The Big Blue Ocean

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I spent a long, quiet night at the motel in Toowoomba. It was nice though, having a room all to myself and being able to wash some clothes in the sink (I was very quickly running out of clean underwear). The bus for Brisbane left before 7am, so I had to check out early the next morning. I met Lea in Brisbane where we boarded a bus together to go to Rainbow Beach. Now I’m just following Lea around for a couple of days. She’s going all the way up to Townsville and Cairns, but I just don’t have the time or the money to go that far north right now. I’ve decided that I’m basically just going to do whatever Lea wants to do. It’s really nice to have someone to travel with for a little while.

It takes five hours to get from Brisbane to Rainbow Beach. After checking in, the first thing we do is walk down to the beach to admire the view. And it’s a view like you could never imagine. The ocean is so blue and stretches so far that it seems practically endless. We walk up along the beach until the tide starts coming in, which is when we head back - the last thing we need is to get trapped by the tide. It’s nearly dusk when we head back to the hostel to eat noodles, dinner of champions (or at least champion backpackers). We’ve come up with the bright idea of waking up early to see the sunrise the next morning, so before passing out from exhaustion at 9pm, I set my alarm for 4:45am.

The sunrise is gorgeous. Everything is orange and rose colored and even though a heavy cloud is looming just over the horizon, the light spreads across the water and shimmers. Surprisingly, we aren’t the only people out on the beach. There’s a man fishing, knee deep in the waves, a few people walking their dogs and even more people running up and down the sand. We stood for over an hour, watching the sunrise, until we had to go back to the hostel to be in time for the wild dolphin feeding that we had signed up for the night before.

A bus picked us up at 7am sharp and drove us to a little dock, where we took a boat ride out to Tin Can Bay. Three wild Indo-Pacific dolphins congregate at this little bay almost every morning (there had only been two days since January that the dolphins hadn’t appeared, according to our boat driver). A group of volunteers provided tourists with 3 kilos of fish for each dolphin (a fifth of their daily diet, since they are still wild animals) and twelve people at a time enter the knee-deep water and the dolphins take the fish right from our hands. Some dolphins are greedier than others and swim around the volunteers trying to get more fish from tourists. It was more organized than I had imagined it would be (I had this vision of a boat sidling up to a pod of swimming dolphins out in the deep water and reaching over the side to stroke them. It wasn’t like that), but it was still a special experience. Also amusing were the two pelicans walking around the bay waiting for scraps from the volunteers. I had never seen pelicans out in the wild before and the sure are funny looking birds.

We checked out immediately upon our return to the hostel and left our luggage in the short-term storage for the afternoon until our bus for Hervey Bay came. Lea and I made pancakes for lunch, which were delicious, and spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach. We went in the water, because we aren’t the kind of girls that don’t like to get wet, and got pummeled by the ways. No wonder people get dragged out to sea, the water is so powerful. We lay on the beach for a while and I got the first of what is to be, I’m sure, many legendary sunburns. I burned down the left side of my ribcage and my upper thigh. It didn’t end up hurting that badly, but I bought some aloe vera gel just to be sure. It makes me glad that I didn’t get mom’s allergy.

We arrived in Hervey Bay just before dark. It wasn’t actually that late, but Queensland is the only province in Australia that doesn’t adopt daylight savings. We booked ourselves a one-day tour of Fraser Island for the next day. I never had any intention of going to Fraser Island, in fact I didn’t even know what Fraser Island was, but everyone we met said what an amazing experience is was and we’d be crazy not to do it. The three-day-two-night tour is supposed to be the best, but time is limited and we decided one day would be alright.

Fraser Island is the world’s largest sand island and is home to some really stunning vegetation and wildlife. As part of the one day tour we got to visit Wanggoolba Creek, a fresh water creek running through a rainforest in the southern end of the island, and then drive up 75-mile beach to the Maheno shipwreck, a former cruise ship that ran aground in the late 1930’s. The Maheno was once a war ship that saw very little battle and following the end of the First World War it was converted into a cruise ship. In the mid 1930’s it was considered obsolete and sold to the Japanese as scrap metal. In order to tow it back to Japan the rudders had been removed, but a storm snapped the tow rope and the ship floated ashore the east side of Fraser Island and has laid there ever since. Its current dilapidated state is an unbelievable sight. Waves still crash against the side, but it’s never moved again.

Following the Maheno the bus takes us to see the Pinnacles, which are colored mounds of sand, and then to Eli Creek, which you can either float down or follow on a boardwalk. After a buffet lunch we visit Lake McKenzie, the island’s largest and most beautiful lake. Unfortunately for us, we ventured out in dark windy weather, so the sky wasn’t as blue and the water wasn’t as clear as it usually is. Even though it was as great an experience as everyone said it would be, if I had to do it all over again I would take a longer tour. Longer tours take you all the way up to Indian Point, where you can see Humpback Whales and Tiger Sharks. But you can’t do everything in one day.

The next morning we had to split up, which was a sad moment. By this time the two of us had been traveling together for about a week, if you include the time we spent with Simon. I booked a bus that went south again to Noosa and Lea booked a train that left that night for Townsville. Lucky Lea got to go whale watching during the day, and I’m sure it must have been incredible. Too bad for me the bus only travels south in the mornings. Noosa is a bonafied surf town, so I’m excited to get my hands on a board.

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Photos

wild dolphin feeding
that's me with the fish

Lake McKenzie
Lea illustrating just how cold it was.