প্রকাশিত হয়েছে: 04.05.2019
Boarding the ferry, into the sand
At the 'River Heads' ferry terminal, all the 4-wheel drive cars and even off-road buses gathered at exactly 8 am in the morning!
And by buses, we mean real trucks. It's funny how all these vehicles are supposed to fit on the ferry. Half an hour after the ferry departed, we started our journey. All roads on Fraser Island are made of sand, there are no paved roads here. The feeling of driving in this cool convoy of cars was awesome. Fraser Island is only 25 km wide, and yet it takes about 1-1.5 hours to cross it.
The usual route that everyone takes goes through the 'Eurong' point, but we decided to take a different route because the ruts seemed not too deep there, and we thought we could drive our car better that way. Our car actually did pretty well in general.
It's not a mega off-road car, but it had no problems driving on the sand and crossing the dunes. Well, in any case, we took the other route through the 'Lake Wabby' point, and there weren't very deep ruts there, but there were pretty high branches that our car had to go over.
We had the best driver ever (Mike), who drove us easily through this stupid road. At one point, we had a longer forced break because a car in front of us got stuck.
While we were trying to pull it out with our car, one of those off-road trucks approached from behind. And since we were stupidly standing in the middle of the truck and the stuck car, the truck driver tried to give us tips on how to pull the car out better.
To not be rude, we followed every tip and ended up getting stuck even deeper in the sand... Meanwhile, a bus also approached from the front, and it pulled the car in front of us out without any problems. We would have gotten out without help, but the bus driver didn't quite understand that and pulled us out as well.
When we were finally able to see the water and the beach just 5 meters away from us, we had to go through really deep sand and got stuck for the first time :-D. Equipped with a shovel and 4 boards for the tires, we started digging. We would have managed to get our car out, but another car approached from the front, and the driver had just bought his entire 4-wheel drive equipment and really wanted to try it out. So he pulled us out with a long rope pulled-out.Am. When we arrived at the water, the feeling was incredibly amazing to cruise along the 75-mile-long beach.
On the first day, we went up to a viewpoint called 'Indian Head'. Wonderful view from up there! After spending the whole day driving on the beach and taking a lot of time to get from the west coast to the east coast, we headed to the campsite.
You should know that camping or driving on the beach is not allowed on the west coast, as this part of the island is mainly used as a docking point for the ferries. Our campsite, 'Dundubara', was really nice, not on the beach but we'll have shade in the morning. We chose this campsite because we can also shower here and the place is fenced to protect against dingoes.