Friday Left Brisbane to head out to Hervey Bay (whale watching capitol of the world)
Saturday Left Hervey Bay at 7 a.m. to head ot to Fraser Island, a World Heritage site, and the largest sand island in the world. Spend all day sightseeing, swimming and hanging out with the people i meet there. Fun fact: it is one of the primary reasons that the Great Barrier Reef has been able to survive--Fraser Island collects the sand that wold otherwise erode the reef.
Sunday Wake up early on Fraser Island to do some more touring, swimming and 4WDriving! Get back to the hostel around 9:30 p.m. then proceed to catch up on emails until Midnight
Monday Hang out at the hostel all day until my bus arrives at 8:50 p.m. then we are making our way to Airlie Beach!
Tuesday Arrive at Airlie Beach about 9:30 in the morning and hang around the giant lagoon and the harbour that this lovely town sits around.
Basically, I have been sleeping in a different place ever night for the past week. While that was thrilling, it's nice to be somewhere and hang out. There seems to be a bit of rain coming in until Saturday, so i may have to postpone my sailing until then. Unfortunately, there's only so much to do at Airlie Beach, so i'd like to get up to Cairns sooner than later, but egal (that means doesn't matter auf Deutsch..I just think it is a simpler term and Americans should adopt it).
Fraser Island
I headed to Fraser Island with a friend I had met at the hostel the night before. She was a wonderful French girl who could seriously make friends with anyone. Another girl happened to be going from our hostel, so we allstrted chatting while waiting for the bus. Once on the bus we ran into a wonderful woman from the UK. She was British but living in Aberdeen (SHOUT OUT TO AMANDA!) which was great as that's somewhere i've actually been in Scotland so we had a good time talking about that. So that was sort of our core group of people on the trip. The entire tour group consisted of about 20 backpackers, and we eventually got to know everyone pretty well (spending two full days with people will do that), but it was nice to have a core group of people to talk to and hang out with.
On Fraser, we got to see some great stuff. It is an entirely sand island, so you can only get around by 4WD, and since it hadn't rained in a while the "road" was not only really bumpy, but also quite easy to get bogged (stuck) in. Luckily, our tour leader was incredible and we never had an issue. In fact, more often than not, we were rescuing other people! But more on that later.
Some thing we got to see:
Shipwreck This was actually a really cool shipwreck left on the beach. The ship had helped out in multiple wars as it was one of the fastest ships at one time. But it got shipwrecked as it was on its way to a Japanese ship dumping ground. So unfortunately there is no epic wreck story to go with it.
Lookout Point Not much to say about this other than it was really beautiful.
Rainbow Pinnacles: which beautiful sand pillars of orange and white. There is a beutiful aboriginal dream story about them, but unfortunately you cannot tell dream stories outside of the land they belong to, so i can never tell you about it=( Just get to Fraser Island and see them yourself! Following the rainbow pinnacles we headed out to a
Freshwater Lake that sits atop the island. It is basiclaly a collection of rainwater that you can swim in being held up by tree debri which keeps the water from sinking into the sand.
Champagne pools which is an area of beach that is surrounded by rocks wherre the ocean water comes in creating a champagne looking effect. It was a bit rainy when we hit these so not too exciting unfrotunately
Rainforest This was cool. There is literally a small patch of rainforest area in the middle of this island. If you know anything about where Fraser Island is, and where the tropics start you'll realize this little rainforest section doesnn't belong there. But for whatever reason God decided to throw us for a loop and throw some rainforest growth up there!
River I will remember the names of these at some point, but until then this was definitely one of the highlights. We got to run up to the top of this spring water river and take tubes down until the bottom. The water was very cold, but the sun was out and we all had great times. I know one of the girls brought her GoPro, so hopefully that video will make it to facebook in the future.
A Bogged Bus Now, I should explain that we are driving around the island in tour buses that happen to have 4WD. That is to say, not little cars with 4WD but giant tour buses. Keep that in mind. Now, like I said previously, with the lack of rain the sand wasn't stcking too well. So, this other driver (Steve) who had already broken a window on our bus, got his bus bogged. And well, his passengers were a lot of generally older folks or families with young kids. So, who gets recruited to fix the problem? WE DO! hahh but it was honestly a lot of fun. By this point we had all gotten to know each other and were cracking up about having to get under this bus and dig out sand, so i'm actually quite glad it happened.=] The only obnoxious thing was that the sand is so fine, that it literally would run back down like water when you pulled it out. So you ended up having to have teams of 2 people one person to throw ouut the sand and the other to push it further away from the bus. Things got crazy.
Anyways, that's the story of my Fraser Island trip. I'll hopefully be headed on a sailing trip later this week and then up to Cairns to do some real Great Barrier Reef diving/snorkeling. I'll try and update as I can!
ACCENT UPDATE: Unfortunately, due to the large number of Brits I hung out with on Fraser, my accent kept returning to British instead of Aussie. But, the Aussie is coming back.
IN OTHER NEWS: I either lost or had stolen all of my iPod and iPad cords. So, I am unfortunately not sure when I will gain use of my ipad again for texting/skyping/emailing etc. I am waiting to hear back from the previous hostel to see if they have found anything, but i'm pretty positive someone probably took them. =( So, I may end up having to wait a week or two before I get replacements. This also means pictures will have to be placed on this blog post at a later date. sorry!
