50 year Backpacker – side post #2 – K’gari formerly known as Fraser Island formerly known as K’gari, Queensland, Australia.
If you’ve read all of my 50 year Backpacker posts – which I doubt and I really don’t blame you if you haven’t – you would remember that originally I was blogging about my wife and my trip around the world to celebrate both my 50th birthday year and the fact that I love travelling.
I’ve numbered this post side post #2 to go along with my last post, side post #1, as they aren’t necessarily ‘canon’ (a term I’ve never quite fully understood which therefore may not be appropriately used here, who knows – probably the ‘canon’ police) to the overall 50 Year Backpacker story. Both side posts #1 and #2 are just, as the names suggest, just little side posts.
This post is just about a trip my wife and I did over the Easter long-weekend, after this I’m likely to go back to blogging about the round-the-world trip my wife and I did, which is currently stuck in Vietnam around the time of Vietnamese Independence Day celebrations, which, coincidentally, have also had a 50 year anniversary celebration (it could be the 500th year celebration by the time you read this).
We, my wife and I – we’re back on topic now and NOT talking about Vietnamese independence but our trip a few weeks ago – took a trip up to Hervey Bay in Queensland.
We live in Queensland at the moment. Down on the Gold Coast, with our beautiful beaches – which have been a bit washed away recently with a cyclone. Thanks to decades of climate change inaction this is probably not going to be an usual occurrence in the coming years.
Australia is wonderful. Queensland is wonderful. Both places have many wonderfully amazing places to visit. And if you visit Queensland, you’ll be visiting both those wonderful places.
The beaches around South-East Queensland are amazing, especially just up the street from us where I walk most evenings and sometimes in the morning. It’s left me very spoilt, and so far, I haven’t been overly impressed with any of the beaches I’ve seen in my journeys outside of Australia. Even on the Greek Islands of Samos and Ikaria, where I thought the beaches might be nice. Although they do like a bit of nude sunbathing on some of these islands which I’m rather fond of.
And Hervey Bay, and nearby K’gari island, are some of the most beautiful parts of Queensland. I last went to Hervey Bay and K’gari in 1994, you can read parts of that trip in The Adventure of Kosio & Juanito (& Corinne) – a novel of sorts about fishing, love and life.
K’gari was then known as Fraser Island, however the Butchulla people, the Traditional Owners of K’gari, lived on the island for at least 5,000 years, and potentially as long as 50,000 years, so I think it’s much more respectful to now call the island the name K’gari, again!
To pronounce K’gari you apparently drop the ‘K’ and just call it ’gari.
On my last visit to K’gari my travel companion and I hitched around the Island. I think we may be some of the only people to ever have hitchhiked around K’gari Island. Certainly don’t attempt to hitchhike around the island. I don’t know what we were thinking! But we did it because on the way to the island I saw an eagle and I knew it would be fine. I really believe in the power of eagles, but still, don’t hitchhike around K’gari. For one, probably no one will give you a lift anymore and aslo, like back when we did it, there’s a bunch of permits and things you need to have to stay and camp on the island, so if you just rock up there and camp like we did you will probably get in trouble.
My wife and I, 31 years after my last trip, did a much more sensible option of going on a day trip to K’gari departing from Hervey Bay.
Initially I thought a day visit to K’gari might not do it justice, but both my wife and I were quite happy and comfortable with our day trip. We got to swim in Mckenzie Lake, also known as Boorangoora, and, in reference to naming K’gari, K’gari, rather than the European name, we should probably also just call Boorangoora Boorangoora.
Boorangoora lake is one of the most amazing places I have seen in my entire life. The water is so blue and clear, nice and warm, soft on the skin, fresh, the sand on the shores so white, the surrounding forest so pristine, apart from all the 4 wheel drives and tour buses (like ours) parked in the car park, which was rather full over the Easter long weekend we were there.
K’gari is certainly pristine, wild and wonderfully beautiful. It is, however, like many places in the world, including Australia, lucky to still be there in such good condition.
It survived decades of logging, proposals to mine it for its minerals and other such environmental vandalism. Culturally, the Butchulla Aboriginal people were dispossessed of the island and the traditional custodians stripped of all say over the island for many, many years. Too long.
I had no idea when I travelled there back in 1994, when I knew it as Fraser Island, and I’m happy as an Australian that the name the local people gave it has been reinstated – hence the title of this blog ‘K’gari formerly known as Fraser Island formerly known as K’gari’.
But back to this day trip. We organised it when we were sitting in a cafe in Hervey Bay on Good Friday. My wife was fasting for the morning, and watched on as I ordered a bacon and egg roll and a flat white with almond milk. She picked up a brochure on the bench, scanned the QR code, which we are all so adept at now post-COVID, and organised the trip for Sunday. It was a few hundred bucks each but included the ferry across from River Heads over to the Kingfisher Bay Resort where we got into a big tour bus with great big tyres on it which are needed to navigate the sand roads that run across the island.
Being Good Friday we’d decided to get fish and chips that evening, which resulted in my wife fasting for a bit longer than she had expected as they took about 1.30-2 hours to get our order in. I think we finally got it around 8pm and quickly scoffed down the red emperor and whiting, potato scallops, crumbed prawns (for me, my wife is allergic to them), and a crumbed pineapple ring.
We ate them down by Urangan Pier, which is another beautiful spot around there. We’d walked the pier the night before. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the end. As you imagine, it’s very long. Unless you were thinking we are really, really slow walkers.
As mentioned, the K’gari island went to Boorangoora lake first, which is a short walk from the carpark. We veered left at a fork in the path when we saw most people were going right and were glad to take the path less travelled as we landed a little bit away from the Easter crowds lounging around on the beach.
Some local park rangers, Indigenous mob, were keeping an eye on things around the lake, trying to find whoever was sending up drones for example, and they came down to where we were sitting.
‘You got the best spot here!’ said one of the rangers.
‘I know!’ I said.
After Boorangoora lake we headed off for a nice little rainforest walk with our bus driver and tour guide, then headed across to the Eastern side of the island to another resort where we had a nice buffet lunch, including, for me, lashings of cottage pie. There’s also a little store in that area so we were able to quickly rush in after lunch and grab a few fridge magnets, something I was too snobby and pretentious to buy back in 1994. And possibly also too poor to get, I was mostly just on the dole and had only come on that trip with a few weeks worth of money that I’d earned working on the farm of Bev and Peter Brock down in Nutfield Victoria where I had met Corinne, my Swiss travelling companion.
It was a far cry from what my travel companion and I had when we were camping on the island back in 1994, right on Eli Creek. Back then I think we might of just had some bread, a few apples and eggs, some cans of beans, and maybe some tea, and sugar, or something like that.
I’m sure we also had some melted chocolate bars, as Corinne was Swiss and always had a bit of chocolate bars in her backpack, most likely Cadbury or something as back in 1994 Lindt and other Swiss chocolates weren’t as readily available as they are now.
Back in 94 we also had some campers who were camping near us who shared some fish, or something, with us that they had cooked up on their campfire.
We didn’t even have that much water with us back then and ended up drinking water from Eli Creek for a few nights. Supposedly it is fresh enough to drink. But I wouldn’t rely on it if I were you as critters still probably poop in it and I’m sure there’d potentially be a few parasites in there, especially in the lower reaches of the creek where it heads out to sea and more people bathe in it.
We survived though, so the water must have been good enough.
Corinne, my Swiss friend, did get sick one night and the next day we had to head off to Hervey Bay to get her checked out. It may have been the water, but it could have been the lack of food, or sunstroke or something. She thought it also may have been a recurrence of some malaria she’d picked up in South America on a trip with her husband years earlier. She thought she might also be pregnant but a later test in Hervey Bay ruled that out.
Yes, she was married, and yes the possibility that she was pregnant would not have involved her husband.
If you want the chismes (gossip) go read a fictionalised version of the trip. Well most of it is roughly true: The Adventure of Kosio & Juanito (& Corinne) – a novel of sorts about fishing, love and life.
The day trip my wife and I were on that day, stopped for a bit at Eli Creek. It was a bit rushed, but sufficient to allow us to go down the creek a bit and swim down towards the ocean two times. If you do go to the island it is worth staying at least for a couple of nights so you don’t have to rush such things. You’d also get to be there at night when the beach highway closes and you’re just left with the stars, sounds of the ocean and crackle of the campfire. But still, our day trip was great and really recharged the batteries.
On the way to Eli Creek we saw a couple of dingoes, one was cooling off a bit in the surf, which is quite rough on the Eastern, ocean facing side of the K’gari. We also saw a dingo jogging along in between the 4-wheel drives which race up and down the beach on that side of the island. It didn’t seem too concerned.
Back in 1994 I think I only saw one dingo in the few nights we were there. There was some sort of sand drift near our camp which I was exploring and I think I saw it in the distance. I’m sure I saw one somewhere. But it’s a long time ago now.
Eli Creek is so beautiful. It’s a freshwater creek where pristine water, filtered for decades through the sand and trees, runs through the forest and out into the ocean. Back in 1994 we managed to walk a couple of kilometres up the creek exploring one day.
After Eli Creek, the tour bus headed across to the West side of the island again, through the narrow forest roads that traverse the island and back to our ferry at Kingfisher Bay Resort, where we were just in time for the sunset followed by a nice calm ferry ride back to River Heads.
And that’s it, side post #2 is done. I might try and do a few more of these ones on short trips we do in Australia, just to spice things up a bit. Next post, I plan to get back to the Vietnam leg of the 50 Year Backpacker trip! Though the comfort level has changed, I’m still backpacking after all these years!
