After Airlie I had a ridiculous 12 hour bus ride through the night to bring me to the town just outside of Fraser Island. At the YHA Fraser, another beautiful little hostel, I ran into an American Guy named Dan who had worked at YHA Perth and knew my old housemate Mya, two small of world traveling in Australia is. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the beach, drinking beer and talking life, spirituality, politics and the such till our jaws were soar, I cannot meet enough cool people they drop from the rafters. The next morning I woke for my two day one night Fraser Island 4w4 tour which was a caravan of three 4w4’s two of which we drove and the front led by our Bogan (ozzy slang for hill billy) yet quite nice guide. Fraser Island is famous not only for its size as a giant Island nature reserve but also for its varying natural beauties, beaches, forests, sand dunes, Eucalyptus and rainwater lakes , wild dingos, and beautiful rocky cliffs.
Did I mention the actual legal highway of the 100 or so km of island is the beach? Everyone pays a hefty fee to get on the island (to make sure there are not to many crazy tourists or ransoms and to preserve its beauty) via a ferry and then when the tide is low everyone cruises to and fro to one of the beautiful hotspots, hikes, and lakes and then cruises back to their campsites or villas on the island when the tide comes in and the road is gone. There are some I would barely call roads going through the jungle that hefty 4w4s can handle, and in our three 4w4 caravan and our 19 person team we went off-roading. Driving on these one lane roads was like mud racing, until you hit the beautiful 8-12 lane beaches and cruised while catching a tune or so at random on the island with almost no transmission reception. My car was a comprise of two Germans(they love to travel oz) two Dutch, two Danes and myself, and after getting one tune on the radio that I claimed was Whitney Houston and was actually Tina Turner, our car name quickly became Team Whitney. This Island is a must visit if you do the east coast because it almost feels like it has a piece of most of the different forms of natural beauty that the world has to offer. We ran through sand dunes that felt like deserts, swam in the Eyucalyptis lake(does amazing stuff for your skin and a rain water lake (I have never seen natural water so clear in all my life) and camped the night in the forest eating great camp food and roasting marshmallows, it felt lovely to camp again.
Just as we were getting ready to leave the Island I ran into my Blond Lady German friends Anya and Isabella again. We bid farewell and I couldn’t believe I had done so much in two days. As soon as I said goodbye to Fraser and got on the bus to continue my trip down south there was my crazy little Swiss friend Lyhn smiling to me from the back of bus, and we laughed and joked till I saw her off a few hour further down the line, did I mention traveling Australia is a small world?
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