Fraser Island

I just got back from my trip to Fraser Island, and have lots of pictures to share!

On Sunday I left Brisbane on a 5 hour bus ride up to Rainbow Beach, which is situated just south of the southern tip of Fraser Island. The beach gets its name from the colored sands that line it - there are something like 70 different colors of sand that have been found along the beaches here. The name also comes from an Aboriginal legend:

"Way back in dream-time, there lived on the banks of the Noosa River a beautiful black maiden called Murrawar who fell in love with the Rainbow, which came to visit her here every morning. She would clap her hands and sing to this lovely rainbow. One day the Burwilla, a very bad man from a distant tribe, stole Murrawar for his slave wife, beating her cruelly and making her do all his work, while he sat in the shade admiring his terrible killing boomerang. This boomerang was bigger than the biggest tree and full of evil spirit. One day Murrawar ran away and as she hurried along the beach, which was all flat in those days, she looked back and saw Burwilla's boomerang coming to kill her. Calling out for help, she fell to the ground too frightened to run. Suddenly she heard a loud noise in the sky and saw her faithful Rainbow racing towards her across the sea. The wicked boomerang attacked the brave Rainbow and they met with a roar like thunder, killing the boomerang instantly and shattering the Rainbow into many small pieces. Alas, the poor sick and shattered Rainbow lay on the beach to die and is still there with all its colours, forming the hills along the beach."

I traveled with Val, her sister Andrea, and her friends Robby, Mike, and Renier. We arrived at around 7:30 and explored the beach and surrounds in the dark. Rainbow Beach is surrounded by the Cooloola (or Great Sandy) National Park, which is huge and means that the town is buffered by a massive area of wilderness. This makes the Milky Way easily visible at night, which is a treat and so beautiful! Almost immediately we saw a huge shooting star and could pick out the Southern Cross constellation (à la the Aussie flag).

Our accommodation during our time in Rainbow Beach was Pippie's Beachouse, one of the numerous hostels. We stayed in an 8-bed dorm, which wasn't the nicest place I've ever stayed but suited our basic needs. Thank goodness they allow you to rent a blanket, or we would have frozen at night!!! The lows here are getting down into the 50s in the evenings, which is nothing but feels pretty significant when you're used to 80 degree weather!

Monday morning we woke up and walked over to the Groovy Grape, one of the local cafes. We had a fantastic breakfast here! (complete with Aussie flag toothpicks)

You'll be able to tell by the pictures that the weather on Monday wasn't great - cold with cloudy skies and a bit of rain. We managed to walk down to the beach and explore it during the daylight.

I'm not sure what this thing is - some kind of fruit? I saw these trees a lot on this trip.

This is me next to some of the black sand on Rainbow Beach. It looks just like rock, till you notice that people have carved their names and all sorts of things into it with their fingers/sticks. If you touch it your hands will turn the same color!

Walking back we passed a campsite and this truck was parked across from it. I thought it was a pretty typical (and cute!) Australian scene.

Thank goodness for Andrea. I have been wanting to get a picture of the outrageous shorts that construction workers wear for SO long - and I finally have it! I always have a chuckle when I'm on the bus in the city and spot a man with huge burly legs sporting these tiny hotpants. I suppose these are just more comfortable in the hot weather here...

At 2PM on Monday we had our Fraser Island briefing meeting. The 'package' that I bought is arranged by the hostel, which also controls the rental vehicle. The trips are scheduled in groups of 11, which is how many people can fit into the Toyota Land Cruiser we were renting. Our group consisted of the 6 of us, plus 5 Germans - Sonja, Virginia, Jeannine, Evelyn, and Peter. We all met up and were forced to watch a terribly thrilling video on the do's and don'ts of the island. This involved lessons on driving 4X4 vehicles, being dingo safe, and camping rules. Afterwards we were given $220 to take to the local IGA to buy groceries for the whole group for our 3 day trip. This immediately made the massive collection of shopping carts outside the hostel make sense!

We got our shopping done and went to bed early on Monday so that we could wake up Tuesday and meet the mechanic to pack our vehicle at 8AM. All of the sleeping bags, backpacks, roll mats, coolers, and crates of food were secured on top of our Land Cruiser, and we were set to go.

We headed up to Inskip Point, where the ferry to Fraser Island picks up all the 4X4 vehicles. Peter was one of the drivers, and this was his first time on sand. He ended up doing the majority of the driving and did a fantastic job. Once we were on the ferry we immediately spotted a few different pods of dolphins swimming around in the water!

This is me with Fraser in the background:

After a short ride we hit the beach and started heading north up the eastern side of the island, which is lined the entire way by 75 Mile Beach (the name is self explanatory).

In addition to huge 4X4 buses and regular 4X4 vehicles, there are also planes which land and take off on the same beach that you drive on - you have to keep an eye out for them!

We stopped at Euronga, one of the pseudo-towns along the beach, before heading inland. It's a good thing we already had a full tank of gas - that's $2.02 per liter folks! Crikey!

Driving inland on Fraser Island happens solely on these sand tracks - I wish I had taken more pictures of them. This makes it look much tamer than it actually is. More often than not the tracks are really deep sand with ruts that must be 1 to 1 1/2 feet deep. In several places the tracks are so steep that it feels like the vehicle might flip over. Pretty extreme driving! Inland you are also surrounded by some of the most dense (and beautiful) rainforest I've ever seen in my life. Unfortunately I didn't think to take pictures of it.

Our first stop of the day was lake McKenzie, a beautiful clear lake located in the middle of the island. Fraser is home to more than half of the world's (obviously rare) perched lakes, which are formed when leaf litter and sand are compacted so much that a lake forms above the water table. The water is crystal clear but the leaf litter at the bottom of the middle of the lake creates a beautiful blue color that turns from almost black in the middle to shades of indigo, azure, and turquoise. The whole lake is surrounded by a beach of white silica sand (just like the stuff at Whitehaven Beach!).

We spent a few hours at McKenzie and then drove back to the beach and further north before stopping at one of the camping zones to set up our tents for the night. Jeannine and Evelyn cooked us an awesome dinner of sausages, onions, and salad for dinner.

We hadn't seen any dingoes (and were told that the last three groups had come back without seeing any), so I was determined to spot one during the trip.

This is me (and Andrea) with my tea and my dingo spotting tool:

Tea was great at the end of the day - and Val had enough foresight to purchase a package of TimTams before we left Rainbow Beach. These are another perk of living in this country. They are biscuits, kind of like an enlarged version of a KitKat bar. You can bite off each end and use them like a straw to suck up your tea, which makes them melt away into chocolaty goodness almost instantly. I love TimTams, as evidenced by the empty package.

We spent the evening playing games like 'I can see the moon in the spoon' (something Val and I learned on our Whitsundays trip), and 'Put your goggles on people!' (one the Germans taught us).

This is our faithful driver Peter, Sonja, and Jeannine playing moon in the spoon:

The next morning I still hadn't seen any dingoes, but this is what we found by our campsite!

Wednesday was beautiful - we definitely lucked out on the weather. We ate a nice breakfast, packed up camp, and headed north on the beach.

Our first stop of the day was at Eli Creek, which is the largest creek on the eastern side of the island. It's big, and pours up to 4 million liters of crystal clear freshwater into the ocean every hour. There is a nice boardwalk you can walk up, and then take steps down into the creek, which you can wade or swim back out towards the ocean. It's also home to large freshwater eels, but we failed to spot these during our visit.

We hopped back in the car and continued north towards Indian Head, which is a big rock formation that juts out into the ocean at the end of 75 Mile Beach.

One of the many jellies we spotted on the beach:

We hiked up this path to the top of Indian Head:

From there we could see huge sand dunes which stretched on for what looked like miles. There was also a big eagle circling around above us.

Looking south down 75 Mile Beach:

North of Indian Head is another beach called Orchid Beach, where we spotted a few people swimming in the ocean. This is dumb for three reasons.

Here they are! One, two, and three. Can you spot them? Bull sharks swimming around the perimeter of Indian Head. From our vantage point we also saw a huge manta ray (he's actually in this picture too - just behind the 3rd shark) and tons of humpback whales. The whales are migrating now down from northern Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef (where the have their babies) to the southern coast of Queensland. They hang out here for a few months before venturing off into cooler waters. We saw them almost immediately after reaching the island, and spotted dozens over the duration of our trip.

Just on the other side of Orchid Beach is a really neat area called Champagne Pools. To reach the pools by car, you have to drive up a really soft sand track, which we got bogged in twice before finally making it through. There is a boardwalk that takes you down to the pools, and I shot this quick video of the awesome view from the top:

The pools are perched right at the edge of the ocean, and were used by Aboriginal people to catch fish. They are filled as the waves crash over the rocks and are home to all sorts of funny little fish and crabs.

After having a fantastic lunch of ham and tuna sandwiches, we got back in the car and headed south again along 75 Mile Beach. After driving for about 15 minutes we saw a couple cars stopped on the beach, and realized that there was a dingo! He looked like he was sniffing around the beach for a quick meal.

Like I said in my earlier post, the dingoes of Fraser Island are viewed as some of the purest in Australia. Here is a little snippet about their history:

About 5000 years before Portuguese navigators began exploring the east coast of Australia and Captain Cook claimed it for Britain, Asian seafarers had introduced the dingo or Asian wolf to Australia’s northern shores. As it spread throughout mainland Australia it became responsible for a change in ecology and the extinction of a number of mammals.

Because the dingo never reached Tasmania some animals which were exterminated on the mainland survived including the Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and Tasmanian devils. The dingos became the dominant predator of the Australian mainland and with the Aborigines occupied a niche at the top of the food chain. They became a critical part of the Australian environment and over thousands of years the Australian ecology adjusted to their presence.

About the same time as dingos arrived on the continent, Fraser Island was already cut off from the mainland and assuming its present shape and form. Because it was separated from the mainland by only a couple of kilometres in parts of Great Sandy Strait, dingos had no difficulty in swimming across to take up residency on this island of 167,000 hectares.

Dingos and Aborigines coexisted on Fraser Island for thousands of years before European contact. Fraser Island dingos had largely escaped the impact of hybridization with domestic dogs and by the 1970s were recognised as having the purest dingo genes in Eastern Australia. To protect that very important gene pool domestic dogs have been banished from Fraser Island since 1981. The purity of the Fraser Island dingos was one of the special values recognised in its World Heritage Listing in 1992 and as such Australia has an obligation to ensure that this genetic integrity is preserved.

The dingoes roam the island freely (minus a few fenced camps and supply posts), and have grown accustomed to the tourists. The dingoes are scavengers, and will snatch up anything that looks or smells like a quick meal. There are signs and warnings posted all over the island in an attempt to limit human interaction with them. In 2001 a 9 year old boy was attacked and killed by two dingoes (who were later destroyed), so park officials are really trying to prevent that situation again. Protection of dingoes versus island visitors is still apparently a pretty touchy subject among the locals. You can be fined up to $3000 if you are caught feeding a dingo or attracting one by leaving food out.

We set up camp a little earlier on Wednesday night and I got a few nice pictures of the sunset.

Unfortunately my camera battery died after that! We had a big dinner of spaghetti and ended up camping with three other groups, so everyone had a big party after dinner. Val and I went to bed early, but everyone told us the next morning about how the camp was surrounded by dingoes who harassed people all night long. The next morning we woke up and had beans and toast for breakfast before heading back out on the beach. We drove the length of the island and just before we hit the ferry we stumbled upon another dingo trotting along the beach.

Thursday night we were back at Pippie's, and the German girls were nice enough to cook all the leftover food we had for dinner. Everyone hung out and had a really good time.

The next morning we were up at 6AM to catch the 7:40 bus back to Brisbane. We managed to have a nice breakfast at the Groovy Grape again, and I snapped a few pictures before we left.

These were just a couple pictures I snapped at the rest stop somewhere south of Rainbow Beach. Not sure what these mountains are, but it was pretty!

These are just some odd looking blue ducks:

I'm back in Brissie now enjoying my nice warm bed and hot shower. Fraser was a really good time, although I'd love to go back and do a trip on my own (or with a smaller group) so that I can see some of the stuff we missed on this trip. Anyone interested??