Fraser Island, Day 1

We spent the last couple of days up on Fraser Island, up off the coast a short drive from Noosa. We barely made it onto the island in the first place. We were jamming up there Tuesday afternoon, and the odds of us making the last ferry were looking very slim. So Catherine called ahead, threw on her best phone voice, and finally the lady at the other end said they'd hold the ferry five minutes for us. (Gawd, Dido is the all-time favorite singer in Aus). Well, five minutes had passed, and nearly ten, but Tim was still cruising at upwards of 150 kms/h to get us there, all of us holding on for dear life. We made it. Beautiful.

So we get out to the island, find our rooms (Catherine's been giving us the grand tour of Queensland's 5 star resorts), take a swim, have some drinks by the pool, stuff ourselves with wonderful food at the restaurant, and pass out for a good 12 hours.

The next morning we headed out in our rig for a tour of the island. Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world. So, imagine if you will, if someone took a sand dune and a jungle, mixed the two well, and splattered the resulting mixture on a large canvas. That's Fraser Island. The roads are all sand tracks, in varying degrees of dryness, and are one way for the most part. When you come upon a vehicle coming at you, one or the other finds a sandy pullout so the other can pass. The whole island is a park, so the vegetation is largely undisturbed. We found Hoop Pines, Paperbarks, Scribbly Barks, all sorts of trees totally new to us.

We went first to a beautiful lake called Lake McKenzie, which has the whitest sand imaginable, and has two shades of blue, one light and one very dark and deep.

I dove in, opened my eyes, and found myself at the edge of a steep drop into the darkest blue I've seen that could still be called blue. As I was swimming alone, I couldn't help but be freaked out by this, so I got back out onto the safe, visible white sand.

We left the crowd at McKenzie and headed for another lake, called Birrameen.

There were only a few folks there when we got there. We walked around through the plentiful reeds in the warm shallows for a bit, then decided it was time to head out to the coast and up the beach for lunch.

Eurong is a small town on the beach, and consists of a petrol station, a bakery, and a hotel. This was the sight that greeted us when we got there:

As described, the island is wholly sand, so the only way one can hope to get anywhere is in a 4 x 4.
We got some caffeine pumping in our blood, and headed down the road and straight onto the beach.

We went up to Happy Valley for lunch, and had to turn around directly afterward in order to get down the beach to a road that would take us back to the resort before high tide rendered the beach impassable.