Alex's travel blog

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Next, I stayed at a small place called Rainbow beach. I was attracted by what I'd read about the coloured cliffs, and I was keen to stay in a small village for a change. I spent a full day there, during which I walked up a huge sand dune. What I wanted more than anything was a day laying on the beach doing nothing - I hadn't done that yet on my travels. Unfortunately it was a bit chilly for sunbathing. And this is supposed to be Australia!

For the next 3 days I was on a trip to Fraiser Island. The hostel organises people into groups of 10 or so, the group hires a 4 wheel drive and heads to the island on their own. I had a very friendly group with lots of lovely people in, but unfortunately also some extremely whingy girls. We were also pretty useless, as you'll see. This is the group.

On day 1 we drove to a lake which wasn't particularly inspiring. Then we drove to another lake which looked really nice. The sand was very white and the water was the clearest I'd ever seen. We swam and frolicked for a bit. We then headed to the campsite. Of course, I had no idea now to put the tents up. Staning back and looking on objectively, it was hilarious watching the others' attempts to assemble them. It didn't help that it was getting dark. We finally managed it, though. We then plugged our light into the car and had a delicious barbeque. Someone set up their iPod and speakers, so you could just hear quiet, tinny music if you stood next to the speakers. Everything was prepared for a party! It was a fun night. I wished I'd bought more alcohol. The drink of choice were these boxes of wine, which apparantly are called 'goons' (this was news to me). I shared a box with someone, which gave me the equivalent of half a bottle of wine per night. I thought this should have been plenty...but a lot of the others had brought 2 boxes each. So I lagged behind on the drunkenness. Later, when I was ready to go to bed, I found there were already 2 couples 'sleeping together' in the tent! This was inconvenient. I had under the flaps of the tents with some of the others, and went to bed later.

I'm rather jumping ahead of myself. Fraiser Island is the largest sand island in the world. It's pretty big - we got nowhere near seeing all of it in 3 days. Then again, we spent most of that time faffing. It's hard to beleive it's all sand: there's a standard size beach, and the rest of the interior of the island is covered in forest. We spent the first night in a campsite deep in the forest. The eastern beach is the main highway and is heavily trafficked by tourists like us. There are some extremely bumpy inland tracks which were great fun to drive over - I wish I could have gone faster but I was worried about moaning coming from the back. The sea is shark-infested, but there are loads of lakes dotted about the island which are great for swimming. One species native to the island is the dingo (below), which are an evolutionary relick of dogs before they attached themselves to humans (I think).

We had watched an extremely patronising video before leaving. One of it's main points which was repeated over and over again was DON'T FEED THE DINGOS. We also weren't allowed to leave food boxes or rubbish bags outside during the night, because they can get food from that. Everyone else who talked to us about the trip mentioned this as well. God, how many times do you have to tell us?

So when we woke up in the morning, we discovered that one of our rubbish bags had been left out. We could have been heavily fined if a ranger had found out. My immediate reaction was that it wasn't my fault...but then I expect the others were thinking the same. The trouble was, there was no one in the group who acted as a leader.

We basically only managed to visit one lake, Lake MacKenzie (below), on day 2, but it was amazing. It was even more beautiful than the first day's and the sun was shining brightly. It was also extremely busy - it looked more like a beach at a popular resort town. I could have stayed there all day, but we needed to get moving because of tidal considerations and driving on the beach. We camped out just behind a sand dune at the back of the beach that night, and had a more sedate evening. The sky was clear and the stars were breathtaking: the Milky Way was so bright it looked like a cloud. The night sky is way better in the southern hemisphere, by the way.

When we woke up we discovered our food boxes had been left out. The dingos had taken everything they could in there: bread, sausages and, inexplicably, tomato ketchup. Again, I was sure it wasn't my fault...but thinking about it, I was one of the last people to leave the area where the boxes had been.

We had to fit a lot into that day because we'd been behind schedule on days 1 and 2. First we drove along the beach as far north as we could go, and climbed up the rocky outcrop there. I had decided to show a bit of maturity and try to organise the group, so I had written out an itinerary for the day. This sucked, though, because while people were enjoying the lovely places, I had to go round telling them we had to go. We then drove back down the beach, stopping at some colured sand-cliffs and this shipwreck.

Our last stop was another lake. This one was particularly exciting because running along it's length was a huge sand dune. We had hired a sand-board, and it was great fun sliding down and splashing into the lake, as shown here.
However, I spent most of the time there in a high state of stress. I was under the impression that the last ferry off the island was at 3 o'clock, and we were cutting it very fine. I told everyone what time we had to leave, at the latest, but no one really showed any urgancy. I don't think I'll bother taking on the leader role again. First, I didn't like acting like a schoolteacher. Secondly it didn't seem fair: everyone else knew that I was thinking about the time so they assumed it was under control. They didn't worry about it and could have lots of fun, leaving me to be stressed for the whole group. I became convinced we weren't going to make it in time. The island had been awesome, but I really didn't want to be stuck on it for another day. We were now out of food, I was out of clean clothes and felt dirty all over. I was correct, in that we got to the ferry after 3. But they were still running: the 3 o'clock thing had just been advice because of the tides and driving on the beach. I wish I'd known that before, it would have saved so much stress!

That evening was one of those coming-back-to-civilisation times. Having a shower, washing my clothes, eating a steak all felt absolutely divine.

I had one more day in Rainbow Beach before leaving. I walked down the beach with a guy from the group. We were looking for these coloured cliffs that the guidebook mentioned. We found them, but they were underwhelming. They were kind of stripy red and orange and yellow. Normally I would have been well impressed...but because of the town's name I had assumed, rather unrealistically, that the cliffs would have all the colours of the rainbow! We walked back and I spent some time on the beach. There were some huge waves and I had some great fun bobbing about in them (in the lifeguard-supervised zone, mum). I then wanted to lie sunbathing on the beach for hours, blissfully unaware of anything else. But it was too chilly again. Dammit!