First thing Jared said to me when they left, "um, I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but...I hope the poles to the tent are in your backpack". Oh Jesus. Jared had left the tent with Amy and Damon when he left Australia, and I was supposed to pick it up for us. Apparently, none of us were aware that Jared had taken the pole out of the tent bag, so all I took was the bag with the actual tent material...oh and the spikes. Well, c'est la vie, and such is our travelling. Our very first destination, Fraser's Island, we were staying in a hostel for one night, so there was no mad rush to find a tent.
We had originally attempted to purchase things for the trip separately, which we later decided against, so we were on different flights out to Brisbane. Mine actually left first, but sat on the runway for ages, so arrived after him. We try to do a lot of things DIY, so I had booked a rental car for a few places; Jared informed me that his driver's license was expired, and I would be doing all the driving, no bigs. We picked up our rental car, where the guys scared the bezeejesus out of me by saying everything would be great, just don't drive between Rockhampton and Mackay after dark because you WILL hit a kangaroo and roll the car and die. Fantastic, seeing as how that was exactly what we planned to do. Anyway, we got the car, and started north to Hervey Bay. The drive was an easy 3.5 hours, and we got in just after the sun went down. We checked into our hostel, got ready for bed, and hit the hay.
The next morning was a semi-early start. We had breakfast and coffee from the stockpile of food Jared had amassed from his last month in Afghanistan, and were ready for our 7am pickup to go to Fraser Island, the world's largest island made completely of sand. I had booked a full day tour, which ended at about 5pm, and the time between 7am and 5pm was almost entirely painful. Since having done this trip, I heard from a lot of other backpackers regarding their experience; apparently, I chose the wrong type of tour. We were shuttled to a ferry and across to the island where we were picked up by a big tour bus...red flag. Honestly, the tour guide was grasping at straws. The only kinda cool thing was Lake MacKenzie, but only because we walked to an area of the beach where there was no another soul. Neither of us had been on a totally deserted beach, so that was neat. Next we had lunch and went to a "ship wreck", as they attempt to sell it, but it was really just a ship that had been in the process of being towed to Japan went it's tow cord broke and it ended up on the beach, nothing to see here folks. Then we went to the "colored sands", which were really just sand that looked like different colors of...well sand, like tan, a little darker tan, a little lighter tan blah blah. On the way back to the ferry, we learned alllll about the native trees to the island and how water was naturally filtered thru the sand...needless to say there was a lot of bus napping. Apparently, the way to do Fraser's Island is with a 2 day tour, 3 days being too much. From what I'm hearing it's really just the driving on the sand that seems to be the coolest part of those tours, so either way, I'm ok with not having done the 2 day tour. We finished off the tour and were dropped back at the hostel, right after the sun went down.
I had emailed our next destination, Whitsundays and Whitehaven beach, to see if we could rent a tent from the water taxi company, and when we got back to the hostel, found out we could in fact rent a tent, so off we went. For the worst.drive.ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment