Day 37: On Fraser Island
I am cheating a little bit with the title of this blog entry, as we will spend all day on the island, and will go back to the main land around 5pm. You will just have to forgive me here. 😉
After sleeping in, we found out that the clouds had all moved away, and that all we could see were blue skies and sunshine! Yay! We quickly threw our stuff into the small bag we packed and jumped into the trusty Jimny. Back to the beach, and back to the shipwreck. It looks even more majestic and mysterious now than yesterday. The tides were still going out, and the wreck was half submerged this morning. I can understand why this is the most visited place on the entire island!
As the high tide occurred today at 07:30, we were not allowed to go out on the beach until 09:30, which meant we could sleep in and relax a bit before heading out. The beach is not wide enough, and in some places the sand has not settled quite yet to be hard enough to be driven on. The drive to the shipwreck this morning was great, and really a fun thing to do. We have outer selves gotten used to the wobbly nature of both the car and the surroundings, and we settled in for the day much more relaxed than we were yesterday.
Right after visiting the Maheno, we drove a little further north, towards The Pinnacles where majestic cliffs of coloured sands built up over the period of many thousands of years were exposed and viewable. The sand on the beach is very yellow, but the sands in this cliff are all colours ranging from white to very dark brown. What a wonderful sight!
We then had to drive about 40kms down south to Eurong Beach Resort, as this was also the gateway to the inland tracks to the barge locations. We arrived at Kingfisher Bay, and the other one is called Wanggoolba Creek, both will go to River Heads. Unfortunately, during our beach drive we haven’t seen any more Dingoes, which means the one we saw yesterday will probably be the only one we’ve seen on Fraser Island. The rest of the island is covered in very dense forests, and wildlife is notoriously hard to see over there. From the resort, we drove to Central Station, where we did a short walk through the rainforest. This site was the main location for all logging activities on the island from the 1860s up to the 1950s. The HQ was moved back then, and all logging eventually only stopped in 1992. They were mainly after tropical hardwoods, as the tropical softwoods were long gone by then.
Lake Birrabeen was the next destination, but it was kind of a downer. The route to it was 15km of the most gruelling road we have had so far, with lots of roots and huge bumps in the road. We even had to go to low gear for a couple of times, for if we didn’t we wouldn’t make it through. Arriving at the lookout on the lake, we found out that the lookout was pretty much fully overgrown, which meant the view of lake itself was almost complete obstructed by small trees in between us and the water. Oh well, off to Lake McKenzie then.
lake McKenzie is the most popular lake on the island. It is also the biggest one. It had really clear fresh water, and even some sandy beaches. As it is not connected to the ocean, there are no crocodiles, and it is safe to swim. The temperature today wasn’t quite right, so we didn’t, but a few locals did and they seemed to have a great time. 🙂
It was by then time to head for our barge, and so we went to Kingfisher bay, as instructed by the guy at Aussie Trax. But, we found out the hard way that we weren’t supposed to be at Kingfischer Bay, but at Wanggoolba Creek for the other barge. Both leave at 5pm, and finding that out at 16:48 is too late to do something about it. Auch. Luckily, as we only have a very small car, we could be fitted on the boat as an extra, and we were finally heading back for the mainland. Phew!
Tomorrow, we head back from Hervey Bay to the Glasshouse Mountains for our next to final leg of our journey.
