After the Cyclone blew over while I was in Noosa for a week, I made my way to Rainbow Beach (which would be the launching point to Frazier Island). Frazier Island is the single largest sand island in the world. It is almost 100 Kilometers long and sustains an impressive rainforest and many lakes of all shapes and sizes. Once again, the thing that is incredible about this place is that it’s made of sand, not soil. So when you are kicking along in the jungle, it won’t be dirt, it will be white sand. This place is home to 4 foot lizards, March flies (horse flies) and Dingoes. But first let’s talk more about the nature of this trip.
Australia is similar to New Zealand in the sense that they believe in realized normal amounts of danger. This means that if you are going to go off road-ing, they assume that you are going to act responsibly and follow the directions they give. There isn’t the same American court system of at will law suits here. The individual doesn’t have a super power over the small business. This makes the self guided tour possible. It is normal to see semi dangerous events and destinations be sold to tourists as self guided.
In the case of Frazier Island, you are loaded up with 10 other strangers, camping equipment, and a Toyota Land Cruiser for a 3 day 3 night adventure. There is an equipment count and check before you leave for the island and anything that is lost or broken at the end is paid for by the group of 11 evenly. There is a worst case scenario insurance that is purchased for the group that only activates in the case that the vehicle is completely destroyed, then the $1000 deductible is split between the 11 people evenly. If anything else happens to the car or equipment, then the group pays in full. If the $4,000 engine breaks, pay in full. If the $3,000 suspension breaks, pay in full. If you drive on the beach during high tide and the car gets swallowed by the ocean, pay in full.
They say that about 50 of these vehicles are rolled each season by self guided tours and we would be entering the island on the first day after the cyclone. The guide at the tour shop said that we could come upon some pretty interesting things on the beach after a cyclone, from turtles to great white sharks, to even whales washed up dead on the shores. But before we get to the island we must first meet the group of travelers that will be sharing the responsibility of the Land Cruiser.
Staring down a table of my suspected peers, I patiently watched the safety video for Frazier Island. I knew that my sole deciding point of how my Frazier Island experience would be based upon this group of 10 others. The place could be hailing and with the right group be the best 3 days to date on my trip. On the other hand, nothing sours a trip more quickly than a group of people who you don’t get along with. I arrived to the rainbow beach hostel “Pippies” early that day to find that 90% of the guests were English. I watched a movie with the others in my hostel and figured out that they were all English, and not particularly friendly. This has nothing to do with their Englishness, only to do with the idea that they already knew each other and had no reason to be outgoing. There were a few people on the other hand that were kind enough to acknowledge my existence. I wasn’t shaken up at all because of my Byron Bay growth session.
The tour company also owned Pippie’s so the same people who checked us into our rooms were the people giving us our safety briefing about the island (that was a short ferry ride away).
The Hotsel/Travel woman said “Take a look at everyone at this table, they are going to be your best friends for the next three days. I suggest you get to know each other.” So there I was, staring down the table of 10 other who would either be best friends with me in 3 days time, or would be scars on my memory of Frazier Island forever.
I made a few off color jokes to test the waters right away and received a few uncomfortable responses, but the group had potential. Little did I know that this group would end up being perfectly balanced for my vulgar/blunt/sarcastic/mean/erotic/random humor.
For starters, we ended up naming our group team face ______ (use your imagination). The trip was rainy, the trip was covered in horse flies, the trip was infiltrated by dingoes. The trip was 3 of the most fun and random days that I have had in Australia by far. No amount of typing would do justice for the chemistry that our group had. 9 English, 1 Canadian, and one very Funny American (ME!)
One of the highlights of the trip was singing Whitney Huston at the top of our lungs (“I Have Nothing” while off-road-ing though the Jungle. As soon as the you-tube vide emerges, I’ll be sure to post it on this page. But there was also great beautiful lakes like lake McKenzie, a crystal clear lake around the rim with a deep blue center. But the most memorable lake took about 40 minutes to hike to. I don’t remember the name of the lake but it was dark green and surrounded by ultra high sand dunes on one side and thick jungle on the other side. Its waters were infested with naturally occurring catfish that would swim up the surface almost close enough to the people to just reach out and grab.
Much of this trip has been learning about the backpackers who are traveling along side of me, not just in Frazier Island, but all over. I have an observation to make. Traveling for long time periods to many countries is not as special and rare to an English person as it is to say an American person. Rightfully so, there has been a number thrown around by the international crowd that less than 20% of Americans even have a passport. The number tends to change every time, but the message is still the same, Americans don’t travel, they vacation. They go to a resort for a week or two and never leave the pool for the most part. I agree with that statement whole heartedly, but when you are the CEO of the international community, you simply can’t afford to take the time off. But when you do find an American traveling alone, they are usually pretty well informed and interesting. But that (an American traveling alone) is just as rare as those individuals.
Here’s my point. In England, it’s normal to travel for months on end, say after college or high school. Therefore, you get 20-30 English for every American abroad. 99% of those Americans are very informed and educated, while only maybe 10% of those English people are informed or educated. So who else is abroad? Well, those annoying fraternity boys who you hate in college, they travel if they are English. The nice folks who don’t have a very big vision or ambition in life, they travel in England. The culturally inept people too, they love to travel. This isn’t a mark against the English, it’s just that you will find a very diverse population of them while traveling, because it is thoroughly engrained into their identity and the American identity just doesn’t have it. So all of our culturally inept individuals and all of our exclusively booze lusting individuals just tend to stay at home.
I found myself informing people about how the moon controls the tides (something that I thought everyone learns in 5th grade) and a bunch of other well known facts when talking to the English folk. But in that group were also those amazing individuals who were very well informed and very cultured. It’s a much more mixed bag than I had expected.
Back to the island, we ended up attracting about 5 other camp sites to party with us in the night, complete with pink face paint, inter gender wrestling matches and sing alongs. We constantly had dingoes walking through our camp ground and even devised a plan to catch one with our extra spaghetti. In case you haven’t seen a dingo before, they look a lot like scrawny dogs, but apparently in the 80s one ate someone’s baby so they are treated like dangerous animals now.