Hervey Bay and Fraser Island

After a long night on the train we arrived at Maryborough West very early in the morning and caught the coach to Hervey Bay with Adi and toby, leaving Mum, Dad, Lucy and the boys on the train heading for Brisbane. We arrived at the Koala hostel to find Aaron, Sarah, Paul and Lisa already there (they had travelled by coach from Airlie beach). A nice lady let us in our rooms, we dumped our stuff and headed off to explore Hervey bay. We had a wander down the beach and grabbed some lunch on the main street, we all headed back to our rooms for a kip before we visited the local Chinese restaurant for dinner.
We made our way to Palace Backpackers another youth hostel, early the next morning, as our trip to Fraser Island started from there. We all sat in a room and watched some interesting videos on how to drive your 4x4 on sand and not get bitten by dingos. We then got put in to our groups for the next 3 days, we had already requested that TJ, me, Adi, Aaron, Toby, Sarah, Lisa and Paul go together, and as the 4x4 held 8 we had a girl called Lorraine join us, it just happened that she was a petite, red head from Ireland (remind you of any one (Lisa!!). They were like twins, instantly getting on. After all the introductions we hopped in to our 4x4 and travelled about 5 mins to the warehouse where we loaded up all our equipment we needed for the island, then a quick stop at the local supermarket to get food and off to the port to get our ferry.



Tj and i had visited the island before and although we had been given a suggested itinerary, we decided to visit lake McKenzie where a few of us thought it would be fun to jump in to the freezing cold water of the lake, we had a while messing about throwing a football around, then i realised that my wedding ring was missing, 5 days and i had lost it already, so i quickly got my mask and started searching the bottom of the lake with everyone else looking too. Fortunately for me i managed to find it (how lucky???). We decided to have a look around Central station, there wasn’t much there just a few old buildings. By this time we had to head to the main beach to find somewhere to camp for the night before it got dark. We found a spot just off the beach and setup camp, we made dinner and had a few drinks then went to bed as everyone wanted to get up early to see the sunrise.

Day 2

Tj and I missed sunrise as Tj was feeling ill, but the others showed us their photos it looked fantastic. We had breakfast, packed the 4x4 and where back on the beach. I had done all the driving on the first day and Adi was very happy to do the driving. We stopped at Rainbow gorge, it was a bit of a walk to get to the gorge from the beach but it was worth it, we climbed to the top of the sand gorge and took it in turn to roll/run down it.



Lisa rolled down it first and spent the rest of the day trying to get the sand out of everywhere. We walked back to the car and drove on to Eli Creek, the largest creek on the eastern beach of Fraser Island, we spent an hour paddling about before we left for the Maheno shipwreck, in 1935 the ship was being towed from Melbourne to Japan for scrap metal when it was caught in a strong cyclone. A few days later, on July 9th 1935 she drifted ashore and was beached on Fraser Island. During the Second World War the Maheno served as target bombing practice for the RAAF. The ship has since become severely rusted. We spent a while taking photos and looking around the ship wreck. We drove up the remainder of the 75 mile beach to Indian head, a rocky out crop, at the top you can see lots of sealife off the island.



We spent another night camping on the beach, chatting to some of the other travels on the island.

Day 3

The last day on Fraser and Aaron took his turn driving. We had to be back at the ferry by 4pm and we were on the other side of the island with plenty of things to see yet. We started heading towards lake Wabby, the tracks on Fraser are just that, tracks! The sand that makes up the track in some places is much softer and so it is harder to drive the 4x4 and at one point we managed to get stuck for a while but we all jumped out and dug the wheels out and Aaron drove us out of it.

The other problem with the tracks is it can get a bit bumpy, and at points it was that bad that everyone was lifted off their seats. On the way to Wabby we stopped at Lake Allom, which is supposed to be the home to lots of turtles, but after an hour walking round the lake we hadn’t seen an. We got back to the 4x4 and carried on to lake Wabby, which has fantastic view over a huge sand dune and a beautiful green lake at the bottom of it. Then it was time to catch the ferry back to Hervey Bay.