Day 57 Rainbow Beach

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Early rise again and a pretty rubbish sleep due to the cacophony of noises coming from the wildlife and bug orchestra. To be fair some of the noises I can assume birds or monkeys make (its seriously that hard to tell) actually made Em and I laugh out loud during the night. We hit the road bound for Rainbow beach today. Pretty uneventful drive via a Macdonalds for a frozen coke (yes they are real and they are only a dollar!).



Once in Rainbow beach, there was a bit of confusion where to stay. As we had booked for the next day to do a two night Fraser island trip, the hostel which runs this tour had stated more than once that we could camp in their car park the night before, with use of the facilities, and park our campervan there whilst we were on the island. Upon arrival when we went to check in our camper, we were told we could camp there but there is no facilities. Why we would want to camp somewhere with no toilet or even a tap, who knows. Anyway we decided to go down the road to dingo's, were we had to pay but we could actually shower and use the loo.



At 3oclock we had a debrief ahead of our trip to Fraser the next day. The safety videos were just hilarious, poorly acted and so repetitive. The highlight of this unintentional hilarity is a point where you see a 4 by 4 driving along the beach and there looks like there is a long grey rock. Suddenly the guy who is this rock moves his sleeping bag with a shocked face at the approaching 4 by 4. Then a voice exclaims “Don't sleep in the road” in heavily enunciated tone over the top. The whole room giggled. It also included advice if you are faced with a dingo – on this videos advice you are to cross your arms and walk backwards.



The video finishes and immediately one of the tour operators comes in with his dreadlocks and manly stance.



“Don't listen to that video. It is a load of shit, dingos don't hunt alone, they do so in packs. So if you are crossing your arms and walking backwards you'd probably walk into another dingo. Here's how you act with dingo's you never go out in a group smaller than 2 and if you see a dingo you huddle in a group and shout DINGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. If you go out alone they will attack you there's no two ways about it.”



He was pretty funny whilst simultaneously scaring me. What have I signed up for on this trip I was thinking to myself. His advice on if you get bitten by a snake or giant spider, was also hardly reassuring.



“If you get bitten by a snake, don't panic you will shorten your already 30 minutes till you die to 15 minutes. This is because you will get the blood pumping and spread the venom quicker to the heart. So stay calm and take a picture (A selfie?) so we know what actually bit you. There are 2 ambulance stations on this island with antidotes. You must know what has bitten you so they know what one to give you. If you don't know what snake bit you then well you die. So remember take a picture or keep an eye out for the colour and what it looked like.” Super.



Sufficiently scared and weirdly excited for our adventure we did the natural thing and went into town and then had showers. We had dinner with these two guys who were going to be in our 4 by 4 called Tom and Nick, both from England. They made us super jealous as they had a luxury campervan, with all sorts of luxury items like a table and double beds, stoves, sinks. It really put simple old mr E to shame.



We all went and had some drinks at the bar. Obviously there was some karaoke going on and we got to watch quite the array of standards. I'm not too surprised though, given that the first 5 up there got a free jug. I wasn't quite at the level that I could do it. Most of those earning these jugs were at the right level of drunkenness to do karaoke and probably didn't actually need the jug anyway.

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