Fraser Day 3

Burning off on the island

Even the sign is smoldering

Lake Wabby and the sandblow coming in

Smoke haze over the sandblow

Trees getting slowly covered by sand

Trudging up the sandblow

We felt lazy this morning so decided to hang around the campsite and relax this morning – it’s a funny feeling when everyone else leaves en masse either to sightsee or go to the ferry and you’re left alone. Then a few new people arrive – some of them having their first beer after setting up at 10am! After breakfast we played some boardgames then headed off on another bouncy bumpy inland drive to Lake Wabby. It’s beautiful forest to drive through (and it keeps changing) but I can’t say that I subscribe to the 4WD enthusiasts’ idea of driving just for the fun of driving. It’s fun on the bumpy sand for about 5 minutes, 10 at a push, and then I just find it annoying and tiring (and I wasn’t even driving) because you’re being constantly thrown around and have to drive quite slow. Having said that, as Nick commented, it’s great here because there’s a bit of everything – beach, lakes, rivers, woodland, rainforest etc.

We did the short walk down to and around Lake Wabby which was nice but hard work on the sand dunes – or sandblow as this one is called. It is slowly encroaching, moving inland at 1m a year, and as it comes it slowly covers plants, kills them which clears the way for more sand to come in. The funny thing is that on the top of the dunes that are coming in there are now new plants starting to grow, and the cycle starts again…. We also saw two goannas along the walk, plus one at the campsite mooching around for scraps. They seem so plentiful that I’m wondering if they have any predators, although Nick thought dingoes might eat them. There’s burning off going on here too at the moment (at least we think it’s burning off), very close to some of the roads, and it means that the smoke is so thick it covers the sun often so everything is hazy, and the light comes through the thick foliage with a very red tinge, kind of eerie. It wasn’t that warm either today (maybe why they were burning off) – although Nick pointed out that on Friday while we were at Rainbow Beach the water temperature was 20 degrees, whereas the maximum temp in Canberra was 15 degrees……