Fraser Island

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Since leaving Louise and Andy's in Toowoomba we have started to travel up the East Coast from Brisbane up. We booked quite a lot through a tour agent and spent ages while at Lou and Andy's deliberating over what we wanted but it was worth it as everything so far has been wicked. We first went to
Noosa where we had a 3 day canoeing everglade safari. We decided to pass on this as it was pretty rainy and apparently v hard work.. a bit lame but Noosa was really pretty, it has a lovely National Park that we did quite a bit of walking in and a nice beach for the little time the sun came out. We met a really nice irish couple, James and Zona, in our hostel and have since kept bumping into them everywhere we go!!

Then after a few days in Noosa we went to Rainbow beach where we did our trip to Fraser island from. Fraser was really good fun and really beautiful. It's a sand island quite like Moreton where we spent New Year but this time we actually had some sun so everything looked a lot better! We were put in a group of 11 at the hostel who would be in our self-drive 4x4 troopie. They were all really nice, 5 Welsh lads and 4 English girls who are out here for a year studying as part of their degrees enjoying their three month summer break by travelling the east coast. Em, I and Ryhs were the only people who could/ wanted to drive so we both did quite a lot, it was pretty fun and we didn't get bogged (stuck in the sand) once!!

We spent the first morning packing up the troopie with our camping gear, food and goon (goon is really cheap box wine that everyone, well especially backpackers, drink out here!) and then got the 15min ferry to Fraser and then spent the rest of the day at Lake McKensie, a massive really beautiful fresh water lake. We weren't allowed to drive along the beach between 12 and 5pm because of the high tides so didn't have long to find somewhere to camp and set up before dark at 7pm. We found a nice spot just off the beach though. Our troopie had a connection for ipods so we had a proper little party with probably a bit too much goon!! One member of our group, Ryhs, had worked as a chef before so although there was quite a lot of sand mixed in with the food it still tasted pretty good!!
You can't swim in the sea off Fraser because of the sharks, and stinkers at this time of year, so the next day we went to Champagne pools which you can swim in but because of the tides being so high you couldn't really swim there either, the weather was a bit crappy too.. Still a nice day though and we had another fun night camping finishing off the remains of our 14 boxes of goon!

There is nothing else in Rainbow beach really apart from a sandblow which we did have a little walk to on our last day there. And so then got the greyhound over night bus from there to Airlie Beach. Airlie Beach is only a quite little place and the main reason for everyone to go there is to get a boat trip around the Whitsunday Islands.

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Comments

[kate]

Awesome
Hi Claire, have been showing your blog to the people on my internet course and..wow, were they and I impressed with what you are doing. the photos are awesome - especially the huge spiders!! Glad you're having such a great time.