinner, which took ages since we had to boil such a large pot of water, but it was well worth it, because it was very tasty! Afterwards it was Tim Tam Time, followed by what I will simply call a group QF and leave it at that. But then obviously, we had to get our frisbee and stargazing in. We came across quite a few dingos that night, too, and later in the night as Mike, Dom and I were out on the beach, one of them even sat down and watched us throw the frisbee around. At night, obviously it was much more difficult to see them, so you wouldn’t know they were there until they were pretty close. That night as we all slept they came around the campsite fairly often and the girls even said that some dingos “attacked” their tent, but I’m not so sure how accurate that is.

The next morning, once again we were up for the sunrise. It was actually much better this time, too, because the clouds were really interesting, as you can hopefully see in the photo. After breakfast and packing up for one last time, we headed south down the beach toward Eli Creek and Lake Wabby. The stop at Eli Creek was nothing too great, mainly because the creek just wasn’t too full of water or flowing very fast. Usually, you can float down it out to the beach, but not on this day. However, we did get to see a whale in the water pretty close to the beach, flapping its fins and playing around. That was really a sight to see, because I had been trying to see some whales off the coast in Sydney for some time, but now I finally did get to see some. The day before we even saw some far off in the distance that were jumping almost entirely out of the water and making huge splashes. Just an amazing thing to see!

After gazing at the whales, we then set our sights straight for Lake Wabby (pronounced like “wobby”). When we got there, we came across one of the other groups again, but they didn’t feel up to taking the 1.5 km walk down to the lake because they were all “in a hungover mood”. So weak! We were not such lazy bums and took the walk down. It was well worth it! Lake Wabby is surrounded by huge hills of sand that Dom and I found exceptionally good for some extreme frisbee. We decided it would be awesome to run down the hill while the other one throws the frisbee out over the water for the runner to jump out and grab then fall into the water. Unfortunately it was only successful once, as I had the throw and Dom the beautiful catch, but that one time was so awesome that it made it well worth all our effort. After that we were quite exhausted, so we laid on the hill to rest, but the rest for me anyway would be short-lived.

As we were lounging there a dingo came walking by. This wasn’t really a big deal since we had gotten used to seeing them around near us. However, this one decided to walk up to where everyone’s bags were and actually grabbed Ania’s purse and started running off with it! Mike and David immediately started chasing after it and I soon followed. After a little while, David looked back and yelled down from the top of a hill, “Well you can forget about your bag!” When I got to the top I could see that the dingo had run all the way across the huge field of sand and was far away from us. I caught up with the guys and we figured there was no chance of catching it and that the bag was gone, but for some reason we decided to keep running after it, following its tracks. The last point we saw it was just before a forest of trees and I was telling myself that if it wasn’t just over the hill at the edge of the forest I wouldn’t chase after it anymore, because who knows if it has a big group of other dingos waiting in the woods and I for sure didn’t want to get it cornered somewhere and get it real scared. Luckily, it had stopped just over that last hill, had dropped the bag and was licking a muesli bar wrapper! I didn’t want it to run off with the bag again, so I snuck up around the side of it and sort of yelled and clapped to scare it off and it worked. We had the bag back! We were all quite exhausted from running after it over the sand and up the hills, but it’s now fun to say that I have chased down a wild dingo and won! After that, it was definitely time for a serious nap. Then Dom and I decided to have a go at one last intense frisbee session and it turned out to be nothing short of that. Lake Wabby definitely provided us with our best frisbeeing to date!

We finally walked back to the carpark, had a big lunch, trying to use up all of the food we had left since we were leaving the island in a few hours. Then it was time to head back to the barge landing and eventually Hervey Bay. However, as soon as we left, Jonas complained about the truck acting up. He couldn’t shift very easily at all and finally the clutch completely gave out! We were stopped at the top of one of the worst turns, so some of us finally got out and pushed it down the hill to where he could turn off and be out of the middle of the road. Now we were really in a pickle, because we needed to be moving to get to the barge in time and get back across to the mainland. Otherwise, we would be spending another night on the island with not much food or water. The tour company had told us to simply call them if we ever come across a problem, yet there was absolutely no cell phone signal on the island, so we had to just wait for someone to drive by who could hopefully help us out in some way. We were also concerned that we would be responsible for the vehicle problems and would lose our $500 bond that we put down for it. Also, some people who were leaving Hervey Bay that night or early the next morning were concerned about missing their connections, causing lots of chaos. Breaking down like this was the exact reason why the company wanted all of the groups to stay together, but we figured the others had already been past where we were. Finally someone did come by and offered to take some of us to the next intersection where surely someone would be able to take them on to the barge and get help from there. We decided that the three people who most needed to get back to the mainland tonight were the ones to go. That ended up being Mike, Jonas and Aurelia because they were leaving Hervey Bay the soonest. Mike was even supposed to leave later that night. So then the rest of us were left to just wait and hope they could get help out to us.

I was quite upset about having to stay on the island another night without food or water and being in a place where we really couldn’t set up our tents or anything. I was tired of having to dig a hole every time I needed to drop a deuce and hadn’t had a shower in about three days. Well, luckily some others did drive by and slowly we received enough advice about what to do that we finally figured out we could just start the truck in second gear and just keep it there. There was no clutch at all, so as soon as you started the car it would start moving and whenever we stopped it would just shut off. After traveling that way at about 10 kilometers per hour, we arrived back at Kingfisher Bay about an hour later. We were well late of making the barge, but it turns out that this place is where they take our trucks to have them worked on anyway, so we were able to just leave it there, grab most of our gear out of the truck and make the last ferry back to the mainland with about five minutes to spare. Finally, I could relax, because we were going to make it back to our hostel that night and it seemed like we wouldn’t be responsible for breaking anything on the truck.

It actually all turned out perfect. The troubles provided much more excitement to an already wonderful trip and we even had a much better ride back to the mainland, riding on the front of the ferry, heading into the sunset. We didn’t have to clean out our truck like the others and we got picked up straight from the harbor and taken back to the hostel. It was such a great end to a crazy, wonderful time on Fraser Island. We also got all of our bond money back and everyone made their connections to their next destination just fine. So what once seemed like it would be a horrible end to an otherwise great trip, turned out to make it all that much better in the end.