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Fraser Island - And Dont spare the Horses! - Australia
by Ben Cooksey | Date >
2005-06-05 | Country : Australia | City : Queensland
| Area : Fraser Island |
| We Got up early Friday morning and went through the checklist of the equipment on the vehicle we had hired (a big 4.3 litre Toyota Landcruiser) for our trip to Fraser Island. After our briefing at our rental company, Safari 4X4 Rentals, we excitedly threw the kit into the beast and headed off toward Hook Point to catch our Big Barge where the adventure would begin.
A ‘very’ pleasant lady both aesthetically and with a charming and friendly personality greeted us onto one of three barges competing for business. We all grinned from ear to ear with excitement and after a short 15 minute crossing we landed and disembarked onto the thick, sandy beach at some speed (as this is how we were told to do it of course!) After a short trip round a sandy track, we pulled on to something that loosely resembled a road, very loosely! The tarmac was worn out and pot-holes were all conquering. After what seemed like ages we arrived at the point where we were to join the beach – Eastern Beach Access. The tide was too high to travel any further at this point so we just had to wait. Out came the beers and the snacks, and the football…..we were only too happy to laze around for a few hours and watch the world go by! Joining the queue were other travellers waiting to head in the same direction as us and we all made friends quickly. After a few hours the tide was out enough to continue, so, in convoy we went up the beach heading for our first stop for the night, Indian Head. 2 ½ hours had passed before we arrived, and many toilet stops too for the beers were beginning to take effect, we roared up in the beast. We could see from the amount of people that were stuck that entering the campsite was no easy task, I put my foot down and spared no horses and managed to make quite an entrance, much to the enjoyment of others and myself! Upon arrival, we haphazardly threw the tent up and cracked open the cartons of wine. We got talking to a few people and I ended up going sand surfing with a Canadian girl in the huge desert like sandunes which was excellent fun. We joined another camp of two lads who were fishing into a bucket, one lad we came to know as Lachlan and the others name escapes me. We ate some great snags and a couple of burgers and things began to get hazy for me and I was hassled by the ranger because there was some leftover dirty pans that needed tidying up so the dingoes couldn’t get at them, I escaped without a fine, luckily. The other lads had a good night going from camp to camp, and drink to drink and in the end they came back rather worse for wear may I add!
We all woke up early, very hung-over. We put the stuff away, and I attempted to drive up the beach a short way but had to return because the tide would have stranded us, so we instead decided to walk to a point called Champagne Pools some 3k’s up the beach. Champagne Pools is a natural rock pool, quite large too, that fills with the tide. We splashed around for a while and decided to head back to the beast. We head south along the beach for an hour until we found ourselves at a fantastic place called Eli Creek, a crystal clear, spring fed stream just 100 yards from the sea. It was chest deep, cool and fresh with a boardwalk following it some 100 yards into the dense rainforest, just paradise. From Eli Creek we headed further south to the shipwreck of The Maheno, a huge ship that was wrecked by storms as it was being towed for scrap in the early 1900’s. It was really just a rusted hull but still fascinating to walk round. Only 30 minutes down the beach we stumbled on some rock formations called ‘The Pinnacles’. Quite bizarrely they looked like sandstone coloured road cones set into the rock but on a huge scale. On the trip to our next campsite we stopped off at Lake Boomanjin for a dip. Lake Boomanjin is a perched lake, almost tea-coloured but still very pure. We had a dip and took off again round the rainforest track to the campsite called Dilli Village. The campsite was clean and the facilities were better than we expected – we had showers and water for a start, more than Indian Head which was just a patch of sand (but fantastic all the same). We pitched up and had a trot round to say hello to people and enjoyed some banter and again, a fair amount of grog then cooked ourselves what can only be described as awful. We called it Gruel and it consisted of everything we had left over, including beer and wine! We threw it all in a HUGE pot; beans, spaghetti, tomato sauce, beer, wine, you name it, it probably had it in there. We each grabbed a bowl and tucked in. It was so awful that we decided to go hungry and tidy up the mess in the morning. The morning came and it took at least an hour to sort out the mess we had ‘created’ previously’ We packed up our bits and set off the 17k’s to our next destination. Lake Mackenzie. It was a long drive through dense bush and rainforest, we stopped for many photo’s and I even managed to embed a large stick in my foot by mistake, we hit a tree luckily causing no damage and finally arrived overlooking a huge, maybe 30 acre lake of the bluest of blues, and I’m talking of blue that you can only imagine and never think it exists. Such was our anticipation of getting there quickly that we had parked and grabbed our towels almost before I had stopped the beast! The winding path led us to the shore and to the whitest and most powdery sand I’ve ever encountered. It was simply breathtaking. We stood in awe at where we were then dropped the towels (swimming shorts on of course) and at full steam leapt into the cool waters of the lake. It is said that the water in Lake Mackenzie is 97% pure and the sand so fine that it will clean jewellery, I don’t dispute this fact one bit. After 2 hours, some sightings of insect nasties and laughs that I’ll never forget in my lifetime the time had come to depart. We took the beach south again, retracing our footsteps from 2 days previous reflecting on the fantastic time we had had. The track that took us along the inland path and back towards the barge landing point seemed so far that we almost questioned whether we were going the right way but we got there eventually. We waited and explored the sandunes amongst the trees while we waited for our barge to arrive, then hopped onboard and watched as Fraser Island vanished behind us. Memories of such a beautiful place, experiences and laughs luckily, don’t disappear as quickly.
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