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Australia: Fraser Island

Mark drinking billy tea by Lake Benaroon
Enjoying a refreshing cup of billy tea in the campsite at Lake Benaroon

The bus trip south from Magnetic Island to Hervey Bay was interminable, the excitement broken only by a visit to Gin Gin, where a two-tyre wheel came off a truck as it pulled into the roadhouse, shooting past the picnic table I was occupying and miraculously bouncing through the neighbouring caravan park without hitting anything. As I helped the relieved trucker to roll his unexpected deposit back to his semi-trailer, I realised that even expensive monsters like that have mechanical problems, and for once I was glad not to have the stress associated with car ownership. Sure, they're well worth the money in terms of travel quality, but a lightweight backpack needs precious little maintenance, and there's a lot to be said for that.

Getting to the Island

A goanna hanging on to a tree
A goanna hanging on to a tree for dear life

Fraser Island is a long – actually, a very long island that is about 120km from north to south, and only about 15-20km wide, on average. The west coast, facing the mainland, is a sandfly-infested mangrove swamp, but the east coast, which is swept by north-flowing currents and trade winds, is one big, beautiful beach; they call it Seventy-Five Mile Beach, rather imaginatively. Having studied the maps and trails, I decided to attempt a long walk, taking in the central area of the island, as well as a fair stretch of beach. If you imagine the trail being a lower-case 'd', then I started on the left-hand edge of the d's circle, headed south and round to the beach, then north up the beach (the d's stalk) for some distance, eventually turning round and walking back down the beach, to cut back into the centre via the top of the d's circle, and back to square one. This meant I could tailor the walk to be as long or short as I liked by altering the distance walked up the beach (i.e. the height of the d's stalk). It turned out to be a brilliant route.

Day 1: Central Station

A typical Fraser Island road near Pile Valley
A typical Fraser Island road near Pile Valley, lined with satinay

The first day on the island, I took it easy. The secret of a long tramp is not to rush it; as you get further into the expedition, the pack gets lighter, you get fitter, you get used to sleeping on the ground and it generally gets easier to walk all day. However, the first days are always tough, and this was no exception. From the ferry, the only track leading into the island is the road, and with Fraser Island being entirely made out of sand (with only three small outcrops of bedrock on the whole island), the road walking is very hard, as you're basically traipsing through dune systems. The 8km walk to Central Station – a grand-sounding name for nothing more than a ranger station, toilet block and campground – took me a good couple of hours, and I just collapsed into my tent on arrival. I have to admit I was a little worried; if all the walking was going to be this tough, this was going to be a very long visit.

Day 2: Lake Benaroon

A dingo raiding a tent at Central Station
A dingo raiding a tent at Central Station

Day 2 was when I saw my first dingo. Every silver lining has its cloud and every politician his perversion, and it seems that every Queensland island has its problem child: on Hinchinbrook it's the rat, and on Fraser it's the dingo. Dingoes are wild dogs, and the ones on Fraser Island are thought to be the purest breed left, due to isolation from interbreeding with other dogs.

Into the Bush

Lake Birrabeen
Lake Birrabeen and a local inhabitant

I decided to take the walking as it came, and headed south from Central Station and through the centre of the island to the first of the many freshwater lakes that dominate the geography of Fraser Island. The walk took me through more gum forest, with patches of rainforest, and I discovered a tree that was new to me, the scribbly gum. Like most gum trees the trunk is pure white, but the scribbly gum gets its names from the zigzag shapes all over its trunk, which are formed by burrowing insects. On first inspection it looks like some artistic vandal has come along with a sharp knife and scribbled on the trunks, in much the same pattern as you make when trying to get a stubborn biro to work, but after a while you notice the variety in the work, and it's quite hypnotic. Combined with the hiker's high – a condition that combines the exhaustion of hiking with the meditative hypnotic effect of regular plod-plod-plod, and which sends you off into a whole new plane of thought as you trudge through the bush – it proved quite a pleasant experience.

Lake Benaroon
Lake Benaroon
An umbrella inside a tent
The umbrella that saved me from a soaking at Lake Benaroon

Day 3: Perched Lakes

Lake Boomanjin
Lake Boomanjin

Day 3 awoke by turning over, splashing into the puddle pooled on either side of my roll mat, and realising that the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Like every challenging bush experience, there's the sunny spell after the storm, and I swear I was high on life as I draped my belongings out on the tea trees strung along the shores of Lake Benaroon. You get wet, but you dry out, and packing everything into plastic bags had saved most of my belongings from a fate worse than drowning; the Swiss couple, however, hadn't been so lucky, as a dingo had come along at four in the morning and ripped a hole in their tent while looking for food, and I counted myself lucky that he hadn't decided to rip a hole in mine. Not that it would have made any difference to the general effectiveness of the bloody thing...

Strange coloured sand on the shores of Lake Boomanjin
The sandy shores of Lake Boomanjin are beautifully coloured
Gerowweea Creek
Gerowweea Creek flows out onto the beach just north of Dilli Village

Seventy-Five Mile Beach

Seventy-Five Mile Beach
Seventy-Five Mile Beach

Going from closed canopy to a beach that stretches as far as the eye can see is a shock. The beach is very flat – when the tide goes out, it goes out a long way – and the sea is violent, to say the least (you don't swim off the east coast of Fraser Island, because if the rip tide doesn't get you, the sharks will). My walk had changed from beautiful bush to breathtaking beach, and it's this sort of contrast that makes Fraser Island such a great place for walking.

Day 4: Beer on the Beach

A strange beastie on the beach
A strange beastie on the beach

Walking on the beach was easier than I had anticipated. Luckily, when the tide's out, there's plenty of firm sand near the surf where you can walk at a regular, easy pace, something that isn't possible in dune walking (in comparison, dune walking is a complete nightmare). I'd made good time on the beach on the previous day, but as day 4 broke, my feet were still in a bad way.

Eli Creek
Eli Creek

Day 5: Waves, Wrecks and Dunes

Strange sand on Seventy-Five Mile Beach
Strange sand on Seventy-Five Mile Beach

I designated day 5 as a rest day, both because I had planned for an extra day somewhere along the line, and because my feet were quite, quite buggered. Despite it being a rest day, I wandered north up the beach for some 6.5km, but this time without a pack or shoes; it was then that I realised the best way to walk on the beach is with what the Aussies call 'beach shoes': bare feet.

Mark's shadow on Seventy-Five Mile Beach
Alone on Seventy-Five Mile Beach, all you have for company is your shadow

The Maheno

The wreck of the Maheno
The wreck of the Maheno

About 3.5km north of Eli Creek lies the wreck of the Maheno. The Maheno was a luxury passenger ship that was sold off to the Japanese for scrap in 1935, but as it was being towed north towards its new home, a cyclone blew it onto the beach on Fraser Island where it still rests and rusts today. It's a weird sight that you can see for a good hour's walk to the north and south, and at low tide you can get right up to the wreck and, if you ignore the warning signs, walk round inside it.

The Pinnacles

The Pinnacles
The wonderful colours of the Pinnacles

A couple of kilometres north of the Maheno are the Pinnacles, the northernmost point that I reached on the island. As a destination, if a tramp such as this can be said to have a destination, the Pinnacles were a marvel. Fraser Island is famous not only for its fairly unique environment – rainforest thriving on nothing but sand – but also for its actual sand, which has built up over such a long time that it gives geologists the same feelings that Pirelli calendars give car mechanics. For these reasons Fraser Island is a World Heritage area2 and the layered coloured sands of the Pinnacles are a vivid reminder of its deserved standing among natural phenomena. Imagine a combination of Purnululu and Nambung, and you're not far off the rainbow-coloured spires of the Pinnacles; stick in a blue sky peppered with surreal cloud formations, and it's a postcard photographer's delight. It certainly made a worthy and fitting destination for my rest day's walk.

The Pinnacles
The Pinnacles

Day 6: Back Down the Beach

Rainbow Gorge
Rainbow Gorge

After spending the remainder of my rest day watching tourists at Eli Creek and planes landing and taking off on the beach – it's not lonely on the beach at Fraser, I can tell you – I turned in early in preparation for a long old walk back down the beach. Day 6 started with a 7.30am dip in Eli Creek – a refreshing experience with no tourists around and morning birdsong erupting round me – and before long I'd struck camp and started wandering south, this time wearing only my beach shoes. My feet had benefited hugely from a day without hiking boots, and the walking was tiring but easy enough, and to my surprise I got to Rainbow Gorge, the halfway point, by mid-morning.

Day 7: Inland Lakes and Diana

Mark sitting on a beach
The dunes of Seventy-Five Mile Beach are great for sitting and thinking

Day 7, my last full day on the island, arrived after I'd slept the sleep of the dead. Heading inland towards the west, I arrived at Lake Wabby at 8am, a time well before the arrival of any tourists. Lake Wabby is an interesting place; it's the deepest lake on the island, and it's slowly being encroached by a massive sandblow that's moving about three metres a year into the lake. It's a serene place, with its green water and surrounding forest, and after a refreshing stop, I struck into the forest in the direction of Lake McKenzie, which I reached without further ado after some 14km.

Lake Wabby
Lake Wabby is gradually losing its fight with the encroaching dunes

Day 8: Back to Hervey Bay

Basin Lake
Basin Lake

The next day, day 8 and the last day of my trip to k'gari, I donated my crappy cooker and crusty billy to Vince, who needed it more than me and promised to give them a good home; and after a dip in Lake McKenzie, I wound my way through the bush to Basin Lake, and from there out to the ferry terminal. There I sweet-talked a Sydney couple into giving me a lift from the ferry to Hervey Bay, which they gladly did, and as I nursed my feet after their 110km of walking, I showered, washed my clothes and sunk back into the luxuries of the western world.


1 Only in Australia could this happen. Castlemaine, brewers of XXXX, the main beer in Queensland, have just come up with the next marketing coup in beer consumerism. Aware that Australians plough through cans of beer like a steroid-fuelled bull in a Wedgwood store, they've come up with the ultimate drink-delivery system, the wide-mouthed can. Research obviously showed that conventional can technology didn't allow beer to be poured down the throat as quickly as desired, so XXXX cans now come with a double-sized hole in the top, so a can can be downed in half the time it used to take. Sceptical, I tried my first wide-mouthed can on Seventy-Five Mile Beach, and it worked; surely the fact that the beer disappeared quicker than ever before had nothing to do with the fact that I'd just walked 14.5km down a burning beach. It's another great Aussie invention, and I'm sure it will soon be everywhere.

2 World Heritage areas, like the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian pyramids, are protected for future generations to enjoy by the United Nations World Heritage Committee; they are deemed to be places that, if altered, would be an irreplaceable loss to the planet. Australia is particularly rich in World Heritage sites; there's the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, Uluru, Tasmania's western wilderness, the wet tropics of northern Queensland, Shark Bay, Fraser Island, Lord Howe Island and the Willandra Lakes, and the list is growing all the time.