Rainbow Beach & Fraser Island

In a moment of lunacy, we’d booked ourselves onto a Fraser Island tour starting two days after our Whitsunday tour had finished. This meant that we had just one afternoon and one morning to cover the 900kms between Airlie Beach and Rainbow Beach. This may shock some of you, but even Tara didn’t have enough chat to keep us going on that journey. After night in a motel in Miriam Vale and a dinner in the Big Red Crab restaurant, we arrived into Rainbow Beach with an hour to spare before our Fraser tour briefing. After the briefing, we stocked up on Goon (wine in a carton) and beer and said our farewells to Kitty (she wasn’t quite up to the offroad terrain on Fraser Island). The next morning we set off for Fraser Island in our Toyota Landcruiser with nine strangers. The next 48 hours were the best of our trip so far. Our group consisted of three northern girls (Sarah, Taria, and Claire), a gay couple from London (Danny and Richard), a trio of lone travellers that had met in Melbourne (Alice, Ali and Gabby), and a german girl whose name I’ve chosen to forget already. Everybody in our group got on really well, and we quickly bonded with the help of Gaz’s cheesy iPod. We made our way up to Lake MacKenzie where we annoyed the rest of the beach with an impromptu game of rounders, before heading back down to the beach and setting up camp for the night. We made a good dent into our goon stash that evening, and we awoke the next morning with some monumental hangovers. With the aid of some Paracetamols we managed to pack up the van and drive up to the Maheno shipwreck for some photos, before driving up to the lookout at Indian Head at the northern tip of Fraser Island. Gaz also went for a stroll up to the champagne pools, before we re-boarded the jeep and made our way south to set up camp. That night we introduced the rest of the group to the Goon Train game, so the next morning we awoke once again to insistent hangovers. In spite of this we managed to trek up to Lake Wabby that morning for a quick dip, before catching a barge back to the mainland. After a quick powernap in the hostel our group reunited for dinner, and as was now traditional we hit the goon again. The hostel wouldn’t let us drink on the premises so we relegated to the bus shelter outside the hostel, which somehow added to the fun. We were sad to say goodbye to our new friends the next day, but the open road was calling so we set off in Kitty for the bright lights of Brisbane.