2020-03-06 – Fraser Island

We parked our car at the barge parking lot in River Heads and caught the Kingfisher barge to Fraser Island.  

Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world.  It has no real rocks…it is all sand.  And it is massive.

After a 45 minute cruise we landed at the jetty at Kingfisher Resort...

and caught the people mover up to the lodge.  

We had a leisurely lunch poolside and were joined by a bar-shouldered dove looking for crumbs.

Then it was off to the beach for very first Segway ride.  The ride took us along Sunset Beach.  

It was just us and the ranger.  We took about 15 minutes learning how to control the Segways before we could start the tour. 

We had to maneuver around small (and occasionally almost large) depressions in the sand called sting ray wallows.  They are made by stingrays looking for crabs to eat.  They come up at high tide when the crabs have burrowed into the sand.  They apparently have sensors that can detect the crab heartbeats and when they have located lunch the settle over the site and wave their wings to dig a hole.

We also saw tons of the soldier crabs.  They are small and there were thousands.  However, it was hard to get close to them.  You would see swarms and as you walked towards them they would vanish.  They corkscrewed their way into the sand to escape. 

We also saw coffee rock, the only type of rock on the island.  It isn’t actually rock but a very hard substance that is a combination of organic matter and sand that has been compressed over time to resemble the texture of rock.  However, it is easily broken off and when you crumble it it looks just like coffee grounds.  Hence, the name.

Our next excursion was a sunset cruise along the Great Sandy Strait.  It was a lovely cruise, but we didn’t see much in the way of wildlife.  We saw one turtle come up for air a couple of times but he was a long ways off in the distance.

We also saw a white tern fishing for his dinner.

We did have a pretty magnificent sunset.  Really worth the time.

After landing we headed back to the main lodge for dinner.  However, no one seemed to have our dinner reservations at either of the restaurants.  One was able to seat us.  Dinner was good but they did have a pretty limited selection of vegetarian dishes.

Our room here is actually a rental villa.  It has a full kitchen, laundry, a sleeping loft plus a bedroom and a large deck.  The view is just of the trees…no beach view..

Couple of miscellaneous photos that seem to be worth including.  Bribie is a small island off the coast of Australia.