In 1995, on my first tour of Australia with the AAT Kings coach party, we stopped for a few nights at Fraser Island, Daydream Island, Rockhampton and Ingham on our way South, having already made our way up through the red centre of Australia. The following few entries are taken from my diaries of the time, and updated for this book.

The ferry to Fraser Island departs from Hervey Bay and seemed to me to be more of a makeshift raft just large enough to transport a 4WD vehicle and a handful of visitors. Passengers wait in what seems like a large car park with a shop on the mainland before being ushered on board the ferry via a wide gangplank which is lowered to ground level on the beach and then raised again for the crossing to prevent anybody falling off. Only hand luggage is allowed on the island, so we had to leave just about everything on the bus and rely on a small overnight bag to last us for, um, two nights.

Fraser Island is the world's largest sand island and is positioned in just the right place to collect most of the sand drifting along the coast from Sydney before it drops over the edge of the continental shelf five miles further on. The island is one hundred and twenty kilometres in length by twenty five wide and is made up entirely of sand. At its deepest point, the sand dunes are nearly six hundred meters deep, and there is more sand here than you'll find in the entire Sahara desert. We're talking one mother of a sand island here! Fraser Island acts as a huge sponge to soak up rainfall, which means that water constantly forces it's way to the surface and forms streams which criss-cross the island, the largest of which is Eli Creek which I'll be getting to later. The surface of Fraser is covered in lush sub-tropical rain forests, the trees easily taking root in the saturated sands. If this all sounds somewhat idyllic, it won't come as any surprise when I tell you that the Aboriginal name for the island is K'Gari, which means Paradise.

Upon arrival on the island, we were greeted by our local driver and led on board the 4WD bus that we'd be getting about on for the next two days. There are no roads, only tracks, so 4WD buses are the only vehicles that don't get stuck in the soft sand.

From the port, as the driver laughingly called the piece of sand at which the ferry had come to rest, our bus rocked and bumped its way deep into the rainforest where we stopped a while to take a walk through the trees and get a taste for the island. Apart from our own excited chatter, the only sound was the trickle of water and the calls of birds in the branches overhead.

Our group is staying for two nights at the Eurong Beach Hotel, which has only very basic facilities and is some way from the restaurant so that getting something to eat at night requires a fair amount of daring as you stumble blindly through the trees in a scene reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. To be fair, though, once you've plonked yourself down at a table outside, you're highly unlikely to want to get up again as the panoramic view of the stars from Fraser Island really is mesmerising. We hadn't arrived on Fraser Island until mid-afternoon, so by the time we'd been given our 4WD orientation tour and had a chance to walk around in the forest with our guide, we were more than ready for something to eat and hoping to god that dinner wouldn't turn out to be Koala on toast or something equally off-putting as we had now been to a couple of restaurants on the tour where the local cuisine hadn't quite been to our taste. After dinner, we sat around under the stars outside the front of the restaurant and listened to dreamtime stories told to us by a local Aborigine, and some of us sampled a bit of "bush-tucker" in the form of branches and leaves which he plucked from a nearby tree or pulled out of his pocket. One of the things I love about hearing real Aborigines telling their stories and legends - and I had a similar experience once in America where a native American sat us down by a roaring log fire and related the stories of his ancestors - is that they are always told with such enthusiasm, and without any hint that they don't really believe what they are telling us. Our story teller would constantly make dramatic gestures such as suddenly standing up, wheeling around and dropping to his knees, pointing at the setting sun and whispering something about a giant sky woman who wakes up, lights a torch and then spends the day trudging from one horizon to the other waving a flaming branch. We loved it.

After our lessons were over, we retired to the bar - or at least, everyone else retired immediately to the bar and I returned to the room to change before joining them. This turned out to be something of a mistake (changing, I mean), as I was greeted upon my return by being suddenly lifted off my feet by several unseen hands, carried outside to the swimming pool and chucked in. Spluttering obscenities, I hauled myself out and was about to go into a serious rant when I noticed that just about everyone else in the bar was also soaking wet. The evening just got better from there.

After breakfast in the morning, we all headed excitedly off to the beach at the front of the hotel where we were meeting a pilot who was going to take us all for a fifteen minute scenic flight over the island in his tiny twin-engined aircraft - although not all at the same time, obviously. It was a very odd sensation to take off and land on the sand with nothing for the wheels to really get a grip on and a bit worrying when you consider that where we were coming in to land was also the main highway, pedestrian walkway and sunbathing beach. It seemed as though people were simply expected to keep an eye out for incoming planes or, if sunbathing, listen out for that telltale drone which means it's probably time to move or die. Fraser Island looks amazing from the air, and it's only from high up that you can see all the rolling dunes and lakes that make it such a perfect place. From above the lakes appear perfectly round and clear, and as we flew over Lake Wabby with our mouths hanging open the pilot told us that he'd be taking anyone who wanted to come on a trek through the bush to the lake after we landed. I don't think any of us needed to be asked twice, and we only ran three people over landing the plane.

At the start of the trek, our guide thought it a good time to mention that the first two kilometres would be a hard slog up the side of a densely forested dune at which point several people muttered something that rhymed with clucking bell and went home in a huff. He wasn't joking, either. We tramped through the trees and across baking sand dunes for what seemed like hours, the guide stopping every now and then to ask what was keeping us, do a hundred press ups or otherwise severely take the piss. After a while, putting one foot in front of another became the most exquisite agony and the only thing keeping us going was the fact that mentioning this to our guide would have almost certainly resulted in him grabbing hold of the nearest overhead branch and doing a thousand chin-ups just to rub in how much fitter he was than us. Mind you, the journey was more than worth it in the end. Despite sounding like a House Elf, Wabby was in fact every bit as perfect as it had looked from the air. We could clearly see the reflection of the sunny cloudless sky in its crystal waters, and the lake was surrounded by a ring of glaring white sand within the dense ring of forest through which we had arrived. It was also at the bottom of a sand dune which encouraged those of us with the foresight to be wearing our swimming costumes under our clothes to strip off and run down the slope to throw ourselves at the water. One or two who hadn't brought their swimming costumes thought about it for a moment, shrugged, and followed suit, much to the delight of our guide who had obviously decided we were just a bunch of whingeing poms. The water was warm and so pure that it probably would've tasted exactly like mineral water if it hadn't been impossible not to think about all the naked people bathing in it. On the edges, the sand merged with the water quite smoothly, but those of us brave enough to try to swim to the other side soon discovered that it was safer to stay in pairs. Looking down at the middle of Lake Wabby, I was intrigued to find that I couldn't see the bottom even though the water was crystal clear - I've since discovered that the depth of the lake at this point is twelve metres.

We spent a good couple of hours by the lake, most of it swimming or just floating around near the edge chatting and soaking up the sun. I cannot tell you what a perfect morning it was - sunny, good company, beautiful scenery and one of the most relaxing mornings of the trip to date. Eventually, it was unfortunately time to head back. We returned to the hotel by a different route, our guide stopping every now and then in an attempt to get us to sample some local bug he'd picked up off the ground and then calling us a bunch of wusses if we wouldn't. It was probably just as well anyway, as there was a massive barbeque waiting for us when we arrived back and it would've just been awkward to have to say "Naw, sorry - I just had some witchetty grubs on the way over!

This afternoon, the bus drove us for thirty-seven kilometres along the beach to Eli Creek where the itinerary cryptically said we would be taking a stroll through the water. It was superb - getting changed on the bus, we set out along a short boardwalk which led into the creek itself. Eli Creek heads straight into the forest and winds about in and out of the trees - there is virtually no light to see where you're going and it really does feel as though you're going on an adventure into the heart of the rainforest, up to your waist in cold water and walking against the current. To give you some idea how strong this current is, bear in mind that Eli Creek has an average flow of eighty million litres of water a day - I'll say that again because I can't quite get my head around it myself. Eighty million litres a day. The whole trek up the creek was a great team effort, helping each other over submerged logs and advising each other of where the water seemed particularly deep. The creek got colder and deeper, and it was littered with fallen logs and covered in buzzing insects that seemed to want to eat us. In places, it was necessary to climb up into an overhanging tree and down the other side to continue. The whole exercise was probably the coldest and yuckiest thing I've done in a long time and yet was totally exhilarating at the same time. Why did we do it? Well, in the words of nearly all Australians: "b*****ed if I know!

We waded on into the forest for as long as time would allow, brushing cobwebs and branches out of the way and feeling as though we were exploring darkest Africa, and then we began one by one to lose the feeling in our legs and head back. I soon found myself on my own at the front and had an image of everybody going home and leaving me there, so I followed suit, but the return journey proved surprisingly more hazardous than the outward leg as we were now heading upstream. The slightest loss of grip on the bottom of the creek and I was pulled off my feet and yanked along helplessly by the current until some vital part of my anatomy smashed into a particularly pointy bit of log. We eventually got back and found those of the group who had turned back early sunbaking on the beach! On the way back to the hotel, we stopped twice. The first stop was to take photos of the shipwreck of the S.S. Maheno which was grounded on the beach here in 1935 and then used for target practice by the Australian Air Force during the second world war - needless to say, it isn't exactly in pristine condition. We also stopped to take photos of the local wild dingo population that allegedly wander the beaches at night eating children. If you believe what you read in the British press!

After dinner we were subjected to a movie about how Fraser Island formed, but had difficulty hearing much of it because a German group were having their talk with the Aborigine outside and their leader was barking out translations at the top of his voice. In the bar afterwards, everyone was much too tired to be interested in doing much so several of us sat up talking until they threw us out. We mucked about on the way back to our rooms, nicking each others shoes and laughing uncontrollably at passing dingoes. Clearly, we'd stayed in the bar too long, and it was time to be getting to bed so that we would be wide awake in the morning to enjoy our next destination - although, if anyone had told us where we were heading next, I think we would've given up drinking for good...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.