Stop 11. Hervey Bay

It sometimes gets a bit hard for to differentiate between all these campsites. They're starting to blur together. I'll wake up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet (as you do) and end up walking all round the camp site.

The campsite where we stayed was fine and a great place to stay for exploring Fraser Island. When we tried to book on a 1 day tour of the island we found that they'd sold out on a lot of the 1 day tours but that there was a cancellation on one of the exclusive tours. the tour was booked with a company called Fraser Island tours and we sorted it out at the campsite. It cost us a bit more then just doing the normal tour ($30) but for that we got free drink and food all day and the group was smaller with a better 4WD truck. There are no roads anywhere on Fraser Island as it's the largest sand island in the world.

we got free drink and food all day and the group was smaller with a better 4WD truck.

We got up at 7:30am and got picked up and transferred to Fraser Island where we boarded our 4WD trucks at about 10:00am. They guides give us all a safety talk about spiders, snakes and dingos before we head off. There's very little threat from the dingos, as they're quite small, but a teenager was taken by a pack of them a few years, ago and killed by them, so they have to warn you. The Island itself is beautiful and it's hard to think that as little as 30 years ago there was a thriving logging industry here.

As we're doing 80 kph up along this beach, which is the main highway for the island, we see a single engined propeller plane parked up. It turns out that if we want we can take a short 15 minute trip over the island in the plane. I don't like flying at the best of times but Jo twists my arm and off we go. The plane takes off from the beach (which is also the main air strip for the island) and does a couple of circuits of the island before landing on the beach again. It was the smallest plane I've been in and felt a bit like being on a motorbike.

We pulled over for lunch about 12 and our driver cooked us fish and steaks on the barbecue. After lunch we went to one of the island's fresh water lakes and swam for a while. The lake was absolutely crystal clear and there's no fish in the water because it's the wrong Ph level. There was 16 of us on the bus and we had the whole lake to ourselves. Great.

In the eveing we walked down the Esplanade where there were some shops open. We called in at the main (I think the only) pub on the road for a few beers. We ended up staying most of the night in this pub as there was a couple of guys doing covers of a wide range of decent tunes and the crowd was good as well.

We left to head up north to our next stop. As we were leaving town, about 10 am I noticed the same guys were still playing in the same bar. Even the same music. Had they been home?