Finding Myself Down Under: Part 2: Fraser Island

To all my Canadian friends who want a laugh, the high was 18C yesterday and some Australians that I met called it icy. People were decked out in thick hoodies, beanies and nothing more appropriate than... uggs.

Anyways, my exam schedule came out about two weeks ago and so this whole time I have been figuring out travelling plans afterwards along with school stuff (oh and a camping trip thrown in there too, will get to it eventually!). I now have a pretty solidifed itinerary (and it will remain a surprise until the time comes) but am still needing to sort out all the logistics. Needless to say, the next two months are going to be crazy and I can't wait!

Back to a month and half ago on April 2nd, I went on a 5 day field trip to the World Heritage listed Fraser Island with my Australia's terrestrial environment class. The journey to Fraser, the world's largest sand island, involved a bus to Inskip point and then a barge across the Great Sandy Strait. Imagine lots of lots sand and then some more and that was my first impression of Fraser. Quite fittingly, we were greeted upon arrival on the main beach by three wild dingoes (Fraser has the most pure breed of dingoes due to its isolation from the mainland and a ban of bringing domestic dogs to the island). There were no paved roads on the island, with the main beach being the highway and sand tracks traversing through the forests to get across the island. We stayed at the University of Sunshine Coast's campground, Dilli Village with some in tents and others in bunkhouses. The first night we had an Aussie trivia competition (questions that nobody could understand) with alcohol being the top prize (only in Australia).

Sand, sand everywhere

First glimpse of a wild dingo

Is this even English?

Over the next few days, our schedule loosely consisted of doing ecological sampling for our assignment for half of the day and exploring some part of the island for the other half. Our work included doing transects on the sand dunes, sclerophyll forests and rainforests (Fraser is the only place in the world where rainforests grow on sand, and I can tell you a lot more about why that is so because I wrote a 2000 paper on this but I will spare you the details), bird watching, small mammal capturing and insect collecting. Even though the trip involved quite a lot of work , it was really cool doing all these activities that were completely out of my field and I loved every minute of learning. There were so many epic memories (such as watching the goanna steal people's food and getting stuck in a mangrove swamp) but if I only had to pick one it would be driving back from Lake Mckenzie on the second last day along the main beach as the tide was coming in. I will let pictures do the rest of the talking.