Look inside, look inside your tiny mind and look a bit harder...

Song: "Guess Who Batman (F You Very Much)" by Lily Allen

April 15th

Mommy's Birthday
U.S. Tax Day

So Day 3 of our Fraser Island tour started out well. Jeff took us to the Dragon Tree, which, well, looks like a dragon.

From Fraser Island

And for the first time in ages, we had blue skies!!

From Fraser Island

Jeff also told us about the scribbly gum trees, which are eucalyptus trees that have little scribble marks on them from inscriptor moths, or scribbly moths.

From Fraser Island

Then we went to Lake Wabby, which was one of my favorite lakes on the island:

From Fraser Island

Here you can see the ocean, a sand dune, the forest and a lake all in one picture.

From Fraser Island

And despite this sign,

From Fraser Island

we did run down the sand dune into the lake anyway...


Glorious.

After the lake, Jeff talked to us about "bush tucker" or "forest food" in American. This berry tasted like oregano, which Jeff pronounced "or-eh-GAH-no" instead of "or-EG-eh-no" like I'm used to. Did you like those phonetics there?

From Fraser Island

Note: My macro mode wasn't cooperating with me (user error) on half of this trip, apologies for the strange camera focus.

When we got back onto the "highway" we saw a plane land on the "runway." Pretty neat stuff.

From Fraser Island

We then went to our last destination of the trip: yet another lake.
It was very pretty. Bernie wanted some "I'm in a field by a lake" pictures.

From Fraser Island

Jeff went snorkeling and looking for turtles while the rest of us swam around. It was really nice.

From Fraser Island

We left Fraser Island after 3 long days there, and took the ferry back to Hervey Bay. The ferry ride provided me with the greatest sunset pictures of the trip.

From Fraser Island

From Fraser Island

From Fraser Island

From Fraser Island

From Fraser Island

From Fraser Island

Yay sunset.

After my crazy picture taking, we took a taxi from the ferry to go pick up our car from the rental agency. We finally got the car! Bernie bravely got us out of town, where we got mildly lost due to my crappy map, and we had to ask for directions to Bundaberg (our next stop) from an Aussie guy outside of Woolworth's, and believe it or not, we got to Bundaberg, no problem. We ran into the world's creepiest bug on the way:

From Bundaberg!

We stayed at Oscar's Motel, which looked sketchy, but not sketchier than your average motel. It actually ended up being one of our best places for accommodation over the trip. The girls were really sweet and let me indulge in my Lost obsession that evening, and then we went to bed. :)

This is the rhythm of my life...

Song: "Rhythm of the Night" by Corona

April 14th

After yesterday's dreary weather, we started off our Tuesday with fairly low expectations for the day. I was pleasantly surprised with how the day panned out.

We started at an overlook where you could see a typical "sand blow" which is like a sand dune which moves drastically based on the wind. It was early, but I managed to take a picture:

From Fraser Island

We couldn't go to the next part of our tour because we couldn't drive on the highway due to a cyclone hitting the island a month earlier. Now when people say "highway" on Fraser Island they mean this:

From Fraser Island

Yes, the beach. Seventy five mile beach actually. Yet again, Australia is calling beaches by their length in miles not kilometers, because 120.7 kilometer beach doesn't have a great ring to it. But the beach is their highway, and since the cyclone hit, part of their highway now looked like this:

From Fraser Island

No fun to drive on, not even for a giant 4WD buggy. Oh, and the highway was also an aircraft runway.

From Fraser Island

No worries.

We left the beach and went to our plan B tour spot of the day, which was a lovely sand blow area around Rainbow Gorge. In my opinion, it was pretty gorgeous, even with the weather. Our tour guide Jeff was a great sport all day. Here's Jeff doing typical tourist poses on the way to the gorge.

From Fraser Island

I was a bit ahead of the other girls I was traveling with, and I got this really cool picture of them walking up the hill. Look how tiny they are!

From Fraser Island

And then we got to the sand cliff (or maybe that was the gorge); anyway, it was awesome. It's hard to express how neat this was, but the sand had blown into the forest, so it was covering everything below the canopy of half of this section of trees. And it was really really steep. I jumped off of the cliff into the sand, and slid down it on a plastic bag. Super fun.

Here's me sitting on the edge.

From Fraser Island

Some people from our trip after jumping down:

From Fraser Island

Erik climbing up after sliding into the trees:

From Fraser Island

It was a really neat place.

On the way back to the bus, I took a picture of this awesome red mushroom that grows around here:

From Fraser Island

Here is a cool sand crab I found by the bus. He blends in really well:

From Fraser Island

Our next stop was another lake. I got out here, without the intention of swimming, and instead ventured on an exploration into the woods. It was good fun, and I ran into another tour group and followed them back to my own on my return. When we got back we had cookies and muffins, which were my favorite snack break on the trip.

We then made it back to camp, where we got cleaned up for dinner and the chaos of the Dingo Bar. I decided to take a picture of the inside of our freezer, where a million ants were falling into the crack and freezing to death:

From Fraser Island

Anyway, to the Dingo Bar.

From Fraser Island

Happy hour was amusing. Bernie and I got B-52s, which were pretty delicious. Look at the layers! Yay properties of liquids!

From Fraser Island

We had a great evening at the Dingo Bar, and Bernie and I stayed for awhile with our Austrian friends Olivia and Sabine. We out-danced the Dutch girl who was getting on our nerves, and danced with the bartenders, who had the dances down to the song "Rhythm of the Night." If you ever want to be entertained, get a group of people to watch that music video, and do every dance move in it.

If you be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal...

Song: "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon

April 13th

We left the hostel early in the morning and headed off to our Fraser Island tour. One of the guys from the hostel, Shanil, was on our trip as well. We had an interesting bus ride to the ferry.

Oh, and I forgot a towel. I was going to bring two. That's what happens when you oversleep alarms. I bought one at the ferry station.

Today was a very rainy day, the rainiest of all our travels. It was raining pretty heavily on our ride across the water to Fraser Island, which is the largest sand island in the world.

Our tour guide's name was Jeff and he was a lot of fun, even with the terrible weather. "It's liquid sunshine" and "I just checked the weather report and the weather is going to be great today...in Perth" and other ridiculous comments kept our spirits up as best as possible.

We walked through a gorgeous rainforest and saw a beautiful lake called Lake McKenzie. It would have been more glorious in the sun, but even in the dreary weather it was beautiful. The coolest thing about the island is that all of the vegetation - and there was a ton of it - grew in the sand. Jeff tried to explain how this works, something about a mineral coating on the darker sand, anyway it was neat.

Also, apparently Fraser Island is home to a ton of dingoes. Yes, the baby-taking kind. We didn't see any, sadly.

After our tour through the day, we came back to our accommodation, which was similar to the hostel we stayed in except there were free towels and soap. Classy. We then ate dinner, and hit up the Dingo Bar, which is conveniently located right next to dinner. While waiting for the Dingo Bar's happy hour, a group of us went back to where we were staying and played an excellent game that Olivia taught us where everyone in the group has to turn around and take the ugliest picture of themselves possible, then the group picks the people with the prettiest pictures and they have to drink. My face wasn't ugly enough, so that was me and Sabine this time around. It was quite fun and it was an interesting way to meet our neighbors.

We had some pitcher of blue something at happy hour. It was not the best drink ever, but it was relatively cheap and cool colored. The Dingo Bar also played music videos all night long, and for the second time in our trip (but not the last) we heard Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" which is a definitely favorite of Bernie's. Good times.

We ended the evening relatively early because we had to get up relatively early the next morning. Now that I think about it, we rarely ever slept in on this trip.

I only slept an eighth of the day away instead of half the day away in Dad time. :)