Fraser Island

Location: Airlie Beach
Weather: Hot n'sunny

Next stop was Rainbow Beach, which I only went to because apparently is had some good surfing. But I
found it to be a very nice and chilled out place. Checking into Dingoes hostel and borrowing a surf-board about the minute I got there, strangely I found half the beach to a lane for 4WD vehicles, still dunno where they were going or coming from.
Anyways after being convinced by this Israeli bloke called Guy who was the resident entertainer and fire dancer I did the inevitable Fraser Island 3 day self-drive 4x4 trip from Dingoes - every backpacker in the world does this trip. Basically groups of about 11 take a 4 wheel drive Land Rover (ours was a Toyota Landcruiser) to Fraser Island for 3 days. Despite being only made of sand, Fraser is the world's biggest sand island, it has a surprisingly diverse terrain eg. rainforest, hills and freshwater lakes. You drive on the beach and tracks, dodging the wash-outs from the lakes. Our group was 5 Germans, 4 English, an Israeli girl and Kiwi girl, which I found quite amusing because there was quite a lot of difference of opinion shall we say. The Germans were kind of bothered about the time a lot and well, the rest of us weren't. Attractions we saw were Lake Mackenzie (a crystal clear freshwater lake), Indian Head (a hill where you can see Tiger sharks, fish and turtles from - we saw all 3), Eli Creek (a river running to the sea), the Pinnacles (some sand rocks) and the Champagne pools (some rock pools by the sea you can swim in - you cannot swim in the sea anywhere on Fraser, there are serious undercurrents, rips and it's shark infested).
You camp on the dunes at night - the women cooked the food and us men drank beer, which wasn't a bad set up! It was quite funny, but we lost our firelights and I stupidly let the amateurs take over instead of a true pyromaniac like myself, so the camp fire took hours to start the first night, they had to use the gas cooker to start it! but the 2nd night, me and English Russ were in charge so it only took a short time...actually we were both pretty impressed with our work!
The other famous thing on Fraser island are the dingoes. They are the purest in the world because it is an island and most others have inter-bred with domestic dogs. But I only saw one and that was in the day, the Germans did see a group on the last night and there were tracks outside our tents at night!

By JamesReed on 06.10.04 @ 05:46 AM GMT