That was great fun, except for when the guide's horse stood on a goat! The goat made an heart-wrenchingly painful-sounding scream and then proceeded to limp onward on three legs, it's fourth leg bent double and cringeingly taking some of the poor animal's weight. The guide, unbelievably optimistically, assured is that the poor goat would be fine and make a full recovery. It was one of thousands of similar goats, and I would bet my life on it now being dead.
I have to choose my photos to put on the blog carefully due to poor upload speeds, and my picture of the backside of my horse does, disappointingly, not qualify.
Next, we were to do a goat rodeo. We were, in simple terms, instructed to pin a goat down by kneeling on it's ribcage, and then tie three of its legs together and then poke it on the rump with a brander. This was all very well, but our goat was very frisky and very horny, that is, it had big horns, which it succeeded in ramming into my, now bruised, upper arm.
The next activity was clay pigeon shooting, with a 12-gauge shotgun. The guide told us that if any of us beat him, he would buy us two beers or something of equivalently enormous value, so I was concentrating hard on this activity, a little shaken from my two earlier goat related incidents.
I missed the first shot, and immediately hated myself. Fortunately, the next four shots were successful, so suicide was removed from the equation. Frat also shot 4, so we were equal. Without my two beers, suicide was, once again, put back into the equation. Only kidding :-) .
Below is a picture of me shooting up, note cowboy looking figure in the foreground, who is actually a proper cockney lad who works there. Damn, deleted the picture. Sorry.
After Kroombit was a long, long, drive to Rainbow Beach. Mind you, a 10 hour drive is a quick trip to the shops by Australia standards.
In the morning I was booked into a 3 day self drive 4x4 trip around Fraser Island. Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world. I was told that if all of the sand that makes up Fraser Island was picked up and dropped onto Sydney, that is, all of Sydney, the sand would be 80m deep. This island is 130km long, and covers an area of 1630 sq m., in short, it is gigantic. The whole island has no sealed roads, and so access is by 4x4 only.
I met my group in the morning and they had been shopping already the night before. We loaded everything onto the roof and off we went, none of the drivers had driven a 4x4 before, and, ironically, I had yet I couldn't drive as I wasn't old enough (21yrs) to hire a car.
As most of the good driving is on the beach, the tide times and heights strongly determined our itinerary for the trip as there were certain periods when you couldn't drive on the beach. a few hours in, we got a flat tyre. Fortunately, I was there to save the day and take some cracking photos of other people doing the work (below). One bloke, dyeing to put his new toy to good use, attached a tube to our exhaust, the other end of which attached to an industrial strength balloon and proceeded to lift our car up from beneath. I was impressed, if not a little anxious that the balloon may burst and kill our little leprechaun hobbit-like Irish helpers.
Anyway, an hour or so later we thanked them greatly and made our way across the island to Lake McKenzie, which is a huge freshwater lake. It was stunningly beautiful, with gorgeous white sands and crystal clear water, picture-perfect, ready for a postcard. It was cloudy though, picture below.
Following this, we set up camp at central station and, after a good feed, I proceeded to have second worst nights sleep of my life, the first worst was to await me the next evening.The next day, we had to go to Eurong (pronounced "you're wrong", much to the amusement of German fellow on board) to pick up another spare tyre, leaving us with a total of six tyres on board.
We then proceeded to Wabby Lake, which is the deepest freshwater lake on the island. We had a nice swim and a sunbake (why do Australians call it that? What am I? A cake?!) and the rest headed back to the van for some lunch. I wanted to walk up to the lookout, which was well worth it. Photo below.
There are many fantastic bushwalking tracks on the island which, unfortunately I was not able to explore.
After lake Wabby and lunch, we drove to the famous wreck of the S.S. Maheno. This is a ship which, in 1935, was being towed to Melbourne for scrap metal when it was caught in a cyclone and washed up a few days later on the beach of Fraser Island. It was used as bombing practise for the RAAF in WWII, and is now very rusty.
We then went back to camp, and had a great meal (Martina, a woman on my trip, is a cook :->), after which we had an early night and I lay there for 10 hours, insomniac.
We rose early this morning to see the sunrise from Indian Head. Indian Head is in the north of the Island, and was named by Captain James Cook, after seeing many Aboriginal people gathered at the peak of the headland on his sail by.
After this, we drove back along the beach to wait to board the ferry and return our vehicle. We saw our third dingo of the trip, on the beach as we left.
After this, we drove back along the beach to wait to board the ferry and return our vehicle. We saw our third dingo of the trip, on the beach as we left.
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