My arrival on Rainbow Beach marked an incredible ten days without drinking even the slightest drop of Alcohol and i couldn't overstate how much better i felt for it. Much more energy, a normal sleeping pattern, colour in my face for a change and all round just a feeling well. While cleaning my teeth a random thought popped in my head that it was a year to the day that the series of events begun that led me to going travelling occurred. It's quite frightening how fast a year can tick over but i did take great delight about how much better things are on 1/4/10 compared to 1/4/10, can't complain with the surroundings either. Maybe it all had to do with just my massive Lennon phase at the moment and especially the words in his Lennon Remembers Rolling Stone interview (everyone really should get that podcast from iTunes), I could listen to him repeat 'I remember what it's all about now, you fuckers, fuck you all.' That's what I'm saying, 'Fuck you all. You don't get me twice!'" all day long. Tremendous bitterness.
Our bus hit Rainbow Beach and it's not going to take me long to talk about what's at the place. There's the standard lovely long beach, two Bakeries, one cashpoint, no phone signal, a surf club very much like the one in Home and Away (so i'm told) and a few shops, that is pretty much it. Surely nobody could actually live here, except maybe holiday homes and all the backpackers who use is as a point to jump off to Fraser Island. It is an enjoyable place though if you want to do nothing (or 'chilling' as people say to justify achieving nothing), I bumped into a few familiar faces, played pool, finally bought some flip flops that actually fit (two weeks later and they're still shredding my toes) and spent an inordinate amount of time on the beach cooking in the sun and reading. Too much fucking time it seems, to the point i then managed to get sunstroke and couldn't be arsed to move. 4 x 4 driving on Fraser Island was on the cards for the next day though to finally get some activity on the way.
8. Fraser Island
It was yet another six am start as we were to briefed for the next three says events at seven o clock; the latest i've gotten up since leaving Sydney is 8:15, that has to be yet another record to add to the collection going back to the paperboy days. The briefing entailed us watching a DVD of the most blatantly obvious safety information with regards to driving around the island, most people are complete idiots though so you can't begrudge them stating the obvious from time to time. My favourite bit was in regards to if you encouter a Dingo at some point - "Stand still and cross your hands over your nipples" is the basic grasp of it, erm no thanks mate, i'll be taking other action I think. The bloke given the talk was an Aussie named Luke (although he did seem rather English) and for some reason he found it completely necessary to talk in rhymes. Idiot. Nice guy though. These people recite the same patter day in, day out like Jude Law's character in Huckabees, I think i'd be driven to madness. We quickly got placed into groups with mine including The Danish couple Monica and Daniel, Germans Katerina and Veronica and the English in Steph, Claire and myself. Not a bad ratio there at all i must say, everyone was "spot on" though so it seemed like we'd have a good trip. After making sure we had all our food and equipment we moved on to see the Notorious mechanics.
I'd heard much about them from an Essex girl in my room, I forget her name as I've almost given up on attempting to retain information like names, you just meet too many people every day, it's like a mind fuck. The word on the street was they were backwards, aggressive, lacked social skills and were just a bunch of pricks really. Needless to say they made a big attempt to keep their reputation up, every little thing had a fine to it. Lose a fork? Fine, Shovel? 60 dollars, Drive through saltwater? 500, return the car in 4 wheel drive? 1000, and so on. They even tried the old trick of given people dodgy equipment so when it was returned they could claim it, thankfully everyone was on the ball and checked the stuff before hand. Unfortunately on a Rock N Roll Thursday i lost my driver's license (coincidentally Lee has just text me a month later saying he's found it) so this left me being unable to drive the car for insurance reasons. Bummer. As the other drivers didd their tutorials i was given the task of going round the car with one of the guys and noting any dents, bumps or general damage to the car. He clearly wasn't a Royal Tenenbaums fan as when i started walking round the car going "that car has a dent, and another....and another dent", he just looked at me like i was an idiot. Some may agree with him on that one. He was an arsehole mind, I asked if he had marked a bump down and his reply was "yeah i fucking see it mate, pretty hard not too". Just mark it down ans shut the fuck up son. With all the checklists completed, all lectures given (including not to do as the video says on dingos) and with everyone ready we jumped in and headed off to Fraser Island.
Claire was first up in the drivers seat and did a rather good job in setting the standard for everyone else. It wasn't too long before we were on the barge taking us over the water and then onto the largest sand Island in the world. Due to the high tides we weren't permitted to drive up the initial stretch of Beach so had to turn into the inland track, the other group went first and we took great delight in watching them get stuck in the sand straight away. Watching their attempts to clear the tracks did give us a false sense of smugness until of course we did exactly the same thing. That'll teach ya quickly, the soft sand really proved to be a nightmare, thankfully that stop didn't last long and we were both on our way.
If the soft sand is troublesome then the inland track is like some form of endurance test. It was impossible to get any speed at all, and the suspension is none existent so you're bouncing all over the shop; the bumps in the roof clearly aren't off people drunkenly jumping on it but heads bashing it inside. It took what seemed like hours to travel about 20km but there was nothing that could be really done to speed up events, I was rather worn out but thankfully as soon as we hit the beach again we moved on with great haste. We'd been given an itinerary to follow but priorities first so we all stopped for wraps first. Very much needed.
The main point of the schedule (as we would found out later) was to avoid the tides and our first set stop was Eli Creek, and it wasn't a bad little place really. Not much going on there except a stream and it was just a bit of a plodge (not a "paddle!"). The only true event came in the form of Claire's massive over reaction to a se snake, she clearly wasn't a fan, although an Englishman did manage to greatly annoy the shit out of me by playing the fool and flopping down the water pretending to be a crocodile or something, fuck knows. It really is a constant battle for me (as you can tell from my rants) not to tell the general public to sort their shit out. After that it was a short drive up to the shipwreck on the Island, I can't really add much to that other than it was nice to look at, rusty and had sea growth on it. No other information was given, no year, how it ended up there, any survivors etc. That's another typical Aussie thing, they really don't give a shit about much.
We needed to get off the Beach for about six thanks to the tide and light issues so we debated whether we should chance getting to the top for Indian head or not. The general consensus was we're only going to be here once so we may as well chance it, so there we headed off. Sadly we did manage to get caught out on the way back, our instructions for setting up camp was "just south" of Happy Valley; well thanks for that sherlock, How do you define "Just South?". We couldn't find any camps anyway and the sun was down with the tide heading in fast up the beach. We headed inland to the Valley for info but found nothing at all, I asked a guy and he told us to drive fifteen minutes down the beach and the campsites shuld be marked on our map. Certainly not on ours though. We headed off but by now it was pitch black, the tide was in and panic was setting in with some too. We came up to a section where rocks were pretruding out into the shore with the waves crashing up and moving up fast. The first car managed to luckily go straigh throuch wit the ebb and flow of the tide but the waves were just too much when we got there. We didn't know whether to rick it or not as a potential 5000 dollar fine was too be had, the other cars swiss section were getting arsey too and told us they'd see us later. I was getting up too as we really needed to make a decision NOW, my other concern was that the tide was going to come right up to us anyway. Thankfully as me and Claire tried to time it right, Daniel just took it upon himself to floor it and went right through. We witnessed the massive spray though, leaving Claire just a bit concerned about that fine.
After that we still couldn't find this campsite, after twenty minutes of driving down too, leaving us at a bit of a loss. The only thing was to flag a car down and thankfully we got lucky with it being the guy i spoke to prior, he let us follow him to camp and it was soon job done. Surprisingly we got our tents up quickly despite the darkness, got the cooker on and just relaxed after all the running about. We all got on really well and had a pretty good night, played a few drinking games (big fan of the horse racing) and had a luagh before hitting the sack. I was a bit disturbed by Claire's claims to me snoring, only Alfie has claimed this despite sharing a room with hundreds of people and this was a disturbing accusation for me. Maybe it's just I sleep so little i never realised.
The next days 6am start coupled with my first night of drinking in ten days really hit me hard but i soon managed to man up before going off to Lake McKenzie. We stopped off at Eurong where we bumped into Charlotte and Katie's group, it seemed they had a worse night than us, they didn't get set up till about 9:30 (us 7), couldn't find a campsite either so they had to sleep in someone's garden up in Happy Valley haha plus they were so rattled they didn't cook anything leaving them to live off jam sandwiches. It's all experiances in the end and you can soon laugh at it.
The "road" to McKenzie wasn't that too terrible and Katarina continued the good track record of driving, we got there within the hour, strange to here the others timed it at 1 hour 40 despite us going together. Maybe they were delirious after the night before. I wasn't too familiar with Lake McKenzie but it turned out to be one of the most incredible things i've ever seen. Just the whole surroundings were magnificent, clear water you can drink, sandy beach, amazing skyline and just one of the places you really need to step back in and appreciate how luck you are to see it. This all led us to taking some Wish you were here esque photos. Had to be done. Just a shame we couldn't have spent a bit longer there but we couldn't risk a repeat of the previous night.
Thankfully this night we got our camp set up straight away in a rather nice spot with daylight to spare. After the burgers of Lunch and the night before we were left with noodles, mixed veg and chicken so we just threw it all in. More drinking games were introduced with "King of the Jungle" being the latest entry and everybody happily humiliating themselves with "chomp chomps", tree frog noises and all the rest, it turned out to be a good laugh though. A dingo or three did manage to stealthily enter the site sending Steph and Veronica into bouts of fear, it was quite strange how little they cared about our presence and just casually went round us. Obviously i wasn't into the arm cross thing but i made sure not to corner it, it was quite happy there so we really needed to do something to get it to leave. I managed to find a fuck off stick and as soon as I raised it, it ran off, obviously i got told off for doing so. Two more followed but they didn't hang around long at all so nobody had to hide in the van.
The night sky was one of the clearest i'd ever seen and i'd not witnessed anything like it. Stars seemed to appear out of nowhere and it was almost like viewing one of those old 35 pictures when you relaxed your eyes. Somehow we got on about Solar systems, planets, stars and the Milky Way. I stated that the sun was our star, the solar system was our planetary collection orbiting the sun and all the other ones together formed a galaxy with ours being the Milky Way. Nobody else seemed to agree with Claire stating it was an astroid belt next to Jupiter or something., obviously I was right as standard and she later blamed it on goon. All in all another great night but Steph did confirm my snoring the next day, terribly gutting when i always feel like i'm better then others in the dorm for not doing so. This must be a recent event though and i just hope i don't ened up like me Da, you can hear that fucker down the street.
Our last day on Fraser brought a drive to another lake, this one being Lake wobby or something and another unique sight. It was like a mini desert leading town steeply into a freshwater lake, no Lacke McKenzie but it's never going to be that. We finally got a bit unlucky when it started to rain but all was well n good so we just jumped i the water to find some rather sizable catfish swimming about. With that being our last event we headed off back to Rainbow to meet the mechanics and their potential fines. Thankfully they were a bit more jovial and we avoided any payments, they did whinge about the radiator being overheated before finding it was a circuit problem. No apology of course. Apparently we one of the last to do the self drives as from here on in it's all going to be tag alongs and guided tours, a bit of a shame but it'll keep the Island clean and away from being vandalized.
9. Rainbow Beach (Reprise)
Back on Rainbow it was shockingly jam packed, being the Bank Holiday weekend all the Aussies must have flocked there to hit the beach and the rest....not there's much else except the beach of course. Daniel and Monica had to say farewell quickly so the rest of us had dinner on the evening and witnessed some amazing Karaoke. The two women organising it all were amazing tragic characters, one had definitely experianced a lost love only singing songs of despair. Jason the pop up pirate was my pick of the bunch though, really getting involved with some classic song choices, others were just a bit too intense singing Pearl Jam and Bon Jovi. Big fan of the Grease mega mix and Cyndi Lauper making appearances though. The next day was just a nothing day to recover and i just spent the evening talking to a girl from York called Natalia for hours. Somewhere in all of this i managed to lose my glasses and leave my camera....i really am useless.
Song of the Day
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