Fraser Island Trees - day 3

It's not often you wake and look up to a circle of blue sky fringed with rainforest leaves way, way up high above you.  And it's not often you glance sideways from your breakfast and clock a huge lace monitor ambling past on its morning patrol.

Today we ventured over the wildest sand roads yet, littered with wrenched off mud flaps, to visit Lake Wabby. This a mild section of Fraser road, photo taken while not having to hang on to something.

Lake Wabby is a "barrage" lake, formed when a huge sandblow dammed a creek near the beach.  It is deep and green and has big black fish. What fish were they? Who knows? Environmental information on F.I. is appallingly scant.  Eco-tourism is in its infancy here. Apart from the tour bus day trippers, most of the visitors seem to be rev-heads with monster 4WDs, crates of beer and huge fishing rods.  They camp in groups along the beach under various flags, their dunny tents tied down against the fierce winds.

The bush surrounding Lake Wabby features spectacular scribbly gums.

Some of them with rather disturbingly anatomical galls.

Here are some portraits of a few other F.I. trees. Skip this bit if trees are boring as batshit for you. We love trees, and their diverse barks were endlessly photogenic for me. Below is the deeply furrowed satinay.

This is the constantly wet kauri, it has beautiful smoothish bark, usually covered with lichens.

This one is called "slash pine" and seems to have been planted around Central Station, as we didn't see it elsewhere.

This is hoop pine, native to F.I.

This fig was covered in staghorns.

This plantation of hoop pine was spectacular.

As was this one of - grey gums?

We saw a tree that appeared to have had a canoe cut from it by the Butchulla people, who called this place K'gari, meaning paradise. That is, until us white folks came. Us white folks exploited paradise for many years. Actually, maybe we're still doing it.  This tree seemed to have survived an attempt at ring-barking.

In the afternoon of day 3, we demonstrated to ourselves why it is impracticable to stay at one end of Fraser and attempt to visit places at the other end on the same low tide. By the time we got to Indian Head, it was time to go back. But the beach driving was fun, we both had a go. On the way, we had a good look at the wreck of the Maheno, a former passenger liner which lies on the beach, slowly biodegrading.

Interior shot.  Later we came upon a sign saying you were not allowed within 3 m of the wreck. Whoops.

Near the Maheno, we met Troy, a third generation F.I. pilot, who says he's afraid of heights, but spends every day taking off and landing his 8-seater from just a few metres of beach, no runway, no guys with paddles, just a couple of witches hats on the hardest bit of sand he can find. Intrepid.

Rover enjoyed the day.  And we were glad after all that we spent all that money on new tyres and ball joints....