Fraser - Some sights

Thursday 13th July

So all good things come to an end and with a heavy heart I upped stumps to Hervey Bay and a trip to Fraser Island. I’d heard lots of weird and wonderful stories about the best way to see Fraser, ranging from booking through an Agent who then teams you up with a number of other people for a Fraser self-drive, where you drove yourselves, camped out and prepared your own food etc. This was my preferred option until someone let slip that they’d endured a nightmare trip where the group consisted of young lads whose apparent sole aim was to get as drunk and stoned as possible, with no consideration for sharing the driving, cooking or anything else. I really wanted an easy weekend where everything would be done for me and so opted for the guided tour, in this case the Fraser Island Tour Company. I’d also heard that Hervey was pretty chocker as well and so took the precaution of advance booking a caravan site – being told I was ‘lucky’ to get the last one! A now familiar line and, I began to suspect, a favoured Queensland way of generating an image of busyness.

The drive up was fairly uneventful and with the exception of the dubious distinction of getting lost in Maryborough, I arrived in Hervey mid-afternoon and what a disappointing looking town it is – basically just a main street and the usual collection of high street names and tourist info places. The Caravan site was on the beach, which was a bonus of sorts but the weather had taken a turn for the worse and the Aussie version of a pea-souper was on its way in. As it started to piss down again, I turned in for the night ready for an early start on Friday at 6.45 – eek.

Friday 14th July

I woke up with my mood much improved and met the bus for 6.45. This impressive looking off-road vehicle pulled up and it reminded me of the Russian Uaz’s that we used in Siberia – rugged and reliable off-road vehicles with 5 foot diameter wheels! Great fun to travel in too – so was already looking forward to it. Our guide was a lad called Steve who seemed full of beans – goes with the job I guess and after collecting the remainder of the travellers, we mooched off for a 2 day – 1 night tour. Accessing the ferry was fun, as one of the self-drive Landcruisers in front of us had 8 young lads in – 2 up the front and 6 in the back. The 6 in the back had already cracked open their case of beer – it was 8am. I was glad I didn’t take a chance on a self-drive!

The ferry crossing was uneventful and we were the first to disembark on Fraser and promptly got bogged down in the soft sand! After a run up, we were through and on our way. The first thing that strikes you about Fraser is again how green it is. There are tropical rainforests on this Island for Gods-sake and it’s composed almost entirely of rock and sand!

Steve, our guide, was a font of knowledge and we were introduced to scribbly gums, bark eucalypt, spine grasses etc – I should’ve taken notes because it was both interesting and detailed. The most interesting thing was how the Australian flora relies, RELIES, on bush fires to regenerate. In fact, a lot of the bushes and grasses need the heat generated in a bush fire to actually germinate and open the seed pods – I mean, that’s specialisation! One of the tree’s even sheds its bark to aid the bush fires when they start!

This little beaut is very useful, called 'spear grass', or 'black boys', the Stem is used as a spear shaft by Aboriginals, the top section contains the seeds which only germinate when the heat from a bush fire helps them along, but you can use the seeds for eating. The grassy section has a lot of carbohydrate in its stem which you can eat. Jaysus, I sound like Ray Bloody Mears!!

Our first stop was a bit of an unscheduled one to help another tour bus with a flat tyre – you’d have thought driving on sand…! So out we hopped and had a look around. I saw a small huntsman spider scrambling through the bush but it was so well camoflaged, the camera wouldn’t pick it up to focus on it. :-0(

This fella is a scribbly gum and sheds it's bark to aid the bush fires. You can use the bark as.... paper! woo hoo!

Heading off again, we started to move into a rainforest area with some very tall and wide trees. Fraser used to be a logging area but is now conserved but the downside is that most of the larger tree’s are now logged. Mind you, there are still some pretty impressive specimens. Further down the track, another tour bus needed help and so we walked a mile or so along the road through the forest, with our tour bus picking us up later. The rainforest is something to behold. The amount of strangler vines was also a surprise. These parasites grow up a host tree and spread their canopy above the host tree’s, cutting off the sunlight. Over time, the strangler fig, feeding off the host tree, grows larger, eventually enclosing the trunk of the host. Coupled with being starved of sunlight, the host dies, rots and after time (3-400 years), there is a hollow inside the strangler fig that you can actually swing a cat in. Brutal environment!

Out on the other side of the Island, we were heading across to the far beach where we would be seeing a fresh water creek (4.5 million litres of freshwater per hour), a famous shipwreck, Indian Heads, champagne pools and lunch in there somewhere as well!

Lunch at the Cathedral Beach Resort was an excellent buffet affair. I’d been told by the guide, Steve, that as I was on my own, I’d be bunking with another lad who was also alone. This turned out to be Tom, who I got chatting to over lunch. Dead nice lad, very mild mannered and easy going, he had just graduated and was travelling for 3 months before heading back to the real world! I was quite glad of the chance to chat to someone, so the poor fella had to put up with me for the rest of the day! He seemed to bear up well though!

The afternoon was taken up with Eli Creek, which you can walk down – very refreshing - and then off to Indian Heads, so named as Cook saw the first indigenous natives on the headland there. It turns out that the natives were removed from the Island following a number of clashes between them and the white loggers, culminating in the murder of 2 whites by the Aboriginals followed by a reprisal that saw 75-odd aboriginal men, women and children herded up and driven off the cliffs at Indian Heads. Those that didn’t jump were clubbed and shot to death. Our guide told us that there are now no genetically pure Aboriginals left from Fraser, seeing as the remainder were moved inland onto reserves set aside for Aboriginals. It’s a shocking story, but you don’t get any perspective, not least as there are no Aboriginal tourist reserves to visit. That said, they are trying to develop a resort that you can stay at and visit to see how they survived but it was closed when we passed. Steve added that he believes, in time, Fraser will be returned to the Aboriginals but it begs the question as to who will have it as there are no originals Fraserites left.

Indian Heads is a lovely vantage point, looking over the Pacific. We saw a pair of white bellied sea eagles training their young baby to fish. It was quite funny seeing the baby swoop down to the sea, misjudge the distance and wipe out spectacularly in the waves! The parents circled overhead screaming at it and eventually, the baby managed to fly back up for another bash!

This time of year is the Humpback migration where they travel North past Fraser and after 10-15 minutes of watching, you could see a number of Whales breaching and blowing. At one point there were 4 Whales in a North-South line breaching one after the other, approximately 1 km apart. A great sight and my first experience of them. Unfortunately, they were too far away to capture with the digital. Sniff!

We saw a dingo on the way back, my first sighting in the wild – there are apparently 150 of them on the Island and they’v been known to be quite aggressive towards humans in the past looking for food. A 9 year old boy was killed in 2001 by a pack on Fraser so I guess that Lindy Chamberlains dingo wasn’t so innocent after all!

That night we repaired to Cathedral Beach for dinner and again the food was top notch. We stopped off at a shop on the way where some people paid 50 bucks for a crate of 24. Ouch! I have to say, the camping facilities were excellent and the beds were just the comfiest things. Best of all though, we just kicked back while the food was prepared. There were some self-drives camping nearby and were looking very haggard as they set their tents up and began cooking. A few of them also began partying and they were going strong when I turned in at about 11pm! Tom had said that one of the camps were where some friends of his had camped – he’d met them at Airlie Beach on one of the boat trips. A group of Irish and they were definitely partying! There was something about the way he referred to one of the girls that made me raise an eyebrow, but he didn’t divulge any more so my curiosity had to wait!

Saturday 15th July

An early start and a fantastic brekkie and we were on our way. Today we were looking at Frasers inland lakes and the sand blows that were travelling across the island. Fraser is listed as a World Heritage site for being one of the only sand islands in the world, for having half of the worlds perched freshwater lakes and for the rainforests. 3 out of 4 on the Heritage list ain’t bad. And you wouldn’t know it unless you were here!

It was a corking sunny morning as we walked for about an hour to get to one lake, which we then went swimming in. After that, we were off to the world’s highest perched dune lake, which was nice to have a stroll around. It was also here that Tom me up with his Irish friends and I began to see what Tom was thinking as the girl he knew was HOT! She was all excited and girly at seeing Tom, so there is some mileage there! Waytago mate!

Like all things, they end though and too soon we were heading back to the ferry. By this time, as a group we’d all clicked and so I’d canvassed a few people about beers in Hervey and there were a few takers so a good night looked in the offing!

And so it was off to the ubiquitous Irish Bar for a bangers and mash supper and a few sherbets. Initially, just Tom, myself, a Canadian lass Laine and a German lass Babett turned up – so we had plenty of time to shoot the breeze. I’d just finished the book ‘Men are from Mars, omen are from Venus’ and passed it onto Tom for study purposes! I also gave him my ‘E for Ecstasy’ book, a great read if I say so myself! Chatting with Babett, it turns out that she’s also heading North, travelling by train, so I passed on my number and e-mail address in case she wanted a lift anywhere. I mentioned I was planning on seeing the ‘Town of 1770’, which she couldn’t get to by train, so I figured she may give me a call, which would be nice.

After time, the rest of the gang turned up and we had a very enjoyable evening, not least debating the pro’s and con’s of the ‘Men are from Mars….’ book. The girls rubbished it, but I thought it was OK. Actually, the book I’d most enjoyed which provided a revealing insight into chix was ‘The Bride stripped bare’ by N. J Gemmel, but it was too much to get into there! After hitting a nightclub, chatting with Tom he revealed he was staying another night to meet the Irish girls from Fraser – top drawer mate, hope the book comes in handy – drop me an e-mail and give a status report – I think it’ll be great news!