Maybe the Dingo Ate Your Baby?

Righteo, and on to part 2 of my spring break trip...

Day 4: Byron Bay → Brisbane → Harvey Bay
Since there are no overnight buses that run to Hervey Bay (pronounced Har-vey), we were lucky enough to sleep in beds for another night in Byron. However, we were also lucky enough to be scheduled for the 7 AM bus to Brisbane. We had to connect in Brisbane because there were no direct buses to Hervey Bay. I realized that this was the second time that I had been in Brisbane and never left the airport/bus terminal. We arrived in Brisbane around 11 and didn’t arrive in Hervey Bay till around 5:30 p.m. After this extremely wasteful day of sitting on 2 buses all day, I actually wished that we had taken another overnight bus. Oh well. By the way, down on the bottom of the bus where you put your luggage, there was a box of day old baby chicks! I can't believe that they were just thrown amongst the luggage. I'm still trying to figure out why someone traveling on the Greyhound was carrying day old baby chicks?



Once we arrived in Hervey Bay, we were told that we’d be met by someone who would take us to our hostel. Well we were met by a tiny van that fit 8 people. So since there were 24 of us, I ended up having to wait in the car park for about 45 minutes while the van shuttled back and forth. During this time that I was stranded in the car park, I could easily conclude that the town of Hervey Bay was quite a shit hole. Basically, the only reason anyone ever goes to Hervey Bay is because it’s where the ferry leaves from to go to Fraser Island.

So once we finally got to our hostel, we had to cough up $109 buckaroos for National Park Entry Fees...how annoying! Like I didn’t spend enough money on this trip already? Anyway, this hostel was by far the worst hostel we stayed at during our trip. Check out this picture below of my mattress. Those black spots would be the remains of bed bug poop. And if your mattress has bed bug poop, one could assume that your mattress therefore has bed bugs. Awesome. At this point, all we could do was laugh about it. Goodnight, don’t let the bed bugs bite…literally!


Despite the poor sleeping conditions, the hostel did give us all a free barbie that night, and you know how we love anything free, especially food. I remember one of the German guys asking my English friend Becca, “Becca, why are you eating so much food tonight?” And she responded, “Well I don’t know when or what my next meal will be…this is free…I’m gonna eat!” The words of a true traveler. Since we were all pretty exhausted from a day of sitting on a bus (it’s tiring!), most of us just mocked around this night, went on the internet, packed our bags (we could only bring a small backpack each), and enjoyed our last showers we’d get for the next few days.

Day 5: Hervey Bay → Fraser Island
And so day 5 began of the infamous Fraser (pronounced Fray-zer) Island adventure. We wasted no time either. By 6:00 AM we had to be up, ready, have our suitcases locked away in lockers, and in the TV room ready for our safety briefing. Before I go on, let me give you a little background about where we were going. Fraser Island is an island off the east coast of Australia and the world’s largest sand island (it’s about 75 miles in length and 13 miles in width!). Recently, in 1992 Fraser Island was added to the World Heritage listing. If you don’t know much about this, it’s a pretty big deal. There are only 890 places in the entire world on this list and they have to go through an extensive selection process before they are added. Once a place is added, it remains under strict regulations so that they can “preserve its natural beauty.” So this makes Fraser ranking right up there with the Great Barrier Reef and Ayer’s Rock (also partly why the entry fees are so steep). Fraser is also unique because it’s known for its wild dingoes. In particular, it has some of Australia’s last pure breeds of dingoes in eastern Australia, so dogs are actually not permitted on the island at all.

So anyway, getting back on track…we had to meet to watch a Fraser Island safety video before we left warning of us of certain things. For example, camp fires & feeding the dingoes are illegal on the island. Also, there are very strong ocean currents and numerous jelly fish and sharks in the area, so swimming in the ocean is also not permitted. Now one small detail that we somehow managed to overlook about our trip was that fact that we were signed up for a 3 day SELF DRIVE CAMPING SAFARI. Self drive?! Camping!? Again…what was I getting myself into? We divided up into 3 different groups for 3 different troop carrier cars (or as we liked to call them "Jurassic Park vehicles"). You had to be 21 to drive the car, so I wasn’t even able to drive it (although even if I was 21, I think my parents probably would have killed me if I would have driven a manual gear 4WD troop carrier on the left side of the road across the world’s largest sand island!). Our group consisted of me, Jess, Catie, Amber, 2 of the guys in our group from Germany, 1 guy from Finland, 2 other random German girls who weren’t in our group, and this crazy boy from Switzerland named Robin (who we later only called Robinhood). Between the 10 of us we had to scrounge up $1,000 for a car deposit before we left. Somehow I was put in charge of collecting the money. I don’t think I’ve ever held so much cash in my entire life.



After we got everything straightened away, we hopped in our troop carriers and headed over to “the shop” to pick up our camping equipment and fill out a condition report of the car. They also showed us how to set up the tent, how to work the car, what type of gears to use for each type of driving (i.e. pavement vs. hard sand vs. soft sand, etc), and how to change the tire pressure. Most of this stuff went right over my head, especially the stuff about driving the car. We were starting to run short on time and the guy was talking heaps fast so I didn’t even know if the guys in our group who WOULD be driving (and didn’t speak English very well) even understood a word this guy was saying. I don’t know how we got so behind on time (I mean we started at 6 AM!), but by the time that we packed up the car, we were only left with approximately 20 minutes to complete 3 days worth of grocery shopping for 10 people before we had to leave to catch our ferry to Fraser.

As I’m sure you could only imagine, this was absolute mayhem. I can’t remember the last time I was as stressed out as I was in Woolworths this day. Remember that old game show where the contestants would run around the grocery store throwing everything they saw in their cart before time ran out? Well combine that show with the Amazing Race and that’s exactly how those short 20 minutes felt. The 10 of us had to divide up buying “the essentials” like toilet paper, bug spray, foil, paper towels, etc. and then we just split off into groups for buying food. Jess, Catie, Amber, and I just bought all of our food together and then split the cost when we checked out. I’m not a very picky eater; however, my friends are, which made this 20-minute grocery shopping trip even more stressful. We couldn’t agree on crunchy or creamy, white or wheat, strawberry or blueberry, apples or oranges, turkey or ham. Most of the debates ended in someone saying something like, “Screw it, we’ll get both!” We felt like we were on the Amazing Race when we started to see that they other groups were already finished and checking out and we weren’t ready yet. So we just hoped that we had enough food at that point, checked out, and ran back to the car park. It was at this point that our group realized that the car rides were going to be quite a tight fit when we now had 20+ bags of groceries and 30 liters of water to add.



So let’s recap. Take another look at that car up there. That car was currently holding 10 people who spoke 4 different languages, with 10 backpacks, 2 coolers of food, 3 days worth of groceries, 3 tents, 3 tarps, 10 sleeping bags, 10 mats, 30 liters of water, a grill, a shovel, and dishes. This was going to be an interesting trip, to say the very least.



We made it to the ferry on time, thankfully. The ferry was filled with people from our group as well as other families who were taking their own 4WD cars over to the island. The ride took about 45 minutes until we finally arrived on the west coast of Fraser. Once we drove the car off the boat we had to stop at this resort to get our camping permits and let air out of the tires. We were pretty jealous of the people staying at the resort who were lounging by the pool eating lunch while we knew that we’d be camping the next few days…

Now we were ready to begin our journey. The east coast of Fraser Island has all the nice spots, so the plan was to drive across the island today and set up camp on the east coast. As one could imagine, driving on sand is not easy, especially soft sand. Across the inland, Fraser basically just has these narrow sand “roads” that you can’t really drive any faster than 20mph on. And trust me, that was fast enough. We were getting jolted and thrown every which way. It was kinda like driving on speed bump after speed bump for a few hours. The funny thing about the roads is that they were only wide enough for one lane of driving, but you were allowed to drive on the roads both ways. So if while you’re driving along, you see another car come from the opposition direction, one person had to stop and back up until the other person could pass. This didn’t really happen that often, but it still got pretty annoying after a while. None of the roads had names or signs either. The map below is almost the exact map we were given of the island. As you can see, the “roads” are basically just a bunch of squiggly lines on the map. We really had no way to know if we were even driving in the right direction and it didn’t take long for people to get pretty testy and irritated with each other as we argued about which way to drive. Being in this car was sorta like being on a stressful family vacation, except with some strangers and some friends. Weird combination.



After a few hours of bumpy driving, we managed to make it to our first destination, Central Station, which was exactly half way in the middle of the island. Here at Central Station, we started to notice the warning signs everywhere for dingoes. Being an avid Seinfeld fan, and cracking the joke so many times, I wanted to see a wild dingo so bad! If I only knew what the next few days had in store for me…. Anyway, here we went on a pretty cool rainforest walk.



We hadn’t seen our other two groups since we arrived, so we figured we were ahead of them since our car was the first to leave. So we decided to go on a bit longer walk to see Basin Lake. It turned out that the walk was a bit longer than we imagined, and Basin Lake wasn’t really anything special. So we made it back to our car around mid afternoon and our next plan was to finish driving to the beach and set up camp for the night.



Well I’m not quite sure what happened… maybe it was the slow driving, or maybe it was the wrong turns, but the sun was setting and we still had not arrived at our camp site. By the time we found our site and met up with the other 2 groups, it was pitch black outside. So we had to set up our tents and cook ourselves dinner with the only light source being the headlights of our car. I had never really camped before, so I was in for quite a treat. The 4 of us shared a pretty small tent, so thankfully we all liked each other haha. We didn’t have any mobile service on the island, so I’m not really sure what time we fell asleep that night. After an early morning and a stressful day, I’d estimate we passed out before 10 pm.

Day 6: Fraser Island
Today was our full day to explore Fraser. Because we’d be driving along the beach, we were restricted to the times that we were allowed to drive based on when the high tide was that day. So we all woke up around 7 am so that we could take down camp, pack up the car, eat brekkie, and be on the road by 8 am. After we woke up, our English friends Becca and Ellie told us that when they went to bed the night before there were 2 dingoes right outside our tent. Dingoes RIGHT outside my tent and I was sleeping and didn't even know!

Today’s ride was MUCH smoother than yesterday and MUCH faster. The speed limit on the beach was 80 km per hour. We were literally just driving parallel to the ocean, which was absolutely amazing. This was my view from the car…rough right?



Our first stop for the day was at the shipwreck of the S.S. Maheno. There was no way you could miss this! The ship was originally built in the early 1900s in Scotland as a luxury passenger ship. Then during WWI the ship served as a hospital ship in the English Channel. Then in 1935 the ship was being towed from Melbourne when it was caught in a cyclone and ended up beached on Fraser Island. The shipwreck looks pretty huge (and it is), but actually 3 stories of it are buried under the sand. Because of its deteriorating condition, you’re actually not allowed to come within 3 meters of the shipwreck, but not very many people seemed to actually follow that rule.



Our next destination was the Champagne Pools. However, on our way there we stopped to help out a family whose car was stuck in the sand. Well, the boys really did most of the helping/pushing while we had a chat with the mom and daughter of the family. They were from Melborune and just on holiday. It seems like Fraser Island is a popular vacation spot for Australians as well as backpackers.



Finally we made it to the Champagne Pools, where we spent about 2 hours hanging out. The pools are a popular swimming hole on Fraser where the ocean waves crash over the rocks into shallow sandy pools. They got their name from the foaming water in the pools. Some of the water formed puddles in the sand which was really warm and perfect for relaxing.




While I was laying around, I started to see a huge crowd of people rush toward one of the pools. It looked like something big was going on, so of course I also rushed over (unfortunately without my camera!). Turns out that an octopus washed up in one of the pools. An OCTOPUS…how cool! However, one jerk decided that he should actually pick up the octopus, so it obviously got angry and inked all over the place. I saw an octopus ink!

Our next stop was Indian Head which is a coastal headland towards the top of the 75 mile beach of Fraser. It only took about 10 minutes to climb to the top. Indian Head had some of the most beautiful views of the island (like the ones on the postcards). The areas on the edge were restricted areas, but again no one really seemed to follow that rule.




On our way back, we experienced probably the scariest moment of our entire trip. To get back to the beach, we had to drive down a pretty steep sand dune. We watched the cars in front of us go down, and decided that going to the left of the dune would be safest. Well we went for it, and our car nearly tipped over! Thankfully it didn’t, but it was still pretty scary. Why didn’t we sign up to go on the air-conditioned bus tour again?

So after that thrill, we decided to head to our campsite for the night and set up (before dark this time!). Although I wasn’t becoming a huge fan of the whole camping thing, I will admit that camping along the beach was pretty awesome. I mean this was our view from inside the tent…hard to complain?



After setting up camp, we decided to take a 2 km walk to Eli Creek. On the way there we spotted about 10 different jellyfish washed up, so we had to be especially careful where we walked. Eli Creek is the largest creek on the eastern beach of Fraser and pours up to 4 million liters of clear, fresh water into the ocean nearly every hour. Who needs showers anyway when we got to hang out in a fresh water creek?




We made our way back to camp, cooked ourselves dinner, hung out for the rest of the night by the beach until we passed out pretty early again.

Day 7: Fraser Island → Hervey Bay → Airlie Beach
Day 7 began around 5:00 AM when our friend Adam knocked on our tent telling us to get up to watch the sunrise with him. As much as I didn't want to get up, I really did want to see the sunrise. So Amber, Catie, and I grabbed our cameras and walked down to the beach to join Adam. This sunrise was absolutely stunning and I’m so glad I made myself get up to see it. That was probably one of my favorite parts of this trip.



After the sun had risen, Adam, Amber, and I were just hanging out by the beach talking. Then suddenly I see Adam look to the right of me and casually say, “Oh, hey.” I thought that someone else from our group had joined us, so I turned to look to see who it was. Well to my surprise, it was not a person, but rather a dingo! A dingo! A wild dingo was standing only a few close feet away from me.



AH! What was I suppose to do again? The funny thing about the whole situation was that I remember back when we were watching the safety video, everyone laughed and made fun of the part of the video where the corny people demonstrated what to do if you see a dingo as they crossed their arms and slowly backed away. Well you can laugh as much as you want, but when the time actually comes and there’s a dingo in front of you, you’re gonna cross your arms and slowly back away! I couldn’t remember if you were supposed to look at it or not. The dingo was defiantly staring at me though. All I could remember was the part of the Dingo Warning sign that read, “If attacked – Defend yourself aggressively.” I sure hoped I wouldn’t have to do that! I was absolutely terrified, but quite excited at the same time because I was seeing a dingo up close and personal. The dingo then actually laid down and started growling at me. As I was standing there shaking in my shoes, I was actually snapping some shots of him as well since I still had my camera from the sunrise. Typical me, right? Eventually the dingoe got uninterested in me and left. That was quite an interesting start to my day.



After eating brekkie, taking down camp, and packing up, we were off at about 8 AM. Our only destination for the day was the place that we were most excited to visit on Fraser Island, Lake McKenzie. Lake McKenzie is probably the most visited site on the island, and after seeing the pictures, you’d understand why!



The water in the lake is some of the clearest in the world. Lake McKenzie is a “perched” lake which means that it only contains rainwater, no groundwater, and isn’t fed by streams and doesn’t flow into the ocean either. Before arriving, I had seen pictures of Lake McKenzie, but when I finally set my own eyes on it, I couldn’t believe its beauty. The sand was almost pure white and the water was crystal clear. I couldn’t believe that a place like this actually existed… and I couldn't believe that I was actually there!



We spent about 3 hours enjoying our time at Lake McKenzie. Lying on the sand was almost like getting a massage. It was also interesting that there was absolutely no wind at all, so it got pretty hot and we needed to take constant dips in the water.



We knew that we had to catch the 4 PM ferry back to Hervey Bay, so we planned to leave Lake McKenzie at 1:30 which would give us more than plenty of time to drive back, pump up our tires, and get on the ferry. Well everything was going just fine, until we were about 45 minutes away. There seemed to be a hold up on the road. We got out of the car to see what was going on. Well there was a 7 car hold up, because one car was stuck and wasn’t able to make it up one of the sand dunes. And since the roads are only one lane and so narrow, you can’t exactly pass the other cars. This wasn’t good. We sat there for about a half an hour watching this car 7 cars ahead of us fail numerous times at driving up this sand dune. Then we started to get kinda worried. Our ferry left at 4 PM and that was the last ferry that left Fraser Island for the day. If we missed this ferry then we would be stuck on the island for another night, miss our bus to Airlie Beach, and be totally screwed for the rest of our trip…and it wouldn’t even be our fault! So FINALLY this car made it up the hill, but then we sat there and watched this huge bus fail numerous times at making it up as well. We were doomed. Finally some guy who worked at the resort on the island (and was also late for work) came and told everyone that they had to let more air out of the tires and get more acceleration if we wanted to make it up the dune. So everyone started letting air out of their tires and finally everyone started making it up. We rushed back to the resort to pump our tires and made it onto the ferry with only about 5 minutes to spare. PHEW! Talk about a close one.

After dropping off our camping equipment at the shop, we finally arrived back at our hostel around 5:30. However, since we actually weren't staying at the hostel that night, we weren't able to take any showers. At this point, no one had showered in 3+ days, so everyone was pretty pissed off and cranky about this. Especially because in a few hours we'd be cramming onto another overnight Greyhound and wouldn't be able to shower until the next day....gross. We had some spare time to reorganize our suitcases and eat dinner before heading back to the bus terminal.

Next we were off to Airlie Beach. This bus ride was by far the worst one yet. It was the longest (13 hours...only 1 hour short of a plane ride from LA to Sydney), and had some interesting happenings along the way. Only about an hour in, the bus driver pulled off the side of the road for 35 minutes because someone had clogged the toilet on the bus and he had to fix it (wouldn't you hate to be that person?). Then a few hours later, the bus driver stops the bus and runs outside with a tiny fire extinguisher. What was going on? Well the truck in front of us was completely on fire! Why the bus driver thought that his tiny fire extinguisher would help is beyond me. After about 5 minutes, the bus driver runs back on our bus, hits the gas, swerves around the truck on fire, then gets on the PA and says "good thing we got around that before the gas tank blew up!" Gosh, what a trip. And it's not even half over yet....

Stay tuned for Part 3, Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays Islands coming soon :)

Catch ya later!

P.S. For those of you who haven’t heard yet…I recently booked a 10 day trip to Fiji at the end of November before I return home. I mean, I gotta go out with a bang, hey?