Fraser Island -- Sarah and Naomi's forum of coolness

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Date Posted: 16:28:30 07/10/03 Thu
Author: NomiMcBomi
Subject: Fraser Island

Wow, Fraser Island seems so long ago now... but I'll tell you what I remember. For those of you who don't know, Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world, and an extremely popular tourist destination on the east coast of australia.

We were originally going to do a 2day/3night self drive camping safari on Fraser, which seems to be the activity of choice amongst backpackers. The way that works is you rent a 4 wheel drive vehicle and camping gear with 10 other backpackers, and take off the explore the island on your own.

We decided however that camping at this time of year sounded rather cold, and we didn't really want to try and deal with making decisions with so many other people. Also, we figured if we took a guided tour we could learn a lot more about the natural history of the island (which is quite appealing to us, seeing as we're such big learning channel fans!!) So we signed up for a 2 day guided safari, which included all meals and accomodation... it actually ended up being quite a similar price to the self guided one.

I think in the end we were very glad to have chosen the guided tour. The food was yummy, the accomodation was much warmer than tents, and the guy was able to tell us so many interesting facts about the island! It's quite an amazing place. It's entirely a sand island (except for a small chunk of rock at the headland), but it has huge rainforests growing in the middle of it. It supports a large variety of different forest types. When we were driving along through the tracks it seemed like the scenery outside changed dramatically every 5 minutes. The guide knew a lot about the different types of plants, and was able to tell us how the aboriginals used to turn them into food. (the island used to be inhabited by around 2000 aboriginals, before the crazy white men came and messed around with things).

We drove all over the island in the 2 days, always on sand tracks (which is what the road system is). The "highway" was the big main beach. It was pretty neat zooming up along the beach, looking at the view. We spotted some humpback whales breaching, a couple of dingos, and a whole lot of cool looking birds.

We got to swim in a beautiful stream, and hiked over sanddunes to get to a lake for some more swimming. Now seeing as I am such a smart girl, I decided that it would be a good idea to drop my wallet somewhere on the sanddunes and not notice until we were driven way out of the area. I was pretty annoyed with myself about that. Luckily on the boat back from the island our tour guide got a call from the ranger station saying that somebody had turned my wallet in. Apparently this guy had gone to hotels all over the island to try and see if I had been staying there! I wish I could thank him :) :) The next day one of the tour guides from our company picked my wallet up from the island and delivered it directly to me at our hostel. I was one lucky girl! Thankyou world!!!

We got along really well with the other people on our tour and had a nice evening chatting with them after our dinner on the island.

I think that's about it for Fraser, you can see how beautiful it was when we get our pictures developed.

Love Love!!!!

NomiNomiFooFooNose

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