Wishing you were here
Posted by Ray @ 5:27 pm(Long-ish post. To compensate for the gobs of text, there will be purty pictures.)
Spent the last 6D/5N on a trip to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island. I’ll skip the beautiful lookout from the Glasshouse Mountains, because pretty as they were, they’re nothing compared to…
Whale-watching
Every year, thousands of Southern Humpback whales migrate north from the cold waters of Antarctica to give birth to their young in warmer climates. They stay down there because of an abundance of their food supply, but they come up to give birth because their young have not had time to develop the thick layer of blubber necessary to survive the freezing waters near the south pole.
On their way back south, they often take a pit-stop at Platypus Bay, an area that’s protected by Fraser Island to the east, and the Australian mainland to the west and south. There, boat operators take people like me right up to these giant, acrobatic creatures as they frolick and play in the shallow, warm waters of the bay.
And oh, how they play!
A humpback whale’s pectoral fin is a third the length of the entire whale. The whale itself can grow up to 15m long, so you can imagine how big the fin can get. One of the things it likes to do is roll on its side, stick its pectoral fin out of the water and slap it down.
The pectoral fin slap (Right-click here and select “Save as…” to download a video)
It makes a fairly large splash! The videos don’t show it, but those things are big. There’s also this one time when mommy whale lifted a pectoral fin to slap it… and ended up rolling on her belly because she lost balance.
The humpback does a variety of other things at the surface. They like to bring their tails out of the water and thrash them around - that makes for some big splashes. They like to hover at the surface, breathing, reminding us of how they got their names.
Call me Humpback - a mother and calf
They like to come up fearlessly to the boats and swim past us.
Mommy, about 10m from our boat
They like to go down into the water, and in a great lunge, propel themselves bodily out of the sea.
Yes, you read that right. Check it out!
A calf playfully leaping out of the water
It is a spectacular thing to see 2 tons of living creature heave itself out of the water and come crashing down again scant metres from where you stand.
From one pretty thing to another… our next stop, World Heritage Site:
Fraser Island!
The native Butchulla people named the island K’gari. In their language, it means “paradise”.
The view from Indian Heads (large image here)
No kidding.
Fraser Island is just one giant sand blow, upon which a remarkable variety of environments reside. Driving around, one can literally go from desert, to beach, to forest, to (I swear) rainforest. An honest-to-goodness rainforest, complete with high humidity and that Pulau Tekong smell. Only it was cooler, thank god!
It’s also really big, stretching more than 150km from northern tip to southern tip, and getting up to 25km wide in places.
Lake McKenzie
Fraser Island’s main attraction is the magnificent Lake Mckenzie, a clear freshwater lake with beaches of pure white sand.
Yes, that’s the water in the lake (photo credit: Hannah)
Our time on Fraser Island was spent visiting various freshwater lakes (all of which are different), and swimming in ‘em.
Lake Boomanjin (large image here)
The largest lake on Fraser Island has red water. It’s weird to open your eyes inside it because everything will look yellow-red. It’s also very, very shallow.
The shallow, red waters… look how shallow it is!
Lake Garawongera (large image here)
Garawongera is a wonderful lake to swim in; the only thing is, it has algae growing on the bottom. Algae that tickles your feet in a very disturbing manner, thus causing intrepid swimmers, in an effort to keep their feet off their floor, to swim in waters 50cm deep.
Boomerang Lake (large image here)
Boomerang Lake is unswimmable due to a lack of access points; its claim to fame, instead, is being the highest perched lake in the world (a perched lake being, a lake which is higher than the water table it serves).
Lake Wabby
Lake Wabby is a small inland lake that is shrinking due to the encroaching sand blow. It’s also one of the last places you’d expect to find a lake - smack in the border between desert and forest (themselves an incongruous pairing). Tame fish and turtles would swim up when they heard us talking on the surface, but the main attraction at this lake was the ridiculously still water.
Picture perfect
The first time we hit the eastern side of the island, we had to stop and gawk. The aptly-named 70-mile-beach is just that; over 100km of undisturbed, pristine beach facing the Southern Pacific Ocean. It’s so long that even on the clearest of days you can’t see the ends.
The never-ending beach (photo credit: Amelia)
The beach is so long that during low tide, planes carrying tourists use it as a landing strip.
Along 70-mile beach is the wreck of the Maheno; a ship that a cyclone washed ashore. The only thing to note is that it smelled fishy.
Rotting carcass
Our trusty Toyota Landcruiser (the old V8 diesel model) was the vehicle of choice on the island; its fuel-guzzling engine served us well in the soft dry sand.
We aren’t supposed to be doing this
Our Landcruiser shields us from the ocean winds (photo credit: Hannah)
Being right next to a beach that faces the sunrise, we decided to wake up early to witness the dawn. Clambering down to the beach, groggy-eyed and musty-mouthed from the night’s rest, we saw…
Daylight, see the dew on the sunflower (photo credit: Wilbert)
…
There are so many other cool things on Fraser Island; at night, goannas (big, mottled lizards) would scuttle around the camp looking for food; dingoes would roam the beaches; people would dig up piccies (a kind of shellfish) to eat; cockatoos and parakeets would fly about; the list goes on.
Lake Albion had cute turtles that would come up to the shore, but run away when we went in to chase them. At night, you could look up and see the milky way, along with so many stars you couldn’t begin to count them all. Dolphins herded a school of fish into a cave; soon later, a hungry shark found nothing to eat.
The sand of Lake McKenzie, soft and white to the touch. The fresh smell of foliage and sea. The roar of the Pacific Ocean.
Against our will, we had to leave.
Farewell, K’gari (large image here)
Gotta love Australia.
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I got to see humpback whales (as well as finbacks) as well when I was in Boston earlier this year. It was incredible, I could’ve stayed there for hours just watching them.
Comment by ~Z~ — Sunday, October 9 2005 @ 9:31 pm
[…] I’m pretty sure humpbacks actually look like this. Link. […]
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