Family Invasion and Fraser Island

My family flew into Brisbane the Sunday that I got back from my field trip, and I met up with them the next afternoon after taking a midterm! Busy times. It was fun cramming for finance on the bus ride back from Heron for sure. Anyways, it was awesome to see the parents and Margaret in Australia. It threw me off to see them just show up at the bus stop at UQ, just not used to people from back home showing up right there at my uni. Very cool though. We hung out at Union for a bit with people from my floor and ate lots of raisins (I got a huge shipment of dried fruit mix, hella awesome). They brought Hershey’s kisses too, and the Australians were all very excited about having those (they don’t have them in Australia). We walked around campus a bit and had dinner with one of Mom’s friends that has recently moved to Brisbane. It was a good night.

The next morning, we started off on an excursion to Fraser Island. Our guide picked us up in the morning and we started our drive up the Sunshine Coast to Rainbow Beach, one of the ferry points out to the island. There were 10 people in our group stuffed into a Land Cruiser. We had a 3.5 hour drive up the coast, a 10 minute ferry ride, and then we were driving on the beach on Fraser Island. Fraser is a very cool place, it was probably one of the best places I have been in Australia, there is just so much on the island to do and see. You drive around in 4WD trucks on the beach and on the tracks that go inland through the island. Fraser is the largest sand island in the world, the entire thing is made of sand, but there is so much diversity throughout the whole place. There is a beach around the perimeter, a rainforest in the interior, and many freshwater lakes and creeks, tons of them are crystal clear and absolutely amazing. You can swim in the lakes, but not the ocean, because there are tons of sharks and stingers in the water. The first day, we drove up the coast of 75 Mile Beach (note miles, not kilometers, strange.), and stopped at a creek that you could walk around in. We also got to dig up these clam-like things called pippies that you can smash open and eat right there. They were really good, and we had 3 or 4 of them each (us and a Spanish guy that was in our group), which really surprised our guide, Justin. He said that people normally don’t want to try it at all, and usually don’t like the taste if they do try them. But they were awesome, just really fresh sushi. We also went by a shipwreck off the coast, colored sand dunes, and hiked over sand dunes to Lake Wabby where we went swimming. It was all really cool, the hikes were sweet, the 4WD rides were fun, and the scenery was amazing.

The other people on our tour were a bunch of characters for sure. There was a guy from Spain (Jose), a woman from Finland, and a family of 3 Brazilians (2 parents that only spoke Portuguese visiting their daughter that lives on the Gold Coast). Jose was cool, he was fun to talk to and a really nice guy. Finland was a bitch and a half, she complained about everything, and was really pushy about having everyone else take photos of her with her camera. All she talked about when she wasn’t complaining about the weather or how she didn’t get sleep or any of the other million things that didn’t meet with her Finnish standards was how she was in Australia for a diving competition. We could have done without her, but it was all part of the experience I guess. The Brazilians mostly kept to themselves, as they were all speaking another language, but apparently they were complaining a lot too. At least we couldn’t understand them, so we didn’t have to listen. The father, Ulises, was a hairy fat guy that wore a speedo the whole time we were there, from breakfast to dinner, and refused to wear pants at any time for some reason I do not understand. I made a point to not have to sit near him in the truck, it was quite traumatizing. Our guide joked to him and Jose (that had similarly skimpy swimsuit), that speedos are actually illegal in Australia, and that people who wear them are said to be ‘smuggling budgies’. My mom was pretty amused by that one.

The second day we got up and went on a hike through the rainforest, which was really cool. All of the trees grow in the sand, and there is a creek that goes through the forest that is absolutely silent because there are no rocks in it to disrupt the water. It’s impressive that all the plants grow on this huge mass of sand. We drove to another lake and went swimming there for awhile, it was very beautiful and we were just about the only people there. Some rain clouds looked like they were coming in, so we took another drive to a different part of the island for lunch, where we got to see a lake that was a red/yellow/orange color because ‘tea trees’ grow in the water and have stained it to be like that. After that, we drove back down the beach and headed back to Brisbane. It was a really cool trip, we didn’t see any dingoes, which was too bad (there are a ton of them that live on the island), but we heard that they like to steal things, so maybe it was okay we didn’t run into any because they might have kidnapped Margaret.

Pictures are: Family in the rainforest, Margaret in the rainforest, Mom and I with a huge tree trunk, and a picture of us in one of the lakes that had been stained a dark color by the tea trees.