We arrived in Hervey Bay ahead of our 3-day Fraser Island tour and spent the day lounging around the pool at the hostel. Then early evening we had a big meeting in the hostel where we met the other 7 people who we would be camping with and spending the next 3 days. We had an Aussie guy leading the meeting who made us all so depressed by doing the usual Aussie thing, going over the 1001 rules and ways you could be fined, loose your deposit/bond or get hurt/injured/die! It was enough to put anyone off, so in the end our group decided not to listen anymore. In our group there was two guys from Sweden (Chris & Marcus) who we already knew from sharing a dorm with, a couple from England (Eli & Chris) and three Brazilian girls, who nobody ever really knew what they were called so we referred to them as "The Brazilians"! Generally for the next three days a common phrase used by everyone was "Where are the Brazilians?" We quickly put a shopping list together then headed off to get the most important thing of all, the alcohol! We all bought way over the top, better to have too much than too little hey!!!!

After a few drinks in the bar together, we all had a relatively early night as we had a 6am start. Ouch! We were all up bright and early and met 'Zombie' our Pink 4x4! Lisa absolutely loved it, the perfect colour but it was a shame she was too scared to drive it! Chris started us off, we headed to the ferry port for the 1 hour journey over to Fraser. Unfortunately, we saw no Sharks, Dolphins or Turtles on our way over. Fraser is one huge sand island, if it wasn't there, The Great Barrier Reef wouldn't exist! When we arrived, we drove off the ferry and straight on to sand, obviously remembering to go in to 4WD (or we would LOSE OUR BOND). Sitting in the back of the jeep was a little uncomfortable to say the least, Chris found it was easier to drive faster over the big bumps of sand as it meant less discomfort for him, Ben and Marcus in the front of the jeep, this was at the expense of the 6 of us in the back who were being battered around and constantly defending ourselves from flying cooler boxes, bags of bread, our luggage and hitting our heads on the roof!!!

There are shops on the island but not very many, every time we stopped near a shop the boys were constantly concerned with how much ice was left in the cooler box to keep the beer cool and whether we needed to buy more; where as the girls, who were in charge of the food thought the ice was more important to keep the food cool, the guys didn't think this was a priority (but would do when their tummies started to rumble) and we ended up with about 4 bags of ice (which all melted very quickly) for the beer and warm food, typical!

We saw a few Guanna's when we first arrived, then not much until we hit the beach, where there were tons of jellyfish (huge too) washed up, we obviously didn't go anywhere near the saltwater in the jeep or we would LOSE OUR BOND! We had a stop off at Lake Wangi (we think), which is a freshwater lake, and went swimming and some people went sand boarding down the dunes in to the water. It was a good walk to the lake which meant we were all ready for a swim by the time we got there!

After Lake Wangi Ben got his first chance to drive the bright pink jeep, driving a 4WD over the sand at a high speed is pretty cool, most of the driving is done on the beach right next to the ocean. Whilst driving, a plane landed on the beach about 200m ahead, rather surreal, these are the rich people having their tours round the island by helicopter or small planes. Then we had to drive the jeep over some rocks, as the tide was coming in, which led to the Maheno Shipwreck, a rusty old ship, plonked on the beach, not much is known about the ship or where it came from it just looks really random.

We found our campsite and started to set up camp we soon realised that we hadn't put a tent up for a long time and didn't really know what we were doing, when the tent looked wonky and unstable of course it was all Ben's fault!! We camped on the beach for our first night and positioned the jeeps as a wind break, we had a BBQ which included sausages and steaks obviously with a little extra flavour, sand (you can't possibly cook on Fraser without sand getting in the food so we just got used to the extra crunchiness)! We sat about drinking and playing drinking games with another group of 9 who camped with us and watched sunset on the beach. Everyone ended up being quite drunk and at about 4am, on a toilet trip, Ben noticed Swedish Chris laid outside with a rug around him saying "Marcus, where are you?" in his sleep. He thought that the plastic rug he was rolled up in was his tent and that Marcus had left him! Bizarre, far too much goon (cheap boxed wine)!

The following day we had to be off the beach by 6am because of the high tide and if we weren't we would LOSE OUR BOND so it was an early start for us all with a few sore heads! After packing up the tents and asking "Where are The Brazilians?" a fair few times and doing everything for them gggrrrrr we headed to Indian Head. Arriving at Indian Head we spent an hour looking at our RULES sheet trying to work out where we could park the jeep without LOSING OUR BOND, the best option seemed to be to go down a little gap in the sand dunes away from where the tide could get our jeep but the little gap in the sand dune was labelled as a no go area on the map or we would LOSE OUR BOND, eventually loads of people arrived with the same problem so we broke the rules and parked away from the beach! We spent the morning at Champagne Pools which is a really rocky area where you can sit and the waves smash against the rocks giving a champagne effect of water spraying up on you! We sat up there for a couple of hours and enjoyed the views. A few days after we left two guys went too close to the waves and got swept off into the sea and were badly injured by the rocks. Then we climbed Indian Head and saw some sharks and turtles in the sea beneath us! Then we needed to move on as the tides were starting to change but not before asking "Where are The Brazilians?" and hanging around for them to come back!

On our last night we set up camp a little more efficiently than the first night, we camped with the same group as the previous night and stayed close to the beach again. The girls had bought spag bol for dinner tonight and Ben was the nominated chef for the evening. Eli was chopping the vegetables for the spag bol and started to laugh because the courgette looked a bit funny, in fact it wasn't courgette but cucumber. All was Ok though we could do without courgette. The bolognese was well on its way when Ben asked Eli to pour the pasta in to the boilng water in the pan, Eli poured in the pasta and they both shouted in horror as hundreds of cockroachy/ant things were swarming around in the bottom of the pan. A quick check of the other bags of pasta and we reailsed they were everywhere, we had nothing else so we set about picking out the ants of the remaining pasta and decided they added extra nutrition, always look on the bright side hey! This was turning in to the worlds worst meal! The boys noticed on the first day that the jeep was swarming with ants and cockroaches but thought it was best not to tell the girls!! On the night we played a drinking game called F**k Yeah' which was introduced by a Dutch guy and is very funny but we won't go into the details just now! By about 2am and around 12 hours of drinking everyone was in bed, so Ben, Chris & Marcus did their usual, wake the camp up making Dingo noises! After having dingos in the camp earlier in the night one of the girls, Emma, was a little scared and woke Lisa up to make her go to the loo with her (well dig a hole in the sand, and then cover it up, no toilets on Fraser)!

We spent the last day on Fraser at Lake McKenzie, which was beautiful but really busy. The sand was really fine and white and the water was clear and cool. Being fresh water too, you didn't have to worry about the jellyfish or sharks, yeah!! So we did lots of swimming and Frisbee games in the lake. Then after lunch we had to head back to the port!

On the night we got back, we had a little alcohol left, the hostel was licensed so we couldn't drink it there, so we asked around for a BYO restaurant. We took BYO to a new level, with a bursting Esky full of goon and beer. We ended up getting pizza and getting absolutely trashed. Then we headed to the obligatory 'park bench' for some more drinking, despite knowing there was a good chance we'd get fined (you get fined for everything in Oz) for drinking on the streets. We then saw one of the most random things, there was gym equipment in the park, by the side of the road. So we all had a drunken workout which was very funny, then headed back to the bar for more drinks. It ended rather late and Ben & Swedish Chris ended up falling asleep on some benches in the hostel. Everybody had a sore head the next day so we all headed to the beach for the day before saying our goodbyes in the evening after a fantastic few days with some brilliant people! We then hopped on a bus to Airlie Beach.