Day 42: Fraser Island and Mon Repos Turtle Rookery

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What a day - all 20 hours of it! We had a 6am start to jump on our pickup for the Fraser Island tour and we got the first ferry across to the island. We were greeted at the other side by a resident female dingo. Approximately 200 of these live wild on the island and even though they look like dogs, they can be pretty vicious and are actually Asian wolves. Our first stop on the island tour was to Central Station in the subtropical rainforest, once the base for the logging workers. The 75 mile beach on the island is the highway and we had a pretty bumpy ride as we raced along the shore - infact the tracks all over the island are sand, so the bumpy feeling was constant throughout the day. We covered a number of other sights on the tour, the Maheno shipwreck (sunk on it's way to Japan 75 years ago), the Pinnacles (multicoloured sand mounds) and Eli creek (a freshwater creek that you can wade through waist-high down to the beach). The highlight of Fraser Island was definitely Lake McKenzie, pure white silica sand, low ph water that makes your skin and hair really soft and a perfect reflection of the sunlight to give the water a beautiful blue colour!

After our tour on Fraser Island, we made a mad dash 120km up north to Mon Repos Turtle Rookery. Turtles lay their eggs between Nov and Feb and hatchlings emerge 8 weeks later - so we had a good chance of seeing at least one of these! Hundreds of people come to the centre every night and wait until turtles come up onto the beach or hatchlings emerge. We were called onto the beach at 11pm to see a female turtle nesting, she continued to dig a nest for over an hour, and in the meantime another turtle emerged and began digging and laying within minutes. We watched the second turtle lay her eggs and cover her nest, but unfortunately due to the low tide she hadn't chosen a nesting site that was high enough on the beach. In order to maximise the likelihood of successful hatchings, the rangers said that we would have to relocate the nest. After making sure our turtle had safely made it back to the beach we helped the ranger carry all 126 eggs to the new nest! By this time it was 2am and after our very exciting day we headed back to camp. I've had the privilege of seeing the baby turtles emerging and running down into the sea before and to have helped keep these eggs safe so they too have a chance of running down the beach was really special!

Bailey's bit:

Fraser Island was very different, firstly being the worlds largest sand island and also having so much vegetation, including a sub tropical rain forest! While we were at Lake McKenzie, we were warned about a local dingo population and only to take what we needed down as they were very opportunistic animals. A couple either didn't get that note or just ignored the warning and took down a cool bag. Needless to say after they went in the lake a dingo promptly turned up and started going through the contents!
The evening was long but in the end extremely exciting, after all it's not everyday you do your bit to save an endangered species! The first turtle we went to after 2 hours worth of digging ended up not laying her eggs and went back into the sea probably to return another day without all the spectators!

Daily mileage: 5 up early and down to the esplanade for a quick fartlek. The surf was very flat so I doubt it's a surfing beach. Plenty of other runners out again!

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