April ended up being the perfect storm of public holidays and friends visiting. Beginning the weekend of April 1st, I was out of town 4 out of 5 weekends. Exhausting, yes, but I was thrilled to get the chance to visit great destinations with wonderful friends. Exploring Fraser Island, the world's largest all sand island, was adventure number one.
Kelvin was my adventure partner for this trip. He's a medical school student in Texas and had two weeks off for spring break, which he decided to spend in Australia. Kelvin's real claim to fame, however, is not the fact that he will be a doctor in a couple of years. His real claim to fame is that he is a co-founder of MABAS, the Madison Area Beer Appreciation Society. If that sounds vaguely and strangely familiar, it's because I mentioned it in a previous post when another co-founder, Craig, visited. While it may sound a bit high brow, MABAS was a tongue in cheek name for good company and conversation over beers and board games.
We spent a couple days together in Melbourne before departing for Queensland. On the Tuesday that Kelvin was around, Linnea and I brought him to our favourite recent discovery: New Brew Tuesday. Every week, a nearby pub (Forester's) hosts a local brewery. That brewery pours free samples of their beer for attendees while giving a talk about the history of the brewery and specifics about each beer. The event is a lovely slice of beer geekdom that delights veteran MABAS members, such as Kelvin and me, and has lead to new MABAS recruits. Anyway, after Kelvin and I had a bit of fun in Melbourne, we headed interstate.
On the way to the airport, I received a phone call. It was the tour company, Cool Dingo Tours, who we were scheduled to explore Fraser Island with the following day. You may remember that Cyclone Debbie hit Australia around the time that we were traveling and, unfortunately, we were heading in its direction. The cyclone made landfall in the Whitsundays, over 500 miles from Hervey Bay, our intended destination that night. However, the entire Queensland coast south of the Whitsundays was going to be impacted by the cyclone because the low pressure system would head south after reaching continental Australia. This meant torrential rain and likely flooding. Our Thursday tour was cancelled and we were booked on the Friday tour with no guarantee that it would happen. We hastily attempted to change our flights to go somewhere completely different, but it was too last minute to make that happen. We headed to Brisbane and crossed our fingers.
After an evening in Brisbane, we steeled ourselves and drove north. It rained extremely hard all day, but we got lucky and none of the roads on our route were flooded. We arrived in Hervey Bay and went to the beach to meet the storm head on. I'm surprised I didn't fly away:
Even though Hervey Bay and Fraser Island were both battered by the storm on Thursday, our tour began Friday without a hitch. It turns out that an all sand island is the perfect place to be after a big storm - much of coastal Queensland was flooding, but we were fine because you can't flood a sand island. We spent a couple of days driving around the island with Davey from Cool Dingo Tours. I can't recommend them enough. Davey was knowledgeable and endlessly entertaining. Fraser Island is a fascinating place, so I'd like to share a few neat nature (aka neature) facts that I learned during my tour.
- The island formed over hundreds of thousands of years of sand building up on a few large volcanic rocks.
- You'd think that an all sand island can't have much vegetation, and generally you'd be correct. However, Fraser Island is an exception. There are rainforests and eucalyptus and mangrove woodlands. This flora is able to get nutrients from fungus that lives in the sand.
- The dingoes on Fraser Island are the purest dingoes in Australia, meaning there aren't any dogs in their family tree. Dogs aren't allowed on the island to keep it this way. We kept an eye out for dingoes while driving around, but we weren't lucky enough to see any.
- To my surprise, there are lakes on the island! They're called perched lakes. They form when organic matter hardens to create an impermeable layer on top of the sand. Because they're filled with only rainwater, they are very acidic and nothing can live in them. This results in extremely clean and clear water.
That's enough neature facts for now. Ask me about Fraser Island if you want to know more :)
We spent our couple of days on the island driving around, hiking, and getting to know our fellow travelers. A highlight was a joy flight around the island that took off from and landed on the beach. Fun fact: Fraser Island is one of two places in the world where you can do this. The other is a beach in Scotland.
After our couple of days on the island, we drove back to Brisbane to have a wander. We tracked down the best-looking brewery near the city (Green Beacon Brewing) and enjoyed a beer before heading to the airport. Kelvin was off to Cairns and then Sydney while I had to make my way back to Melbourne. I was sad to part ways, but I have a feeling that the powers of MABAS will bring us back together sooner than we think.