About Cornwall

Here I am once again writing the tales of my Australian adventure from the comfort of the lovely Michael and Clare's in Sydney. The backpack has been put to rest whilst I base myself in this great city for another month or two whilst I work in a café in the city to earn back all the dollars that I spent on my East Coast adventure.

So life will be going back to a familiar routine for a bit, till I'm off up the coast again in September to meet my very good friend Nicola. She is coming all the way out from Cornwall to see me for two weeks, oh what fun we're going to have.

This beach runs the length of the east coast of the island and it acts as the main road – so you have to treat it like any other road by signaling and adhering to speed limits. Due to the island being made of sand you have to have a 4WD vehicle – we named ours Arthur and he did us proud.

We were a group of eight girls and we had just one guy, I think at times he felt a bit scared by all of us but he came out of it alive. Nay, the guy and I were the only ones alowed to drive so I had a lot of fun whizzing along the beach and sand tracks – obviously adhering to speed limits at all times.

We were there for three days in total and everyday was jam packed with things to do; seeing amazing lakes, creeks and the stunning coastline. Every night we had to set up our camp and then it got to dinner time and without a doubt every dish got served with a side of sand – whether you wanted it not. Being in a sandy environment constantly without having any washing facilities, I got sand in places I didn't even know sand could get.

The sea incident happened when we left Arthur parked too close to the incoming tide and by the time we came back the waves hard started to lap onto his wheels and before we knew it, they had made it to the front of him – you can just imagine a bunch of girls freaking out at the thought of our vehicle being taken by the sea. We had two reasons to be worried, one being that we didn't have the keys to move Arthur (the guy in the group had them and he was still not back) and the other was that one of the rules when you have a hired a 4WD on Fraser is that you do not by any means let it go in the sea, if you do then you chance losing your $1000 bond – now you can see why we needed to move Arthur as soon as possible.

First we attempted to move him by using our 'women power' and pushing – this achieved us a couple of inches, but god it’s hard to move a 4WD on wet sand with just four girls. By a miracle a 4WD bus was near by and we managed to get them to tow us out of the wet sand and back to dry land. In doing this though the van then got stuck and we all had to push that. All of this was quite daunting at the time, but looking back on it now makes me giggle.

We shooed it away by making lots of loud noises and jumping around and we thought that we had succeeded, but little did we know that whilst we were looking one way the Dingo came around the back of the 4WD and jumped into it and took our bag of our rubbish and ran off. I just caught it in the act out of the corner of my eye but there was nothing we could do – so the Dingo had a tasty dinner that night.

These Dingo's run wild on Fraser Island and they are wild animals so they must be treated so – they can attack if provoked. 

Apart from these two minor hiccups we all had an amazing time and if you ever come to Australia you must visit this magnificent island.

Rachael's nest stop was Noosa in Queensland. Click on the link below to read more...