The Worlds Largest Sand Island

Next stop Hervey Bay. We arrived after a 13 hour night bus ride. Once again, did we mention how stupid this bus pass thing was??? Hervey Bay is where Australians come to die…the elephant graveyard. We have never seen more motorized scooters anywhere else and we lived near Sun City, the place the snowbirds go to die!
We stayed at the Friendly Hostel which was only friendly in name. The proprietress was very, very, high strung. She gives new meaning to the term micro-manager. She watched your every move. Jason was scolded for running the water while washing a knife. Next, she stood over Woodley as she placed each article of clothing in the washing machine while repeatedly demanding to know if there was any sand in the clothes. One last giant scolding involved a search team but we’ll talk about that later.
These old people had a pretty good idea when they chose this place. Nice beach, long pier, kite-boarders everywhere, good food and extremely relaxing. We might come back here to die someday.
We took the ferry to Fraser Island. We had planned an afternoon of hiking and swimming in Lake Mackenzie. We really need to figure out the metric system because apparently 30 kilometers is more than the 5 miles Jason had in his mind. Did I mention this is the World’s Largest Sand Island?? The 30 kilometers was all on sand.
We checked in with the local ranger to tell them of our planned hike. From the look on her face it should have given away that this hike was a lot longer than we anticipated. But she gave us a map, explained dingo etiquette (did a Dingo eat your baby?), took our names, and asked that we inform the rangers when we return. Later, we learned this was a very important part of the hike.
The hike was incredible. The island is dense rainforest with the clearest, cleanest, freshwater lake you can imagine. The last hour of the hike was on the beach. We were the only people there with thousands of soldier crabs.
From the beach we saw our ferry and made a run for it….after an 8 hour hike we didn’t have the energy or time to go up the hill to the ranger station. We trusted a young kid at the ferry to notify the rangers for us. Oops….when we got back to the hostel our friendly proprietress informed us the rangers were searching for us as we spoke.

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