The biggest sand island in the world!

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When i got to Brisbane i was picked up by a coach that drove me about 5 hours north to Hervey Bay where i then transferred to a cruiser which took me to Fraser Island which was to be my home for the next 3 nights. On my travels i have met a great number of people who has told me i should do a self-drive holiday on Fraser Island as it is the best way to see the island. I have a bit of a phobia about ever driving in a foreign country and given my time constraints, I had gone against their suggestions and booked the entire package through a company called CoolDingos. THANK GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!

It turns out that Fraser Island is the biggest sand island in the world, measuring approximately 122x23km, and it is made up of 99.8% sand, 0.02% rock. Virtually every single road is just sand. For the 2 day trip, we were driven around in a massive 4 WD truck type coach, and even they had problems. We had a funny New Zealander driver called Michael, who normally works as a bit of an aboriginal art expert/translator up north at Kakadu, but he came to Fraser Island 7 weeks ago for a bit of sunshine and a working holiday. However despite being here 7 weeks, in the past 4 days he has just got through 4 buses, and on our 1st day he almost crashed into a tree, and on the 2nd day he almost got stuck in the sand. Driving on Fraser Island requires a lot of skill and is not really for the faint-hearted! We went to the Basin Lake, the Champagne Pools and Lake Mackensie, with the latter being the most memorable. It is a freshwater lake with a PH of 5.5 which means that the water is good for your skin and it also conditions your hair, so when you get out it is soft and not at all tangled! Combine this with the fact that the sand there is silica sand and you have a natural spa! (silica sand is extremely good as an exfoliator on your skin, and it can also be used to polish any tarnishes off jewellery). On the second day a few of us decided to take a plane trip around the island, which involved taking off and landing on the beach. It all looked so nice from the air, and we saw another lake that was shaped like a butterfly, some sand dunes and some sands that had different colours running through them. I was lucky with my room-mates - a German woman called Andrea, and a Swiss 20 year old called Deborah who only learned English a couple of months ago in Perth, but she is doing so well! Puts us to shame, virtually everyone i have met so far can speak English no matter where they are from!

After my third nights sleep on Fraser Island i then caught a ferry back to the mainland for the next leg of my trip to start.

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