Australia: Fraser Island

Fraser island: The biggest sand island in the world, the place where I will be spending my next 3 days.
It's an early morning and as I get to the reception, where we are getting picked up, I see plenty of tired faces. No one seems to enjoy the early hours of the trip too much.
The bus drive from Noosa to Rainbow Beach goes smooth and without too many issues, except maybe the heavy rain that started to fall as soon as we got to our break.
In Rainbow beach we get introduced to our tour guide: Kevin, and go trough the basic safety briefing and such.

Dingo!!

We have 4 jeeps available, 2 manual ones and 2 automatic ones. and we are a group of about 30 people, everyone gets sorted and we all have an assigned car. I'm in the car with Kevin, an Irish girl, and a whole big group of Norwegian girls.
It takes us about an hour to get to the ferry towards the Island, including the stop at a bottle shop and a super market before leaving Rainbow Beach. And another 30 minutes from the ferry drop off to the first stop: Lunch at the resort where we will be staying the next 2 nights.

On the way to the resort, we get surprised by the beautiful long beach and the amazing scenery, and to make it even better we get to see a dingo, sitting all by itself not to far away from our resort's entry. As we drive into the resort I notice that we drive over the same security that I saw in South Africa to keep the animals outside of the area, some sort of rails over which animals aren't supposed to be able to walk on.

After lunch we have a few minutes to refill our water bottles and get something from the local store before continuing to Lake McKenzie.

To get there we go though an amazing bush drive for about 10 km, or 30 minutes more or less.
The island already felt overwhelming, with the sandy coast and the massive jungle just a few metres away from the coast. And now with the lake it just feels like the cherry on top of the cake.
The sand is incredible white, and very good for your hair, skin and to whiten your teeth, or so they say. And the water is incredibly clear.
There is barely any form of life in the lake which is one of the reasons behind the crystal clear water.

Lake McKenzie

As the sun starts falling we make our way back to the resort, where everyone seems to be too tired to do anything so it looks like almost everyone goed a quick nap before dinner.
For dinner we get steak with veggies and potatoes, and after finishing we head towards one of the rooms that got upgraded (so we had a tiny fridge there) to play some drinking games and get to know each other a bit.
We end up going to the resort's bar later on and even jumping in the pool to end the night.


Day nº 2 starts with an early wake up call followed by what was left of breakfast (the other group seemed to know how things worked here and got up earlier to get the best of breakfast)
After breakfast we leave towards the northern part of the island. We drive for about an hour, over the incredibly long beach before we get to our first stop: The Champagne pools. The weather wasn't the best when we got to there, but that didn't stop us from jumping in and heading to the furthest part, where you get all the "bubbles".

View from the Indian head

After the pools we head towards the Indian Head, the most easterly point of the island, and even with a cloudy day like the one we had, you have some amazing views over the island.

The remainings of SS Maheno 

After the Indian head we go for lunch at a nearby picnic area before continuing towards the SS Maheno wreck that you can find on the island. Kevin tells us how after all the years of great labour, the ship had been sold to a Japanese company that bought it hoping to use all the metal of the ship, but on the way to Japan (the ship was being towed, as it had nothing left but the metal and the steering wheel inside)a storm raised and  broke the wire that connected both ships. The crew, without any way to navigate the ship, decided to strand it on the beach hoping that the Japanese would come and pick it up once the storm was over, but by the time they found it, the was had pushed the ship so deep in the sand that it wasn't rentable to get it out, so the legally abandoned it. 

Eli creek

The last spot of the day was Eli Creek, a massive source of fresh water with a flow of 80 million litres of fresh water a day, supposedly enough to sustain Brisbane without any issues. We spend a few hours here, going down the cold river down to the beach, and going up again just to repeat.

And to end the day we get pasta with meatballs and garlic bread, and then we head to the garden out at the rooms to try and play some drinking games with the whole group. But we get interrupted by heavy rain first, and then we even get a visit from a snake.

The last day of the trip starts with another early morning, but this time we only have one stop ahead, before going back to the mainland.

The view from and to lake Wabby

We are visiting lake Wabby, the deepest lake on the island, as deep as 12 metres, as well as the lake with most sea life.

To get there we need to walk about 2.5 km, through a little forest and then a massive sand batch that looks like a small desert.
Once there we swim from one of the edges to the other one, and once back just relax a bit, some of us stay in the water, with the Dr. Fish (those that nibble all your dead flesh away) while others just spend the last hours on the beach next to the lake.

Once we finished there we had a little drive before having lunch, and then we head back towards Noosa.

The best thing about being back in Noosa is that almost everyone from the Fraser trip was staying there as well, so we decide to party all together. All in all, I had an amazing experience on Fraser Island, and I think that I was really lucky with the amazing group that I had.

The amazing group!