Before we arrived in Hervey Bay (at our next couchsurfer, this time a German expat called Axel), we wanted to see the beach of Agnes Water, because Steve described it as the best one in this area. It’s definitely a nice one without many people and so we spent there some hours. After a small sandwich we wanted to leave for Hervey Bay, but we met another German couple from Munich, who were driving in the opposite direction, why we were talking about the highlights. They were on Fraser Island already and fancied about Lake McKenzie. As we were still annoyed of the tour to the Whitsundays, we actually decided to skip it (or at least not to book a tour). This decision became a bit unstable, but one thing after the other.
After chatting, we arrived at Axel’s place around 7h (driving was interrupted by a sudden rainfall and a breathtaking sunset). Entering the house, we were welcomed by a smell of freshly prepared wood. Axel internalized the Australian way of life and works half time as a bug defender in order to enjoy the rest of the week with his hobby, preparing guitars (if anyone in Australia is interested, we promised to post his website in our blog: http://www.axelbass.com). We really hoped to get some advice from Axel concerning Fraser Island. Instead of booking an overpriced tour we thought about only going to Lake McKenzie. If we would have been at Axel’s place two days earlier, we might have had the chance to participate in a private tour of Axel’s friend, but we missed that. Axel gave us the hint to take the ferry to Fraser and to hike to Lake McKenzie, which was our plan for the next day. Just for general knowledge: Fraser Island is biggest sand island of… WRONG! Not of the southern hemisphere, this time of the world!
But there was a little drawback: We found in the internet that a few hiking tracks were closed due to fire danger. But we couldn’t find out which one exactly why we wanted to ask the lady at the ferry ticket reception the next morning. The nice lady didn’t have any clue, of course (which idiot is going to hike on Fraser Island?), why she gave us her mobile to call the ranger. This one was a really smart guy! He didn’t have any clue, like the lady at the ferry reception, and only read the information from the internet (10 minutes before the ferry left). Tobi was precisely asking whether the hiking track we wanted to take is closed or not, he just answered (Typically Australian) “should be fine”. Accordingly, we bought the ferry tickets quickly and jumped onto the already moving ferry (be aware of sarcasm).
Arriving after around 50 minutes at the luxury resort “Fishermen’s Bay Resort“, we directly went to the reception asking for details of the hiking track. And what a big surprise, the hiking track was closed! The nice lady suggested us to walk anyway, but then we’ll risk to get a fine by the ranger, if we were still alive and not being roasted by the fire. All tours have already started, because the whole story at the reception took us half an hour. She advised us either to rent a car or to join one of their incredibly great programs of the resort. The car rental was closed and 180$ for half a day (!!!) seemed to be quite a lot. The woman from the fuel station couldn’t help us either, but she gave us two deciding hints. First, she told us we could ask the owner of the car rental company to give us a lift, because he has to help tourists who are stuck in the sand somewhere on the Island. The other hint was that we could just hitchhike. A word and a blow! As already mentioned, the car rental was closed (because someone was stuck in the sand, no joke 🙂 ) we asked each car at the fuel station for a lift to Lake McKenzie. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to go in this direction or the car was already full. That’s why we sit in the shade on the exit of the resort direction Lake McKenzie and waited (as we couldn’t hike, we somehow gained 5 hours, so not really a time pressure). Indeed each car stopped but either the destination or the amount of places in the car didn’t fit. But then we were lucky and Myra and Helen stopped and made our day! They wanted to go to Lake McKenzie to spend the last day of their holiday there and they had enough space for both of us. After packing Helen’s newly bought vacuum cleaner (from Aldi!!!) in the car boot, we could enter and the 11km drive to Lake McKenzie started. Being really naive, we asked one week before whether our Mini-SUV would be fine for Fraser Island. Very probably, we would have been stuck after 200m from the resort. The so called “streets” on Fraser Island consist a 100% out of sand and as a lot of people are driving there and the streets are just repaired once in a while, they look exactly like that. There are waves in the ground between 20 and 60cm and all that with only one trail. But our two drivers were really well trained in 4WD and quite thoroughly shaked we arrived at our destination very fast. In addition, we laughed a lot with the two and they even offered us to give us a lift back or even show us more around the island. But after our first look on the lake, it was over. We knew that we want to spend here the afternoon. We never saw such a clean and crystal clear water together with such a perfect sand beach. To make that even better, the lake contains sweet water and no Australian animals, a perfect place for a swim! After a little wandering along the coast, we swam in direction of the middle of the lake in order to vegetate the rest of the day in the lake and make funny pictures. Helen and Myra offered us in the evening to go to the Central Station, the starting point for the rainforest logging in earlier times. We took one ferry later than we thought in the beginning and unfortunately didn’t have enough luck to see a dingo. As there are no dogs allowed on Fraser, it is the only place where dingos are purebred. Being back at around 10.30pm at Axel, we fell exhausted to bed to drive to Noosa the next day…