Fraser Island wins for my favorite beach-y location that I visited in Australia. It's the world's largest sand island, and many backpackers take tours to see it during their travels down the East Coast. The tours are on 4WDs and depart from a few locations, but as I mentioned previously, while in Darwin I won a free 2 night trip with Dingo's leaving from Rainbow Beach. This was ideal because it's exactly the tour I would have chosen myself!
Getting to Rainbow Beach from Cairns required a full day in transit. I flew down to Brisbane, napped at the airport for a few hours, then caught a bus up to Rainbow Beach that took the time of three terrible on-board comedy movies that hurt my brain (Adam Sandler has fallen so far). By the time I reached Dingo's (which was luckily right in front of the bus stop), I only had time to pick up goon for the trip and get to bed early.
The Dingo's hostel, by the way, is really nice! They serve free pancakes every morning, there's an attached Peter Pan's (travel agency) where you can book your next move or use the wifi on the computers, a bar and dining area which serves a $6 dinner option each night, picnic tables outside, a swimming pool, and a sheltered lounge area with hammocks.
Day 1 Ferry to Fraser Island, Lake Mckenzie, & Campsite Drinks
It was a 6 AM start to have free pancakes, catch the tour briefing, check out of the hostel, load up the trailer, and split into our separate vehicles for the trip. There were four jeeps in total, and a big highlight for most people is taking turns driving around the sand island, but unfortunately I cannot drive a manual. Because of this, I was in the lead car, Group D, with the other non-drivers, and our guide Joel shuttled us around over the next couple days like a bunch of losers.
I'm never taking photos next to this many tall blondes ever again.
We drove onto the ferry that took us over to Fraser and stood by the railing looking at the hundreds of jellyfish bobbing through the water as we passed. After we reached the island, it was an hour's drive on the beach to our first destination. I had taken a look at a map to see exactly how big the island was, but somehow I was still surprised by the distance between everything.
We stopped for lunch at a spot with some picnic tables. There's obviously no Woolworth's on Fraser Island, so all of our food was bought back at Rainbow Beach. Each group had two crates and one cooler full of food, and we all had a copy of the suggested menu telling us what to make for each meal in order to get our rations to last the full three days. Our first lunch was just basic sandwiches.
Afterwards it was a very bumpy 40 minute drive through the rainforest to reach Lake Mckenzie. Setting the trend for the entire island, it was such a pretty lake! It was huge and clear surrounded by trees and a white sand beach. Some people went swimming, but the water was chilly which makes swimming even less appealing to me, so I mostly laid out on the sand or took walks.
We experienced my first and only rainforest traffic jam on the drive back as a bus ahead of us had a flat tire. There were cars stuck all the way down the single-track path as we waited for the situation to be resolved, but I had somehow persuaded our group to make my iPod playlist the Day 1 choice for music and so at least was enjoying that.
Once we eventually got moving again, we made it back to our campsite just before dark. There were plenty of other tours camping out in the area, but our group had our own separate tent village under a canopy. We picked up rollout mats from the storage room to aid with comfort, and we picked our own tent-mates, three to each one. I ended up with a pair of Swiss girls (insert fantasy of your choice here).
There was an open-air kitchen area near our site with stoves and picnic tables. The bathroom area was a few sites away and had no electricity, so if it was the middle of the night, I just opted for the trees. There was also the "bar" which has no reason to be called that as there was nothing even resembling a bar there. It was just a pavilion with poor lighting that flashed dim LED lights giving it the atmosphere of a drug den.
By the time we got started on dinner, it was already dark outside, and the two English boys from the group and I were pretty useless with food preparation. We left it to the Dutch girl who had pretty much taken over cooking duties and all shared the stir-fry together when it was ready.
Cooking by headlight with Elise.
We had pretty much started drinking as soon as we left the lake earlier, but now that mealtime was over, we picked up the pace. I got into a really interesting discussion on American politics, we all played Never Have I Ever, and I ended the night dancing with some of the girls in the pavilion "club".
Day 2 Champagne Pools, Indian Head, Eli Creek, Maheno Shipwreck, & Flunky Ball
We had scrambled eggs for breakfast with tomato and onion, showered, and then hopped back in the 4WDs for the absolute best day of the tour.
Our first stop was at the Champagne Pools.
You may be wondering why we appear to be at a beach with all kinds of ocean yet keep stopping at lakes and natural inland swimming holes rather than going into the sea. If you're asking that question, you clearly haven't read my other posts, because the ocean life pretty simply wants to kill you. Besides, you'll see dead birds and jellyfish washed up all along the beach, and it's not really enticing.
This is actually the closest we actually came to the ocean, in fact, because the waves break against these rocks on the coast that form natural pools. I was amazed at how beautiful they were! They're called champagne pools, of course, because of how the water bubbles up. We spent about an hour there sitting in the pools, chatting, and just enjoying it.
We just drove a few minutes down the beach afterwards to the Indian Head lookout point.
It's a cliff with a really scenic outcrop over the ocean. You weren't meant to go near the edge, but of course everybody did anyway. There was a very long drop to bright blue, shark-infested sea below.
We spent 20 minutes there before driving to our lunch spot, and excitingly, we finally saw a dingo! Fraser Island is known for being home to plenty of wild dingos, and you're meant to exercise a lot of caution if you head to the beach at night, but this is the only one we actually saw on the trip.
Look how adorable! Like a fox hybrid!
After lunch, we went to my ultimate favorite spot on the island- Eli Creek. It was a completely natural lazy river that went winding from the sand into the trees.
You'd walk along the bridge through the forest until you reached the far end, hop into the creek, and let the current take you back to the beach while you enjoy the beautiful palms and nature along the way. It was fantastically beautiful! We rode down a few times and it was a perfect combination of peaceful and fun.
Finally around 4:30 we headed out and made one last stop at the Maheno Shipwreck down the beach. The Maheno was an old liner that was being carted to Japan in 1935 when the boats were caught in a storm. It crashed on shore and has been there since, even more beat up than that day since the military used the shipwreck as a bomb target in WWII. It's pretty cool though and we had fun taking photos in front of the big copper skeleton.
We cooked a barbeque dinner back at the site, which meant veggie burgers, potatoes, and salad for me, and then we toasted marshmallows over a fire. It was our last night together so we had a big blowout with lots of goon.
The Germans taught us what is possibly the most fun drinking game ever. It's called Flunky Ball. Basically, you have two teams that stand on opposite sides of the playing field, and you set up a water bottle midway between them. One team will have another water bottle that they then throw at the one in the center. If your team knocks it over, you immediately start chugging your beer while the other team rushes to set the bottle back upright and return to their side. When they get back, you have to stop drinking. The first team to finish all their alcohol wins. It’s really fun and I’m appreciative of a drinking game where you win by drinking instead of having to drink when you lose. Alcohol is supposed to be a reward, not a punishment!
After a few games of that, I took a walk to the beach with a few others. It was a little cold and extremely dark, so I didn't have much interest in staying once we got there, and a couple other people accompanied me back after a short while as dingo protection.
I found some friends back at the site and went to dance in the trippy pavilion. After the electricity for the music was turned off at 1, we ended the night in a circle of extremely drunk Irish people singing songs, and I fell asleep back at the tent around 2:00 pretty intoxicated.
Day 3 Lake Wabby, Sand Dunes, & Rainbow Beach
I overslept by an hour on our final day and awoke to my cute gay Irish friend playing Titanic music, and we had a short discussion about how we should get married but I think only one of us was joking and it was him.
I only had time for a quick breakfast before we were off to Lake Wabby. Once we parked, it was a 40 minute hike through the forest to reach it- all uphill. After what felt like ages, we finally emerged out onto the sand blow, and thankfully it was so worth it.
The lake used to be completely surrounded by forest, but over time the sand has blown over to cover most of the trees, so there's just this huge expanse of sand dunes. It's really incredible.
We pushed our way through the sand until we reached a steep sandy hill, and at the bottom of that was the lake. The cool thing about being able to see Lake Wabby wasn't just that it was another pretty sight, but it's one that will be gone in 20 years. The sand will eventually cover the entire lake, so we got to swim in this body of water that won't even exist later in our lifetime.
The sand created a gradual slope into the water, so I enjoyed just sitting in the shallows letting the little fish bite at my feet. There were big catfish that would glide by as well.
The return hike wasn't nearly as tiring since we took a different path that was mostly flat. We had one last lunch with whatever leftovers were in our crates, then we drove back to Rainbow Beach where we unpacked the cars.
Showering after check-in was one of the best feelings ever. I was actually caked in dirt. It felt so good to be clean again!
That evening I booked my next bus, joined my group for drinks at the hostel next door, and walked to the beach with everyone at night.
Day 4 Carlo Sand Blow
In Rainbow Beach, about a 25 minute walk from Dingo's, is an area called the Carlo Sand Blow. I went with one of the Germans from my trip, Bernard, and really enjoyed it. Even the walk there was nice. The residential areas in Rainbow Beach are cute with tree-lined streets, and then the path through the woods in the Great Sandy National Park area was all browns, greens, and reds and was gorgeous. It was springtime, but it looked like a fall landscape.
We reached the sand blow in the early evening and that was awesome. It's another huge dune area with one side overlooking the town and forest and the other overlooking the sea and island beaches. The sand gathered on the sides in big hills and then dipped in the center like a valley.
It was a nice, chilled out way to wind down from the trip before waking up at 6:45 the following morning to catch my bus back down the coast. I had such a blast on Fraser Island and would recommend it as the best organized tour I took while in Australia. There were so many beautiful sights and fun people.
This brings me right up the end of my year, and I'm going to bet that I can fit my last four stops into one entry. Just because my trip was wrapping up though doesn't mean that I didn't still have a couple highlights left to hit, most notably cuddling a koala, so join me next time for my final Australian adventure.