Good evening everyone,

Today we got up real early to make it in time for the tour to Fraser Island. By 7:15 we made it there, had quick breakfast and waited for the bus to pick us up. We got on and to our surprise the best seats weren't taken yet. We sat down in the 2 seats right behind the driver, and I sat on the left side so I could see right through the front window and had the best view of everyone.

A ferry took us over within 15 minutes and from then on it got really exciting. We arrived during high tide which meant most of the beach was under water, but we still had to drive through to reach a pathway actually leading further into the island. The drive itself the entire day was a great experience already but on top of that we got a couple of great things to see as well.

First stop was McKenzie Lake. A lake consisting entirely out of rainwater which made it a bit harder to swim in apparently. We didn't notice much of that, felt just like a swimming pool. Only much much cleaner without the chlorine everywhere. We had a great swim before we went back towards the bus. On the path we encountered a fairly big lizard (for my standards at least..) which crawled away under a log and kept still there until we continued our way.

Back at the bus we continued the tour towards one of the many rainforests on Fraser Island. Here the tour guide told us a lot about the history of the place and how everything came to exist. We also saw a unique plant to only sand based rainforests and were amazed at how old some of the trees and plants actually were.

The next stop was Lunch (which was great!) and after we went towards the beach again where we saw a wild Dingo before arriving at a ship wreck. It was an interesting thing to see and we took some pictures but didn't spend much time there before continuing to the Pinnacles of Fraser Island. These were a sort of sand dunes consisting of different layers which all had their own unique colour.

Here the bus turned around and went for Eli Creek, which we had passed earlier. We weren't on the bus though, along with 1 other person. The reason for this is because we got the chance to go on a plane ride over the island for 15 minutes, which would land us back at Eli Creek afterwards.

We didn't miss a thing of the tour this way and got to enjoy the island from above which gave us a great impression of how big the island actually was, all made out of only sand. It was simply amazing and a unique experience which I hadn't seen coming.

Back at Eli Creek we were free to explore on our own for a while. We walked up the boardwalk along the creek to the end to get an idea of how the creek looks like further upstream. There were 2 really big spiders here which we tried to photograph but it wouldn't focus. Since we didn't have much time we didn't hang around too long and looked at other things before getting back on the bus.

Last stop was back at the Eurong resort (where we had lunch) to pick up a few other tourists who needed a ride back to the main land. After a 10 minute leg-stretch we got on our way back to the ferry. The tide was coming in again so we had to either take the same way back to the ferry (taking a road which went deeper into the island and back out near the ferry) or take the beach route which was currently getting narrower and narrower.

We went over the beach nonetheless and the bus partly went through the see which can be seen on one of the photos. It didn't take long for the ferry to arrive (5 minutes or so) and we got on along with 3 other cars. We climbed the stairs on the ferry up to the captain's cabin and watched the sea from there before we got to land again and were taken to our campervan.

We drove back to Gympie because Liz gave us the offer to stay another night. We gladly accepted that offer and are now going to have dinner. Tomorrow we'll try to make it to Byron Bay, just south of Brisbane. See you there!

Jeremy