Out Of Control
Trip Start
Feb 26, 2004
1
55
84
Trip End
Nov 16, 2006
Surfers, Brisbane and Fraser Island,
Australia
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Sophie and I stopped at Surfer's Paradise as we carried on north, and confirmed it is as big a dump as everyone said. We only really stopped here to go to Wet'n'Wild waterpark which was great fun. The rides were indeed wet. The locker prices were indeed wild. Calamity Sophie's mishap of choice this time was smacking herself in the nose on the first ride.
The only other points of interest on our way up this part of the coast was that I saw a Japanese guy with a tattoo in English (switcheroo); a blind man go in to a video shop; and a couple of New Zealanders do the Haka to a couple of slot machines.
We had a couple of days in Brisbane then to explore
01 - Surfers Paradise actually looking good
. It's a real nice city from what I can tell, and suprisingly feels a lot more spacious and less built up than Surfers.But this was all foreplay before our next big destination: Fraser Island.
Our group all met at our hostel in Hervey Bay to arrange food and drink and suss each other out. Sophie and I would be traveling the next few days with a San Fran girl ("Backpacking is like speed-dating."), a Perth girl, 2 Swiss miss, and 3 Canadian guys whose extreme enthusiasm was immediately likeable.
We also got a couple of briefings on how to handle the island and how to practice 'dingo safety'. When Al The Seagull had gone to Fraser Island he had made his own way there and didn't get any tips on anything, including how to handle a dingo encounter. Inevitably he came face to face with a dingo and handled it by running away (a definite no-no), jumping in a lake, and waiting in it until the dingo disappeared. I miss Al.
Fraser Island is made entirely of sand, and is the only sand island in the world with rainforest, making it pretty unique
02 - Our Fraser group
. And, despite the fact that sand is total bullshit, Fraser Island is brilliant.Our days were spent driving the 4WD around the island on some mad tracks (you're driving through sand), checking out a shipwreck, chilling out and visiting some of the most beautiful spots I've ever seen. The beaches around the perimeter aren't safe to swim in, but a couple of the lakes have some overwhelmingly sweet beaches...and it's fresh water. As the Canadians would say, it was out of control.
The evenings were spent having a big dinner (Sophie's Mishap of Choice: Food poisoning) and a bunch of drinks with a couple of other groups who were camped in the same spot. The party wasn't as hard as we would have liked since we were getting up before 5am to beat the tides.
It was all great fun and everyone was cool, but the 3 Canadian guys were truly legends. 2 of them were brothers who had realised one day that they hadn't really ever spoken to each other in the last 20-something years, so decided to travel the world together.
They're loving it and all these experiences and their new-found love of nature seems to have been blowing their minds
03 - Putting up the tent
. They're over-enthusiasm for everything we did and everything we said was great and definitely added to the trip for me. They taught me the beauty of 'moon-tanning' and came out with some classic lines to keep me entertained:"I wanna learn how to backflip. Chicks dig backflips."
"I got back to the hostel last night and all the beds in our room were taken. I told reception the next day that I'd slept on the floor and they looked at me like I was an idiot."
"I wanna ride a sea turtle."
"I'm older than him. I'm one day sweeter."
"I wanna climb a tree and stare at an owl for like 4 hours."
"Where are you going after Fraser Island?"
"We're going to go get a burger."
"So you're Japanese? Do you like swords?"
"I need a wrestle."
"Me and Dave went walking in the Blue Mountains. We lost each other for a few hours. When I found him he said, 'That was intense. I just got naked and stood amongst nature.'"
And many, many more...
