Fraser Island

My overnight bus dropped me off at Rainbow Beach, closest departing point for another of Eastern Australia's most popular destinations, Fraser Island.

IT is a place that is quite hard to imagine and equally, to describe. Simply put, it is the world's largest sand bar. Oddly enough, this 150km long, 50km wide sand pile is large enough to support a diverse rainforest ecosystem, complete with many large freshwater lakes, fish, birds, lizards, and quite a large population of dingos.

Australia's park system has allowed a silly occurrence. Though the island has a few settlements with a couple of resorts, hostels, and hotels, the most common way to experience the island is by taking an unsupervised 4x4 camping trip. Various tour companies unleash groups of ten or so backpackers onto the island with a giant four-wheel-drive truck, tents, food, gallons of beer and box wine, to stomp around the island, the only direction given is a map and when to not get stuck in the high tides. I find it absolutely mental that the level of trust for all these kids on such a fragile ecosystem is so high.

My group was very friendly, but quite irressponsibleble. To say I didn't really enjoy myself would be a total lie, but I would have rather shared this natural wonder with a group of older, more laid-back group who'd rather enjoy a couple of beers under the stars instead of 20. Camping is easy when lots of people help out, but I found myself initiating most of the work. The most disheartening part was the explicit ignoring of the park ranger's rules for camp cleaning. I wanted to follow the rules, but at the same time, I wasn't about to spend hours doing dishes and collecting rubbish while everyone else was partying.

Cleaning up immediately is essential for one big reason, prevention of dingo raids. Dingos are a pest in Australia and are not native by any means. Brought from Asia as hunting dogs long ago, many escaped, became feral and became a species of their own. Many efforts are taken to control the spread of dingos and their ecosystem harming ways, including the famous dingo fence across Australia. That said, the dingos are here to stay and need to be respected as a part of Australia's wildlife. Fraser Island being, surprise, surprise, an island, and protected from cross-breeding, houses some of the purest dingos in all of Australia. Our island briefing included ways to avoid attacks (crossing arms across your chest apparently (laugh, laugh) scares them away) and other ways to be "dingo safe". After all the warning, when I finally saw one was quite amusing. Dingos are simply put, small, red, wild dogs, about the size of a small border collie. IF not wild, it would be tempting to just pet one. Though crafty enough to raid dirty camps for random food scraps, they are quite shy of people. With every dirty camp however, they become more and more accustomed to people and more and more aggressive about getting people food. There are only 50 dingos left on the island, and nearly five a year need to be put down because of aggressive behavior towards tourists.

As a nature lover, I was quite angry by the behavior of my group mates. I awoke one night to find four dingos in our camp, ripping our rubbish bags apart, scattering the dirty dishes and eating food left on the ground. I saw one sneaky bastard open the esky with its nose, remove a liter of milk, and run away with it in its mouth. No amount of crossing my arms and stern looks seemed to scare them. Finally, a cross, finger pointing, "Bad Dingo!" made them cower away in shame.

My trip wasn't all negative. There was some amazing scenery, including an incredible view from the northern Indian Head Point. Lake Mackenzie, a perched lake in the center of the island had water so clear, it couldn't even be captured with a camera. Swimming pools look murky in comparison.

It was quite fun to drive so many miles with the beach as the road, though a few errant waves negatively tested the watersealing capabilities of the truck.

The trip was quite fun, but (fellow backpackers, please throw not your stones!) there needs to be more control over the tourists coming to the island. Reform is not too far away actually; two backpackers were killed after their vehicle rolled when swerving around a wave. Yeah, even our crazy party group did not cause excessive damage to the fragile environment, we also didn't help in anyway.