I’ve just returned from a couple weeks in Australia. I was tooling around the country with my friends Adam and Tiffany. Hopefully I’ll be posting details of the entire trip in the next week or two.

After a quick 25 hour flight, I arrived in Brisbane around 6:30AM local time. With the time difference (+14 hours from New York), one ends up leaving New York around 6:00PM on a Thursday, and arriving early Saturday morning. I hadn’t slept in about 36 hours at this point, and wouldn’t get my first nap for another 14 hours or so. Regardless, I headed off from the airport to meet Adam and Tiffany at the car rental joint up the road. They arrived right on time and after a quick stop back at the airport to buy tickets for a couple more flights, we headed up to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island, about 400 kilometers to the north.

We spent one night in Hervey bay gathering supplies and picking up our sweet ride - an outback-ready Toyota Landcruiser complete with snorkel kit for driving through rivers. We got up early the next morning and headed to the ferry for the hour long trip to the island.

Fraser Island is a 75 mile long sand bar just off the eastern coast of Australia. There are no paved roads on the entire island, so a 4-wheel drive vehicle is required to make your way around. Additionally, because the island is so large, you really need a highway to get from place to place. Since there isn’t one, you drive up and down the eastern beach. You can cruise at around 80 to 100 km/hour down the beach, just make sure to slow down for the frequent rivers running into the ocean (though not too slow, lest you get swept out to see) and the occasional small aircraft that also use the beach as their landing strip. Cruising down the beach is fairly fantastic and enjoyable, though one should be mindful of the many small sand-cliffs created by the tides, winds, and streams. While many people would slow down for these, we (and by we, I mean Tiffany) preferred an alternate method of traversal - speed up and giggle profusely. It seemed to work well, the only downside being that my spine is now fused. I’m also fairly confident we permanently damaged the suspension in our 4×4, but hey, it’s a rental.

The sand bar itself is huge - it contains rain forest, sand dunes, fresh water lakes and rivers, a few small towns, countless camp grounds, and a rocky outcropping or two great for climbing and watching whales from. We spent our days touring around the island and hiking inland. We did flips off of sand dunes, worked on our Australian accents, camped out - where I’m convinced a large animal spent the better portion of one evening licking the outside of my tent, swam in the fresh water (and crocodile free!) lakes, and got ourselves stuck and extracted from deep, loose sand, over and over again.

Fraser is also great for wildlife viewing. We saw wild dingoes, eagles, strange plants (animals?) that would periodically spit water at us, and thousands upon thousands of other birds, large and small.

We only had three brief days on the island, then it was back on the ferry, down to Brisbane, and on our overnight flight to Darwin, deep in the Northern Territory, or NT, as it’s popularly called by all the ankle-biters (kids). But that will have to come in another update.