The Weekend & Fraser Island

So for those playing along at home, I haven't even gotten a chance to show you my room yet! Well actually, since I've been in Brisbane (Brisneyland, Brisvegas), I have actually had three rooms, my first in the City Backpackers Hostel downtown, and then two rooms here in the Indooroopilly Lodge. I had a nice place upstairs, but for some reason, they decided to move me downstairs (which is a worse room basically), claiming that someone needed my room upstairs, but strangely enough, I have yet to see anyone move in up there. hmmm.. At any rate, here is my place. As you can see, I've filled it up pretty nicely. I am typing this very blog sitting in a 70s -era lawn chair that I scavaged from outside my room. It's not the best of quality of accomodation, but it works.
So let's go ahead and move on and talk about the weekend! So much has happened and I've seen so much in the past couple of days , but I'll try to sum it up as quickly as possible, for your benefit, and because I am getting really tired.

Well we left Brisbane on Thursday on a 2pm bus headed north to Hervey Bay. The bus was like any other you could imagine., similar to a greyhound experience in the US. We made plenty of stops on the way up, and the entire bus trip took approximately 6 hours. Of course they played a few movies on the way up to Hervey Bay, but naturally, they are about the most non-offensive yet, IQ dropping movies that are out there. (daddy day care and legally blonde 2). Actually they threw in Cheaper by the Dozen, and I actually appeal to that one because of my midwestern roots :-).

So we arrived in Hervey Bay in darkness around 9pm. Check into our hostel, and since it's still relatively early, we (My friend Oli and Rob) decide to go explore the town. As many of you know Australia as a country, tends to replicate the business hours of my hometown of Gibson City, nearly everything is closed by 6pm, and if you're lucky, you'll find a grocery store that stays open until 11pm. So we had a rather exciting trip in search of the town's only event going on , the local grocery store. After that, we tried to get a drink, but were turned away from the first bar since they close d at 10pm... luckily, we were able to convince a local hostel that we were guests, and they served us at their on-site bar. But it was an early night, we needed to be up by 6am the next morning for our pre-departure briefing.


So Friday morning, 6:50AM, this raspy -voiced Aussies walks in , and looks like he's done this about 100 times too many, starts speaking to us. "Hey guys, I'm gonna put in this DVD, it's got two parts, so when the first part finishes, go ahead and someone get up and start the second part", then he walks off. ... hmmm, good start. Well the DVD is quite informative about how to drive in sand and not kill yourself and your group, the second part was all about how not to anger a dingo (which we never saw btw), and camping tips. After this meager breifing, we got assigned to a group for our Land Cruiser (which we fit 11 people into, as opposed to the original 9 which we were told), but we had a fantastic group including myself, and four other guy friends, 2 scottish girls, 2 british girls, and an older couple from barcelona.

Just a brief on what Fraser Island is, it's the largest sand island in the world. We had booked a 3 day - 2 night camping trip which included a 4x4 rental, and a bunch of camping stuff.


These first two pictures are actually on the 3rd day on the island when I woke up to see the sunrise (6:40am), It's pretty cold during the night and into the morning, hence the gloves and woollie hat. But by 10am, it warms up to about 70 degrees.


Here's a photo of Lake Wabbie, this place was RIDICILIOUS!, I've never seen anything like it in my entire life. To the left, you see all of that sand, it was a complete desert., then on the lower right, you can see the small lake, which has of course the clearest water you could ever imagine. This is one of the two lakes which we visited on the island (Lake Mackenzie and Lake Wabby), both were absolutely pristine and had fantastic beaches.


Here's us on the vehicle ferry heading over to Fraser Island

Just to give you an idea of what the driving was like, mostly single-track and on the island, the fastest we would usually get going was 20 km/hr (slow)...., driving on the beach you can do up to 80km/hr, but it's WILD driving on a beach, I just went to a place in the states where you can do it (Oceano Vehicular Rec Area, - Pismo Beach, CA), but I've never seen this anywhere else.
This shot is through the wreck of the Maheno which is on the eastern coast of the beach.
Here's a nice shot of my feet hanging over the ledge. It's probably a good 70 feet down to the bottom. Strange though, this was probably one of the only cliffs I saw on the island.

So all in all, the trip was awesome, you should check out the photos , maybe they will help paint a better picture. We took the nice bus from Hervey Bay so we got back to Brisbane around 6am this morning. it's been a rough and groggy day. I just got back from our Ultimate Frisbee league tonight and now I'm destroyed... I got a flat tire on the way back as well, so tomorrow will be a fun day putting the bike back together, as well as mending my foot wounds from ultimate... hmmm, good night!