Fraser Island and the Whitsundays
Trip Start
Feb 21, 2003
1
10
Trip End
Nov 21, 2003
Cairns,
Queensland,
Australia
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Ooops, that was Brisbane. Next stop: Hervey Bay. Here I joined a group of ten others on a 4x4 truck driving all over Fraser Island, the world's largest island made entirely of sand. Quite a lot of vegetation and some absolutely serene lakes and streams there. That's important, as it was very hot and sandy and there's nothing like a quenching swim in a lake after a day of hard driving. It's also important as there's no way you can swim in the sea there due to an abundance of tiger sharks just waiting for easy prey. Saw some from a cliff there. Impressive monsters! Also could see a variety of eagles, humpback whales, dolphins, turtles and quite a few dingos, a type of wild dog, prowling around camp and breaking into coolers for them yummy sausages.
Quite a few adventures there, most of them involving us getting lost or stuck or being anxious about individuals' driving skills. Some tension, but that spices life up, doesn't it. The wildest situation was in the deepest stretch of soft sand a truck towing a second truck that in turn was pulling a boat (!!!!!) in a trailer over the center of an island. Now why would you want to do that? The stupid rednecks had stuck a piece of wood between two towropes that under the tension had been catapulted with high velocity through the windscreen of the second truck barely missing the driver and out through the back of the driver cabin. Crazy! The driver was bleeding from glass wounds to his face. Thankfully we had a doc (who would that be?) and paramedic on board. We washed and bandaged him after superficial exploration didn't herald any obvious remaining glass splinters and recommended A&E if any glass suspected. We then helped the silly fools to move their load as they watched us work while drinking a nice cool beer themselves. Idiots!
Before embarking on our journey the organisers had told us many-a horror story about the sand and streams claiming hundreds of cars a year, pople getting run over by cars, cause you can't hear an approaching car in the sand until you're lying under it. Also there's many a fatal car crash. The beach there is the main traffic vein and is a registered highway and airstrip. It's quite busy, but heeding all the advice we were equipped with we all managed to survive, an almost impossible task according to all the prognostication by said organisers.
Next day I went whale watching in a boat in Hervey Bay where humpback whales tend to rest a couple of days on their journey into colder waters in the southern Spring. We were lucky and saw a number of humpback whales, some of them lurching their heavy bodies out of the water and performing some other eye-candy tricks. Most impressive was them surfacing right next to the boat and then diving back down underneath it. And I didn't vom!
