I was the first one in our camp to wake this morning - I was so excited about the fact that we were camping - so I jumped out of my sleeping bag, got dressed and gave Nikki a kiss, before rushing outside to do last nights dishes. The Australian guys were already up, so they said I could use their water to wash them. As I was doing them with Dunger, the rest of our group started to slowly rise and we eventually used the guys bbq to cook a fry-up for our breakfast.
Our replacement 4x4 was supposed to be arriving at 10am - which still meant we were 4 hours behind (our itinerary said our day should start at 6am). It finally turned up at about 11.30am. We'd already unloaded the broken one and I don't think the mechanic had barely stepped out of the new one before we'd started loading it up with our gear. We didn't hang around to find out what the problem was, we just said our goodbyes to 'The Rescuers' and sped off down the beach.
The first stop of the day was a place called Indian Head, which is a huge rock formation that looks over the sea. It's really high and if you're lucky you can sometimes see whales, sharks and turtles... we didn't see any! After a while we walked back to the car and took a short drive along the beach to a place called Champagne Pools. According to our itinerary we were supposed to leave the car at Indian Head and walk to the pools, but seeing as we'd been given a duff car and had lost a few hours we drove anyway - we were rebels, plus we didn't really mind about starting the day later - we all appreciated the lie-in!
The Champagne Pools were great. We set up our towels on the small beach and then swam in the pools. They are created by waves that crash into the rocks and the spray (like that of champagne) splashes onto the other side - creating pools of warm water, some of which are about 7' deep. Dunger, Big Kev' and Wayne all turned up at the pools too, which was cool because we shared a few beers, had some group photos and had a few laughs before saying our goodbyes again.
Indian Head and Champagne Pools are on the Northern end of Fraser Island and we were supposed to be camping in a place called Cornwells tonight, which is quite a few km's South - so we reloaded the car and set off - giving us plenty of time before the tides came in. En-route we stopped at the shipwreck of an old vessel called the Maheno, which was blown ashore by a cyclone in 1935 - and has sat there ever since! We all posed for pictures and then took off again.
We managed to get to the camping area of Cornwells just in time - the sun was setting and the tides were almost right in, so we pulled the car in just behind the sand dunes and set up our tents. As we'd missed lunch, we decided to cook everything we should have eaten today all in one go. We had... chicken drumsticks, nachos with salsa, spaghetti bolognese, tinned peaches, fruit cake and custard... all washed down with beer! Whilst some of the group were preparing the food, the rest of us went off to build a toilet - or dig a deep hole in the sand. Me and Sylvan dug two - one for the men and another for the women (which we decorated with shells).
Not far from our spot, we noticed that another group of travelers had started a camp fire, so when we'd tidied up we took a walk along to the beach to join them. At first there were about 10 people sat around the fire, some singing to a guy playing guitar and the rest chatting, and after about 15 minutes there were about 30, all from different groups. One girl even started fire dancing... the nutter!
Camping on Fraser Island rocks!
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