With cruiser and camper primped and preened, food stocked to the roof and two travel worthy children, we waved goodbye to Noosa and headed for the sands of Fraser Island. It was strange being back on the road but straight away we gave a collective sigh of relief and felt that freedom creep back into our bones. Ella and Jake were excited and enthusiastic to be back in the 'big black car' and be towing our house again.
Made our way via Rainbow Beach to Inskip Point, which was beautiful and crawling with 4wd's and families swimming and fishing. Here we boarded the barge to scoot us the 500m across to Fraser Island. The distance from the mainland to the island is shortest from Inskip Point and we had heard that most good beaches and 4WDing was accessed from this end.
As the barge bumped rather awkwardly into the beach on Fraser, we loaded up and after letting our tyre pressures down, took to the beach. Awesome stuff! The beaches are beautiful and although we were a couple of hours off low tide it was still easy enough to negotiate our way north and through some beach streams. The day was grey, but with the raging seas and white sands, it was exhilarating. It was a strange feeling hooning along the beach thinking at any time the fun police were going to come along and tell us to get off the beach. Cool fun.
There is bush camping along certain sections of the eastern beach (which we had already paid a permit for) so we chose a secluded looking spot and tried to find a suitable camp. Our first attempt found us mounting a soft white sund dune that would give any dune from the Simpson desert a run for its money, but the cruiser managed it fine and we found gorgeous grass and sand covered camps, nestled just off the beach behind the first dune. GORGEOUS! We nearly managed to get the trailer and cruiser bogged on our first attempt to position ourselves, but success prevailed.
Setting ourselves on a secluded grassy knoll looking back towards the beach we revelled in our perfect campsite...ahhhhhhh
Our second day still saw grey skies but we decided to do some inland 4WDing to see the three giant lakes and beautiful rainforests. It really is a place of contrasts. We drove 15km or so up the beach, past people fishing which again made me wish I knew something about fishing...sigh... and turned off onto an inland track.
Much to our disgust the inland lakes were inhabited by those wacky foreign tourists who think throwing around giant flourescent beach balls and floating five to a blowup boat is something we all enjoy to see and hear. NOT! So we hightailed it away from the hire cars and backpackers and made for the serenity and isolation of the eastern beach.
Back to the beach we enjoyed the afternoon, although not much sun.
Last night the grey, threatening skies delivered on their promise and opened up. We knew it was coming so it was no great surprise to wake at midnight to hear the rains coming down. The rain has continued non stop through this morning and we are holed up in our camper. A change of camp, as planned today, doesn't seem like such a great idea in this weather. So we will sit it out till we can get back onto the beach.............maybe the next blog will be about the great cup of tea we just had!
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