Our Fraser Island Adventure

We spent a night in a hostel in Hervey Bay, and the next day I got an email from my friend Amanda (we spent our first year of uni in England together) - she had already left Hervey Bay for Fraser Island that day. We went to her hostel and booked our trip to Fraser Island for the following morning.

In the morning, we met up with 8 other people, got our 4x4 rental vehicle (conventional vehicles can't handle the tracks on the island, and there is about 100m of paved road on the entire island), and set off for the barge to Fraser Island.



The beach was the smoothest part of our driving, and the speed limit there was 80 km/h so it was quite interesting. We even saw some humpback whale tails and blowhole sprays while we drove along.



There was a cool shipwreck, the Maheno, a WWI hospital boat, washed ashore in 1935 in a cyclone while being towed to Japan for scrap.



These were some cool birds. Cool.



We made fun of a guy who bragged about his past 4x4 driving, and in this pic he was stuck in the sand.



Phil, from the UK. In the group shot his face is blocked, so he gets his own special shot.



The beach as seen from Indian Head. Scenic.



Our group left to right, back row: Kevin (Winnipeg), Andy (Glasgow, Scotland), Phil (near London, UK), Cherie (Leeds, UK), Marcus (Munster, Germany - my flatmate), Eddie (Leeds, UK)

Front row: Ruth (Glasgow, Scotland), Jemma (Leeds, UK), Ria (Leeds, UK). I am clearly not pictured. Clearly.



Ruth and Andy never seem to get bored with each other.



Ooh... artsy fartsyness. The sand at this beach was crazily white. Much whiter than my pasty skin. Some people washed their jewellery in the wet sand - the sand made the jewellery shiny again.



It was a fun three day trip and after 4 hours of sleep back in Hervey Bay on Monday night, Marcus and I left on a bus headed south for Byron Bay to meet up with a big group of friends.

To be continued...

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary

On the 22nd, Marcus and I went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary just outside Brisbane. It's the first and biggest Koala sanctuary in the world, with 130 koalas. We had LOADS of fun playing around with the animals - Marcus even finally decided birds aren't as boring as he thought.

This koala was born with only one eye. He's young - only 15 months old.


Marcus cuddling a koala - they have very sharp claws, so we had to stand very still to keep them from digging in.


The sanctuary has many other animals, includin emus. There were a bunch of them in a fenced in area, but a lady was feeding them from her hand - they're really quite creepy in my opinion.


The kangaroo area was reeeally cool. We could walk right up to kangaroos and feed them and watch them bounce around.








A lace monitor lizard chills in the sun.


A laughing kookaburra - they're a type of kingfisher, and really look similar to the ones we get out at Bowen Island in BC. They 'laugh' quite hysterically, and we heard them at night while we slept in our tent later.


Two lizards relax in the light of a heat lamp.


A hairy-nosed wombat - very endangered. I believe the current estimate is 300 living members of the species. I can understand why - they aren't particularly suited to the survival of the fittest theory. Strange strange creatures.


Hundreds of lorikeets (small, very colourful parrots) were flying around, and at feeding time they all swarmed to the feeding area where they pretty much attacked anyone that was holding the food, fighting with each other and flying into people's faces.


Echidnas are pretty cool - they're sorta like a porcupine with the toxic quills deal going on, and a sorta beak... I believe they're related to platypii (my plural form of platypus).


The koala sanctuary even had a tasmanian devil named Trevor! Turns out they can only run 13 km/h and are scavengers, not predators... so they look pretty crazy but they're not all that bad. I wouldn't mind one as a pet :-)


We spent about 15 minutes waiting for the baby in this photo to make his head visible. When the mother moves around (and she lept from one tree to another a couple times) the baby holds on to the mother's stomach/chest. Pretty cute.



After leaving the koala sanctuary, Marcus and I went to the Brisbane Forest Park to camp, as we read that we could camp for $4 a night there. We got there around 6pm and the office was closed! Luckily, while we stood there wondering what to do, a jeep drove by us and stopped not far past us. The guy got out and turned out to be Jason, the park manager. Turns out Lonely Planet could use some clarification, as the camp sites were on the other side of the park, accessible only by car. The book specifically said we could get to the park by public bus, which is what we did... gah.

Well, Jason was quite nice and offered to drive us to a local park where we could tent out. However, after some thinking he decided the locals might not be happy, as technically it wouldn't be legal. So, he drove us a few metres into the Forest Park to a clearing beneath some trees with a fire pit. He said we could stay there, even gave instructions if we wanted a fire, and told us to mention his name if anyone gave us a hard time.

Sure enough, in the morning some cranky know-it-all locals came by with their dog and after sniffing around for about an hour, finally asked us what we were doing. They left as soon as I explained our situation so it was all good.

Best of all - we didn't even have to pay the $4 to camp out! Free accomodation is a backpacker's friend :-)

After our night tenting outside Brisbane, we bused up to Hervey Bay (pronounced Harvey Bay).

At our evening rest stop, there was a nice sunset.





To be continued...

Brisbane

I've finally found a place to upload photos from my USB flashdrive, so this post from 2 weeks ago now has 12 photos - check em out.



Marcus and I arrived in Brisbane Saturday morning after our flight.



Joey met us at the airport and brought us via trains and a bus to Union College, her residence at the University of Queensland. We went to sleep pretty soon and woke up in the evening, in time to go downtown with Joey and her friends.

Sunday, Marcus and I spent a few hours walking around downtown after taking the CityCat ferry down the river from the University to downtown.



We ended up spending nearly 2 hours in the museum - really neat, though disorganised, place.

Monday (yesterday), we spent the day doing pretty much nothing, and in the evening decided to leave for Surfer's Paradise. We caught a bus and a train then another bus, found a cheap hostel which turned out to be a somewhat delapidated hotel, and went to sleep. Here are a couple viewshots from our window.





This morning we tried finding a bus to Lamington National Park, but found out that only package tours were availabe - so we rented a car and drove off.




A bit over an hour later, we were at the park and had a map from the nice people at the information office.

We spent just over 4 hours walking the trails before driving back to Surfer's to return the car, catching a bus, two trains, and another bus back to the residence to stay in Ron's room again for free (he's gone until tomorrow, visiting his cousin in Hervey Bay).



On our day hike, we saw a few animals... not many, but I should mention them. First, as we drove to the parking lot, I noticed a strangely snake-like stick on the road, which turned out to be in fact a very very large snake. Marcus stopped the car, I got my good camera out, and I got out of the car and got a bit closer for a few photos.




A local later told us from our description that it was probably a carpet snake, a type that isn't venomous but swallows things whole. It was about 4-5 feet long, 2-3 inches around, and green and yellow in colour.

A few minutes into the hike we saw the only other animal of the day - a family of about 5 or 6 pandemelons (don't ask me how to pronounce it - sounds like food to me). Pandemelons are a type of marsupial (mammals with the pouch for their young, like Kangaroos) which look like a cross between a kangaroo and a mouse to me. Cute little things about 1.5 feet tall, with a couple young ones they were protecting. They were quite shy and bounded along like a kangaroo (I imagine - having never seen kangaroos except on TV and at the zoo one time) across the path and into the rainforest.



The University of Queensland is pretty nice, with a lot of sandstone buildings.




To be continued...

Austraaaaaaaaaaaaalia

In a few hours Marcus and I are getting on a Knightrider bus to Christchurch. 6 hours later we'll be at the airport groggily waiting for our plane. 4 hours after that we'll land in Brisbane and start our crazy month in Australia. Here are a few random photos from my first semester here at Otago... let me know whatcha think.