Day 94

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Fraser Island… Fraser Island… Fraser Island…

This will probably be quite a long post, so I would advise that you make a cup of tea and then sit down to enjoy it. I’m adding this when I’m halfway through: it’s a REALLY long post

First, a little bit of what I’ve learnt about Fraser Island. Fraser Island is the world’s largest sand island, and although it is made of sand, it has rainforest growing all over it - which is strictly speaking scientifically impossible. It’s a world heritage site, due to it’s cultural (Aboriginal) and natural significance, so although there are a handful of hotels/hostels/resorts on the island, it’s very much an eco-friendly holiday. Which generally, in my experience, translates into poor hygiene!!!

Just a random fact: on the island there are trees growing called Satinay trees. Satinay wood is the only wood in the world that is impermeable to water termites, so before the 90s, there was a lot of logging on Fraser Island (these trees grow NOWHERE else in the world). The wood was used to build docks, including the London docks. The docks last for 200 years (or more) as opposed to just a few decades.

Anyway, there are two popular ways to explore this island. Number one (which is what I did) is a self-guided tour. You’re given a map and a few pointers, then you set off in a 4WD with a bunch of strangers. You camp in the bush for two nights (three days on the island) and you prepare all your food yourself. Number two is a guided tour. You get put on a big bus and get a guided tour of the island. There isn’t the same flexibility, but it’s all inclusive so your food and accommodation is paid for (no camping in the bush for YOU!!). The guided one is about 3 times more expensive, but that’s debatable due to various deposits you have to make regarding insurance, and also buying food.

You can find many exciting things on Fraser Island. There’s a shipwreck called the Maheno shipwreck. I actually know the whole story of how that got there, so if you’re really bored one day you can ask me and I’ll tell you the exciting story. There are several “perched lakes” which is some kind of scientific phenomenon where you get freshwater lakes, which are higher than sea level. I can’t remember exactly how those work SORRY. All I know is that they are fresh, very clear and lovely to swim in. The sea off the coast of Fraser Island is a breeding ground for tiger sharks and bull sharks (those are two of the very few kinds that actually eat people). The sea is not quite as lovely to swim in as those lakes… There are also crocodiles. You’ve got to love Australia, hey. On the island there’s a wide variety of different birds, lizards and… snakes and spiders. There are also dingoes. I could talk for years about dingoes. Dingoes are wild dogs that look kind of like small brown wolves…

I’m actually going to devote a whole paragraph to dingoes. As a backpacker, you hear many a horror story about dingoes. The night I spent in Rainbow Beach, I heard that a girl had been bitten the day before and had been airlifted to hospital. You hear so many stories about people getting bitten - and dingoes particularly like to bite backpackers. In the first place that I camped, the ranger said that in the past month (now I’m not sure if he’s talking about April, or four weeks ago from now) 4 people had been bitten. That’s either one or two a week, and when they’re bitten they go to hospital. It’s that bad. The dingoes become accustomed to people camping and become less and less afraid of them, so become more and more dangerous. You may have heard the “Dingo stole my baby” story. The advice we were given regarding them was simple - don’t feed them, don’t attract their attention. Don’t run away from them because they’ll run after you. If you see them you’ve got to try to get them to go away because if not they’ll sit and wait for the opportune moment to nibble on something (either you, or your food). Always travel with a group of people, especially at night (and especially when you have to “bush toilet”). Don’t be fooled by the fact that they look thin. They are not hungry, you’re from an obese world and that’s what you would look like if you had to fend for yourself.

I think that’s enough about the island itself now, I’ll just get on with my story of the past three days.

When I arrived in Hervey Bay, the day before I was due to leave for the island, I met a girl called Bryony. We went out for our “Last Supper” (except it was lunch, involved no wine or bread-tearing - instead we had fish and chips) together and stuffed ourselves - we even had PUDDING!!! What a luxury. She was very nice, and it was good to meet someone doing the same trip as me before it started. The day was sweaty hot, and it was pretty impossible to do anything vaguely exciting.

Next morning, we woke bright and early. We were quickly split into groups of about 6, who would then become the people we spent the next 60 or so hours with. In my group, there was: Bryony (from near Blackpool), Bethan and Sabrina (from Wales) and Jade and Sam (couple from Manchester). I’m not going to talk about my opinions of them on this blog because this is a pretty public forum… I’ll tell you about it in person, if you ask. We went to the supermarket, stocked up on food for three days, then headed to the ferry. The ferry to the island was probably the slowest in the world, but on the way over I saw a shark and a dolphin (not swimming together). We arrived on the island at about midday, and the weather was beautiful. I had a minor panic attack when we first hit the dirt tracks inside the island. Imagine this - you’re being driven in a car by a stranger who has probably never driven a 4WD before, definitely never driven a car in a rainforest anyway. It was the kind of scary where you genuinely fear for your life. I was RELIEVED to hit the parking area for the lake - Lake Wabbi, our first stop. We walked for about 20 minutes through rainforest, and then had to plod up a large sand dune. The area was absolutely stunning, a large sand dune with a green lake at the bottom. Obviously we went for a swim… The water was clear (and definitely fresh, although a little fishy-tasting). We could see the catfish swimming around us, and it was a lovely start to the trip. We headed back to the car, and drove to the eastern side of the island (you can camp along the beach there). When we arrived at our first camping site, it started raining. Rainforest kind of rain, where it’s thick, heavy, not particularly cold, and impossible to step outside in without getting soaked to the bone within seconds.

I’ll make a quick point here. When, like myself, you’ve been travelling alone for 3 months getting used to making decisions as a group takes a while. Especially when the group is made up of strangers - you have absolutely no input on the personality of these people, unlike when you have a group of friends (i.e. you’ll make a group of friends with personality traits you can bear).

Various members of the group * ahem * decided that it would be a fantastic idea to set up the tents ASAP, despite the advice of nearby Australians (who camped there regularly). Their advice was that the shower would probably blow through within half an hour. Just putting that out there. We set up the tents, getting absolutely soaked in the process - and letting water into the tents. By the time we had finished setting them up, the rain stopped. Look who was right!! The rain did start again about an hour later though. We started barbequing some meat. Only problem was that we had bought it, frozen, from the hostel. And it was still frozen. The barbeque plate was also covered in sand. The stuff cooked slowly, and the rain started again. When we eventually had it, we ate standing up underneath the tarpaulin we had hung up between our van and another one from the same group of people who left the hostel. We had one on the ground, which had puddles of water all over it, and sand. The food was sand, with a little bit of meat on the side. Afterwards we sat on the wet tarpaulin with two of the other van groups, 18 of us in total. Whenever we saw a dingo (which was pretty regularly) we would all simultaneously scream, which made them run away pretty quickly. There were two guys in the whole group of 18 (I’m not sure why, but there seem to be very few male backpackers on the east coast of Australia). We did sing songs to cheer ourselves up (you do feel pretty miserable with a belly full of sand, and wet clothes). You know the song about the farmer who had a dog called Bingo? You might not. We had a song which went “There was a dog on Fraser Island / And his name was Ding-o / D-I-N-G-O, D-I-N-G-O, D-I-N-G-O / Ding-o was his name-o”. Then you repeat, and you miss out the letters one at a time. It’s a fantastic song. I think the dingoes really liked the song too, because they seemed to be attracted to it. Night fell around 5:30pm. When I say night, I mean that it’s so dark that you can hardly see your hand in front of your face. We went to bed at the late hour of 8:30pm. The problem with camping is that you have nowhere to dry your clothes, because the tent is wet and you obviously can’t hang it outside. The night was hard work. The four girls (i.e. not Sam and Jade) were packed into the tent. Sabrina was snoring. I was waking up about once every 30 minutes and telling everyone how scared I was of dingoes (they have been known to tear through tents). It was a FANTASTIC night’s sleep. Not.

Despite the cold and the wet (it was still raining the next morning) we were pretty cheerful. We had steak and sand for breakfast (that was meant to be dinner the day previously). When we set our minds to it, we could be very efficient and creative, and generally positive about the whole thing. The plan had been to drive all the way up the beach to a place called Indian Head and the Champagne Pools. The 33-knot wind and the fact that it was chucking it down hindered us. We made it to Eli Creek, then the shipwreck, then decided that there was no point going to the Head. It’s meant to be an amazing lookout over the island, but given that we could see barely anything already we thought it wouldn’t be worth it. We did a scenic drive through the island, through rainforests thick and thin. I actually really enjoyed this part of the day (although I had been really looking forward to going to the Head - apparently you can see sharks, dolphins, sea turtles and sting rays from there). We drove and drove, it rained and rained… We ate and ate (sand). The mood was still upbeat, and we managed to laugh our way through the day despite the fact that we were still wet. I had brought just a pair of shorts and long pyjama bottoms with me, and the shorts got wet the first night (in fact they are still wet as I type now). I wore my pyjama bottoms for the second and third day. We stopped at one of the few shops on the island for ice to fill our Esky (ice box), and I found a $20 pair of thin trousers, which were essential to keep warm in the night. We made it to our campsite for the night, and after a bit of fuss as to where would be the best place to put our tents (the gale-force winds were becoming a bit of a worry), the others started arranging the campsite (along with tarpaulin stretched between the trees and on the ground for shelter) while I struggled with making the food. The key part of my food preparation was minimising the amount of sand in it. And then I had to work out how to light a camping stove without it getting simultaneously blown out by the wind (I managed to sit in a position where I acted as a wind-block). We ended up with large quantities of spaghetti Bolognese (which took at least an hour to cook) which everyone said was delicious. It only had a sprinkling of sand in it, making it one of the least sandy meals that we enjoyed. We meant to sit and drink enough alcohol that we could have a good night’s sleep (sorry if anyone is shocked, but that’s honestly how bad the sleeping was the night before). We got too cold in the process, and had a late night, where we fell asleep at 9pm. The wind almost knocked over our tent (in fact, it knocked over the other groups’ tents, but that’s an anecdote for later) and I was sleeping against the side to try and hold it down. The sleep was just as bad as before, because the wind and rain was so loud - we could have been camping in Wales or Scotland.

The third and final day started off with LOVELY weather. I think that was the problem, we jinxed it by being excited by the weather. Given that the previous days had essentially been spent in bikinis because there was no point in getting limited clothing wet, we got dressed excitedly and headed out early for Lake Mckenzie. By the time we were heading down the beach, we realised that where we were heading was the middle of an enormous grey cloud. When we finally reached the lake, about 3 hours after we left the campsite (a VERY bumpy journey which caused many a bruise) we were just glad that it wasn’t raining - prepared to ignore the clouds. Of course the second we stepped out of the van, it did the whole massive rainforest-rain on top of us again. We headed down to the lake, which was beautifully clear with white sands surrounding it. The lake was warmer than the rain, and we spent about half an hour in it before our lips went blue and the cold became intolerable. We drove miserably to the place where the ferry landed, in time for the sun to come out and tease us again. A lot of our food had been ruined by water on the second day, so the third day was a pretty hungry day. We had a several hour wait at the place, because we had calculated that we didn’t have enough petrol/time/energy to get all the way to another place we wanted to see. The third day was a miserable day, everyone was very depressed and there was a hell of a lot of moaning. For a variety of reasons, I spent the three days being very quiet and kept myself to myself, so I didn’t moan or say anything that could possibly annoy or cause offence to anyone. The ferry ride back to Hervey Bay was sunny. It was lovely to return to a real bed, and I’m now in the middle of my “recovery day”. I’m doing some laundry, and then am going to eat a meal which has absolutely NO sand in it, and is exactly what I want to eat.

I did enjoy the trip, but the weather was obviously a HUGE downer. Being English, I’m pretty used to rain and I can cope with it fine when I’m prepared. The problem was that I wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t have even nearly enough clothing, let alone warm clothing, to deal with it. As a group, we got on better than some of the other groups (there were some MAJOR tensions between some of them), but I’m not going to lie and say that it was completely fantastic hanging out with these people (it could have been worse though). I’d really like to go back to Fraser Island, to see it when the sun is out because I can tell it would be absolutely stunning with the normal Australian weather. If I were to do it again I would definitely do it as a guided tour, where your food can’t be spoiled and you get a bed every night. I’d also have liked to have known a lot more about the area (although I knew heaps more than anyone else in the van). In this story, I’ve missed out a fair few things that happened, especially anything related to, say, bad driving and accidents related to that…

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