Day 78 - Hervey Bay to Fraser Island

  Fraser Island, Australia
Monday, November 19, 2007

After another shockingly early alarm call, we did the necessary, fell into the car and headed towards the barge loading area at River Heads.

We had to organise our vehicle permit at the office & pay for our tickets, and we were waiting to load with plenty of time for the 07:15 departure.

It was a lovely sunny morning, so the barge ride to the island was tremendous!



 

As I said yesterday, Fraser Island is most famous for being able to drive along the 70 mile beach which takes up most of the east side of the island, as you can see on the map below.



You can also drive around the interior of the island, but only a TINY section of the roads are 'sealed' (tarmaced), so the rest are simply 'tracks', which sounded quite innocuous to us naiive little souls! Little did we know...

The safety briefing yesterday was helpful, but with hindsight it was pretty light on some facts which would have found pretty helpful, as you will see that for yourself later. I guess they try not to scare you!

So we drove off the ferry, switched into 4 wheel drive mode (which has 2 settings, "high range" and "low range" - low is used for very soft sand to give more punch, high is used at all other times), and tackled our first hill.

Which was pretty damn steep! Katie and I just looked at each other half way up it, thinking "I hope this gets easier!", yet somehow knowing that this was going to be just the start of the fun & games!

They suggested that it takes 1 hour to drive across the island (we landed on the west coast which is not suitable for driving, so you have to head inland and either drive to the east coast, or spend time driving around the interior), and as the tide was due to come in at 11:30am, we decided to head for the internal freshwater lakes, which were supposed to be pretty cool.

It was a real baptism of fire for Katie 4x4 driving; the 'tracks' were pretty basic to say the least! The guy in the hire place said that they'd had rain last week, and said that was a good thing, because it should compact the sand and make the tracks easier to drive...

Well I tell you what, we wouldn't want to try it when they'd had no rain for a month!!! Some of the tracks were a NIGHTMARE.

Just to confirm, all of the tracks were simply sand, plus tree roots, and the odd bit of wooden boardwalk which was normally broken and therefore even more difficult to negotiate than the soft sand! It was really hard work.



Katie did a great job to get us to our first stop, Lake McKenzie, without getting stuck, but we knew this was the most touristed section of the island, so it was probably also the easiest to get around. It helped us get used to the jeep, and to understand what it could & couldn't do.



We couldn't shake the feeling that we were driving a bit of a hairdresser's car, which looked a bit too cute for roaring around the brutal tracks! It was a little Suzuki "Jimny" (presumably after Jimny Cricket from Pinochio?!); it was bright white in colour, and pretty poor on the power front.

We'd had the chance to upgrade to a more powerful jeep, but we honestly hadn't expected the tracks to be this rough & hard to tackle.



Anyway, we got to Lake McKenzie in one piece, and just before 8am, which was perfect; we just had to pray that we'd managed to avoid the 4x4 coach tours...

It was a short walk down a track to get to the lake itself, and we were very excited at our first glimpse through the trees...



Sure enough there was only one other couple there when we got down to the beach, frollicking in the waves like they owned the place... MOVE OVER SUCKERS!

The beach itself was absolutely AMAZING, huge and white, with very fine sand similar to Whitehaven Beach in the Whitsunday islands.



Best of all, we had a beautiful day for it, bright blue skies with a few cotton wool clouds scattered around like pure white candy floss.

 

This was officially "more like it"!!!

 

We walked over to a completely empty part of the beach, threw down the towels, took off any extraneous clothing, and got down to some serious sunbathing!





This state of euphoria lasted for about... 3.5 seconds.

Katie had the pleasure of the first sand fly, which buzzed around her head and then sat on her shoulders. Where it preceded to then BITE my beautiful wife sqaurely on the shoulder blade, the nasty little git!

Katie screamed in pain, told me they were "biters", and we then spent most of the next 5 minutes waving our hands around our heads like Greek waiters, trying desparately to fend off these horrible little creatures.

We'd manage to scare them off by jumping up and down, but EVERY time we sat back down again it was only a matter of seconds before they descended again, it was horrible.

We moved further down to the edge of the water, hoping this would discourage them. Uh-uh...

So we moved again, away to the left, close to where a newly arrived couple were sitting without being bothered by flies... but this didn't work either.

Gradually as time went by the beach filled up, but the flies stuck around. I discovered that my flip flops were ideal fly-killing tools, but no matter how many I killed, more appeared to take their place. It was like a B-movie.

So here we were by this lake of paradise, being plagued by these annoying little shits. (Excuse language!)



Katie went for a nice long swim in the warm freshwater to try and take her mind off the flies, and I walked along the western shoreline.

I had just turned the corner away from the beach when I remembered all the "BEWARE OF DINGOES (wild dogs), DON'T GO ANYWHERE ALONE" signs before we got to the beach, and promptly turned back. Yikes.



Normally I would have walked around the whole lake, I love doing stuff like that, but not here, where another of Australia's predators was lurking out of sight!

(A couple of years ago Fraser Island made the news when dingoes killed and partially ate a toddler, so they are still very much a problem here)

They say that Fraser Island has the 'purest' dingos in Australia because there has been no cross-breeding with domestic dogs, but unfortunately we didn't see any on our time on the island.

However, we did see a bloody big lizard scuttling along the beach!



The sand was amazing, but the water was just incredible, so CLEAR... check these out:







I managed to get some nice photos of the beach before 10am, when the tour groups arrived en masse, and we perservered despite the flies for another hour or so before heading back to the jeep and down to our next stop, Central Station.

Years ago Central Station was a logging station, but these days it's the centre for most of the best walks on the island. It also is the centre of loop road which the bulk of 4x4 traffic passes through as they negotiate the island's tracks.

We pulled in about noon, Katie was "starvin marvin" so we made some lunch with the help of Big Emile our friendly neighbourhood Eskie. I tried to make my sandwiches outside the car (big mistake - fly central), whereas Katie sensibly stayed inside. So I 'accidentally' let a few flies in ;)

After lunch we decided that we were knackered after our early start, stuffed after our lunch, and quite stressed after our first 'track' experiences, so we would do the easiest of all the tracks leaving Central Station - a 1km boardwalk along the creek.

We set off, instantly congratulating each other on our good sense, and remarking how little we fancied trekking off in our flip-flops on a tiring trek through the woods...

On the boardwalk we bumped into the English couple who were in our 4x4 briefing yesterday, who advised us not to go down the path they'd just walked, because it was "it was a load of crap and didn't go anywhere". We assumed that they must have taken a wrong turn, and as we started chatting to them we let them lead us in another direction.

Up and up we climbed, until we realised that we were headed on a 6km walk to Basin Lake, which sounded very nice, but not exactly what we had in mind.

The problem was that neither Katie or I had the nerve to tell the other couple that we wanted to do the easier walk instead! So we carried on, and hoped that we wouldn't regret it.

 

It was cool to walk through the thick forest, which we could appreciate much more now that we weren't being thrown around an underpowered jeep!



In turned out that the other English guy was from Suffolk, didn't drive (legend!), and also supported Liverpool. After establishing these salient points, we knew we'd get on just fine ;) 

His girlfriend was living in Sydney, working as a nurse, and proved a great sounding board for Katie's Australian travel plans!

I got talking about Liverpool, which I can do for hours, so we ended up walking & talking for the next 20 minutes without any real concept of how far we'd actually walked.

Before we knew it we turned a corner, walked down some wooden steps...


 
...and there in front of us appeared Basin Lake. Which looked like... a big basin!

 

We all stopped talking (I was just about to tell him about Emile the Eskie, which I knew he would appreciate!), and looked out over this beautiful little lake cut into the forest, with blue skies above and white sand all around it.

It was literally breath-taking, but that might be because we are not very fit ;)



 

We all sat down, loving our little find, which had absolutely no-one else around it, it was like when Leonardo di Caprio sees The Beach in that film for the first time...

The girls soon stripped off to their bikinis and dived in, I went for a walk around the edge, and the Suffolk Scouser (glory-hunter!) basked in the sun.





We stayed there chilling for about an hour and then walked back, which seemed to take twice as long because we had less to talk about!

We even thought we'd taken a wrong turn for a while because we didn't recognise the path as we'd paid no attention on the way out.

 

When we got back, the other couple decided to head to the Eurong resort on the east coast to get some lunch, and Katie & I pushed on to find Lake Birabeen, which was supposed to be just like Lake McKenzie except no tours go there so it's much quieter.

The maps they gave us for the island weren't great, and the sign-posting on the tracks is even worse, so it proved a bit challenging finding the road we needed.

We took one road which I thought was going in the right direction but we had to turn when we realised that the wheels were hardly touching either side of the centre of the track! We could hear the undercarriage scraping along the middle of the road, and knew that the jeep would grind to a halt any second! 

Eventually we happened upon a road signposed to the lake, so we took it. About half way up this VERY difficult road, Katie noticed that her steering wheel was now pointed about 90 degrees in the wrong direction compared to where she was steering, but the track was so steep and so bumpy that we really couldn't pull over anywhere to check it out.

The engine was also starting to overheat and we were REALLY thumping into the tree roots either side, which would throw us up in the air and around in the jeep. It was very hard going, and the front of the car was taking a real pounding from the roots & bumps.

As we got near the top of the track we noticed a large land rover right up our backside so Katie found a way to let him pass and we continued on our extremely bumpy way.

Katie had now discovered that she couldn't get any traction in 2nd gear, so was having to go up these bumpy steep hills in 1st gear, which made the engine scream like it was going to explode.

FINALLY we got to the top of that hill, and were able to pull over on a fairly hard piece of sand so that we could see what the hell had happened to the jeep.

I got out, looked at the front 2 wheels and swore loudly. The front right wheel was a mess. It looked at first like it was pointing in a completely different direction to the front left wheel, and that had me worried.

We were miles away from anywhere, we'd only seen one other car for the last hour, and it would be dark in less than 2 hours. It also looked like the wheel was knackered and would cost us a fortune to fix, IF we could get back to the mainland of course!

Katie had a look and said that she thought it was a puncture. My first reaction was "there's no way all that damage is a puncture", before realising she might be right... and then understanding what that meant!

I really wasn't looking forward to trying to fix a puncture on a jeep, at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere, with no-one else to help but Katie. 

I don't drive, so have no experience of changing a tire, but out here we had only two options: fix it ourselves, or sleep in the car until someone could help us!

It took me 10 minutes just to get the jack & crank arm out of the boot (they had 'secured' it, making it impossible to remove... GENIUS!), which wasn't the best of starts, but then it started to improve. I got the jack underneath, realised the sand was too soft, so we tried our Lonely Planet guidebook to give the jack more height!

That worked well and I got the punctured tyre off, but I couldn't get the new one on because we were still too low down, even at maximum jack height!

So I had to put the old wheel back on, lower the car again, take the jack out, add another book on top, and then repeat the process all over again! 

I should probably send this photos to Lonely Planet & Rough Guides!



Now imagine all the sand flies landing all over my neck, legs and arms because I couldn't fight back! It was like torture!

Katie was kind enough to stand over me hitting them with her sarong (which mostly involved whipping me in the face, but it was better than nothing) and I continued with the tyre.



Eventually I got the new tyre on, and we attached the old tyre to the back of the jeep. I was absolutely exhausted, and bitten to death, but at least we were back on the road.

To be honest at this point all I wanted to do was get to the resort, and off these bloody roads, but Katie rightly pointed out that there was no point going through all this trouble and turning back, so we walked over the road and down to the lake.

Which was amazing. Great call Mrs Fey! ;)

 

It looked a lot like Lake Mackenzie, but it was even quieter!



Yet again we had the entire lake to ourselves, and there were a lot less flies around, so we really took to it.

We sat and enjoyed the view for about 20 minutes, then I wandered off until I found myself walking right on top of a new set of dingo tracks! Hmmm, maybe I should turn back...

 

A few minutes later we climbed back to the car, and prayed to God that it was going to be easier drivng downhill through the holes & roots with 4 good tyres and 5 gears, compared to driving uphill with a front right puncture and only 1 gear!

We managed to get back to the loop road, me wincing after every impact, and turned off when we saw the road to Eurong. We were soon on the last track leading back to the resort, just as it was getting dark. Perfect timing. 

A short while later we could SEE the sealed tarmac road about 100m ahead of us, when Katie suddenly relaxes, and took her foot off the gas! We stalled, and we were now stuck, within spitting distance of the resort! I don't think either of us said a word, we were gutted.

I got out and started clearing the sand from under all the wheels, as they taught us yesterday. Another jeep then pulled up right in front of us, unable to get past, upping our stress levels even more! It's not so bad when you get stuck, but as soon as there's another car... NIGHTMARE.

And then, guess what, an even bigger van FULL of people came up behind us. I won't tell you exactly what Katie said, but you can guess. Something about a clucking bell I think ;)

Luckily this guy had a shovel/spade, and with that we quickly cleared the wheels. He then (interestingly) took the rubber foot flaps from the front of his jeep, and stuck them under the front wheels. He told Katie to reverse as fast as she could, and we were instantly free. Good work.

A very embarrassed Katie then pushed forward, through the heavy sand, and into the resort, parking up 10 yards away from our room.

We got the keys, dumped our stuff, and went for a walk, finding a lovely swimming pool & hot tub right outside our door...



...and a nice bakery over the road. We rewarded ourselves by splurging on a black forest gateau (moi) and a chocolate mud cake (Katie), which we decided to have for dessert! 

Later we went for a couple of well deserved beers in the resort bar, where we again bumped into our fellow English friends from earlier who were full of stories about getting stuck, which cheered us up immensely ;) 

On the way back we couldn't resist the lure of the hot tub, and LOVED relaxing in that for about 30 minutes, it was just what the Doctor ordered!





Katie then knocked up a quick veggie green curry from our little kitchen, we showered and collapsed in bed, ready for another full start tomorrow, looking forward to our day of beach driving!

Fingers crossed it would be rather less eventful than today! ;)

Lots of love,


Al & Katie xx