Fraser Island Day One

We left the hostel at Rainbow Beach early to catch the ferry across to the island. The tour we went on is called a tag along tour. There is a lead vehicle and driver followed by three other vehicles. Each of us on the tour are put into groups and we take turns driving on the island. There are hardly any roads whatsoever on the island, so it is mostly driving in sand. Our group for our tag along vehicle included Harry, Olivia, Lauren, Mike, Myself and Josephine, Amanda and Madeline from Sweden. As we waited for everyone to get onto the ferry, our group climbed up onto a look out deck to take pictures. Just before we left, a group of dolphins were frolicking in front of the ferry, along our route to Fraser Island. A great way to start and adventure.

When we first got onto the island, within about 5 minutes or so, our vehicle got stuck. We went of the tracks in the deep sand on a turn and buried the wheels. Our whole group got out to push the car. It was much he same as being stuck in snow, but much warmer. We were stuck pretty bad and the lead driver had to come help us out and another group in the vehicle behind us came to help push our truck. We finally go unstuck and were on our way. It was a great team building event and we nick named ourselves Team Awesome.

We drove along the beach and some trails in the jungle until we got to a section with pavement and shops where we stopped to have lunch. We saw a dingo on the beach along the way. The lead vehicle dropped the trailer off with all our food to be picked up after our next trip. We drove along one of the bumpiest paths. It was actually a lot of fun. It seemed to more bumps we hit, the more we laughed. We had our iPods along, so we had good tunes as we drove through the jungle on the sandy island. This route took us to Lake Mackenzie.

Lake Mackenzie is a perch lake. This means that the lake resulted from rain water being trapped on the sand, becoming a lake. It was amazing to see how much rain water had been trapped since the lake was a fair size. The water is supposed to be very healing since it has a slightly acidic pH and is full of eucalyptus and tea tree oil from the surrounding trees. The water was very refreshing and still warm. We spent the afternoon sunbathing and swimming here. The sand was most silica based and was very soft. Geoff, our lead driver, told us that many jewellers will come to use the sand to polish jewelry because of the grain of the sand.

We drove back to the rest stop to pick up the trailer to head to the camp site. As we went over the metal grate to keep the dingos out, the trailer broke. We got the help of another tag along tour group to come get our supplies to take to the camp site. Since our food was supplied, it was assigned to our groups. Our group cooked our meal together and spent the night around a camp fire and drinking goon (boxed wine drink). I ended up teaching some of the other people in our big group some yoga moves. The campsite we were staying at is on aboriginal land and is the only place on Fraser Island where you can have a camp fire. It was also surrounded by a fence to keep the dingos out.