Survivor: Australia

Get comfortable, we have a lot of ground to cover, as we have been without wifi for 3 days. Without plumbing as well….

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Today we were up bright and early for our 7am pickup for Fraser Island. The day started off innocently enough. Picked up by our guide, Simon, who is a big hippy (we are talking like, he doesn’t own shoes) from Norway with a slight Irish accent.

I couldn’t stop calling him Chet, as he looked shockingly similar to a tour guide named Chet that Steph, Jorgie and I had in Peru who lit up a joint the second we got in his car. No relation though – I asked. Seemed like we were in for an interesting few days. We were taken to the DropBear tour office where we were shown a safety video that basically detailed how to not have your baby eaten by a dingo. The wild dingos on Fraser Island are the most pure native dingos you can find anywhere in Australia. Apparently they can get cray if you feed them. After the instructional video that is probably similar to one I will show in my “how not to be loser” seminar, we headed out on the road. Basically how this tour works is there are 4 jeeps and you just jump in one and switch off driving with everyone on the tour, while the guide leads. An Aussie caravan on the beach, if you will. Now I know what you all are thinking – will Rory manage to add another point to her license from across the world? Don’t worry, I did not drive. People were shocked Stina and I had no interest in driving until we explained we were from LA. Seven years of an hour commute each way is apparently the driving get of jail free card.

And we we were off! For about 20 minutes. When a tire fell off a car. Literally. The tire. Fell off. The car. Not the car I was in, but still too close for comfort. The guides with us called the office to inform them that we had some “car trouble”. Ummm. Car trouble is what you call it when a check engine light goes on, or your tire pressure runs low, or you run out of gas. I would call a fucking axel breaking and putting everyone in said car’s life in danger something more like “a major fucking accident”. If your entire business is based around people driving these cars onto and around an island, wouldn’t you think to, oh I don’t know, tighten a fucking lug nut? But then I realized we are in Australia, where they give only half a fuck about everything. So after our little snafu they put everyone in the three remaining cars and we just continued on our way, leaving broke ass car on the side of the road for the Company to come get at their earliest convenience.

A few hours up the coast, one rest break that took entirely too long and a ferry ride later and we were finally on Fraser Island!

Fraser Island. You lovely little Oasis of gloriousness. What shall we call you? The actual name of the island, given to it by the aboriginal people that first lived there before the white men ruined their lives, was K’gary, which translates to “Paradise”. As that is pretty damn accurate, we’ll go with Paradise. Now, Paradise is the largest sand island in the world, and the only one with a rainforest growing right on top of the sand. So you have miles and miles of beautiful, uninhabited beach, rain forests with trees big enough to walk through, and tons of amazing little lakes and streams to discover. It rocks. What did not rock, however, was lunch. Lunch every fucking day. Make your own wraps. Sounds great, huh? That’s because you are picturing a burrito right now. And rightfully so. What we were fed was a sad amalgamation of ham, shredded cheese, a few veggies, a can of corn with a fork in it, and mayo. It was sad. However the promise of a lake in the middle of a sand dune kept our spirits high.

We spent the afternoon at Wabby Lake. A drive down the beach and a quick 10 minute (read: 20 minute through the forest) hike and we were at a lake that was created in the middle of a giant sand dune. Apparently this is the lake where they aboriginal men used to come for bro time – no ladies were allowed. We swam, we tanned, we played the name game. Everyone in the group fawned over how fabulous our tans are. It was a pretty great afternoon.

After the lake we headed back to base camp where we all claimed our tents and got showered for dinner. To be specific, Stina and I showered, changed, arranged our tent (no we did not have to put it up) and got a drink before anyone else could figure out which end of their sleeping bag is up. Typical. Dinner was an Aussie BBQ and was actually pretty fab. I was shocked it was made by the same heartless bastards that gave us DIY ham wraps, but people surprise you. Chet took us all down to the beach to watch the moon rise over the Ocean, which was surprisingly cool, as I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat and watched a moon rise. We drank with the A-team, played kings cup (which Brits call “ring of fire”) and a few other drinking games.

Chet brought out a bunch of onesies at one point – one was a unicorn and one was a baby dino. Ok, I think it was actually a crocodile but work with me on this. So danced around in our onesies most of the night. I thought Stina might sleep in hers, as unicorns are Stina’s spirit animal just as Pterodactyls are mine. We headed to bed at a reasonable hour – basically once we got drunk enough to pass out in a tent.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Our wake up call was Chet coming up to each tent blowing in a didgeridoo. This was a big day of sights, but before we get into that, let’s talk some shit about the peeps on our tour. There were so many, so I’ll just cover the highlights. We have the Brits. The Brits are typically our favorites on any tour, probably because they share our dry sense of humor. Or perhaps it’s just been bread into us as Americans to stick with the Brits (or, more accurately, for the Brits to stick with us). Either way, they were rad so we hung with them erryday. Also in the A-team were the Canadian girls. They are super fun 24 year olds who didn’t shower once but still managed to look cute. They were basically Stina and I five years ago. Before we were ravaged by things like back-fat and full time jobs. That basically sums up the A-team. The B-team was composed of your typical boring couples and painfully shy groups of friends who look like they will cry if you speak to them so you just keep your distance. There were the Canadian boys – 20 years old, thought they were superman, and one had a mullet. Every day I devised a plan to cut it off while he slept, but come nightfall I always got drunk and forgot. Must find a different form of community service. And then, we have the wannabe A-team. The A-team posers are the most dangerous of all teams. We’ll call them the B+ team. While they possess social skills that lead you to believe, at first, they can function in normal society, you soon realize those skills need desperate sharpening. Our B+ team was mainly composed of a group of American girls. They claimed to be Californian, when in fact they all just happened to live in California at the moment. This much was clear from their constant losing battle with sand. It was like some mythical fairy dust that they just couldn’t quite figure out. Bitches were drowning in it. We have names for all of them, thats how bad it got:
1. Sick girl – Oh lawd, the sick girl. Hacking up a lung from the second we met her. Now, sickness is not something that automatically puts you on the B+ team. However when you spit your sickness in everyone’s face because you can’t handle not being the center of attention for one fucking second despite the fact that you should be put down for a nap, that’s when you get demoted to B+ team. There was some serious Jan Brady shit going on with this girl. She also couldn’t dance on beat to save her life, but one of the Brits explained to me that it’s because she is tall and tall people are always awkward dancers. Which is true. So I let that one go by.
2. Ugly girl – I know this sounds mean, but let me explain. What I mean by this nickname is that she is ugly to the point of it being offensive. Shit, it’s still mean. On top of that, she was ALWAYS late, constantly losing her shit and making everyone look for it, and had a serious selfie issue. Someone should break it to her that those pics ain’t making her any cuter.
3. Touchy girl – She is like the one girl in the sorority that is super nice but kind of creeps people out, so everyone tries to avoid her. Serious personal space issues. Always wanting to hug you, or tell you how awesome you are. As if I need to be reminded how awesome I am.
4. Old chick – she was older than the rest of her crew, and looked it, sadly. But actually the most normal out of all of them.

I just figured out how to do my community service – am giving them all scholarships to the “how not to be a loser seminar”. You’re welcome. Their first class will be called “Accepting your basicness 101” in which I will attempt to explain to them that the bad bitch club is not something attainable for everyone, for bad bitchness chooses us (Stina and I), we do not choose it.

So let me take you through the next twelve hours, with visual aids, of course: The first stop of the day was Eli Creek, which was basically a lazy river that dumped out onto the beach where tons of people hung out white-trash style.

I obviously loved this place. We floated down the river and then lazed on the beach for a few hours. Everyone then commented on how I am even more tan today than I was yesterday. I tried to explain how the sun works, but that’s a losing battle. Then we saw the famous Maheno shipwreck, which is exactly what it sounds like.

After that it was off to the Champagne Pools which are, sadly, not exactly what they sound like, as no bottles were popped. But they are still pretty cool – little pools on the very north of the island that the waves come crashing into.

Sun went into hibernation for the hour or so we were there, but still pretty rad. After this it was on to Indian Head, which is where the evil white man killed a bunch of Aboriginal people. Bad, bad white man. Same story, different country. Next up was Pinnacle rock. Now, remember yesterday when we went to the bad-ass aboriginal dudes-only hangout at the lake? Well, this is what the women got. Some fucking rocks. When I scoffed at this inequality our guide tried to rectify the situation by explaining that there are plants at the base of the rocks that can, after a very tricky recipe, get you high. He really thought that helped, bless his heart. Our last stop was a sand dune. Only prob here is that our guide told us shoes were not necessary (and by shoes, we mean flip flops), when in fact it was a walk through a fucking forest. Not everyone has calloused hippy feet dude, please recognize.

We head back to camp and shower and change for dinner. B team has actually discovered we have showers and get in line for one. Stina and I are second and third in line (first in line had no soap or shampoo, which is the only way one of the sheep beat me to it). We then have dinner and proceed to get drunk, as the main goal of any camping trip is to get drunk enough to forget that you are camping.

We discovered that the Canadian girls love country music, which upped their badass factor by about 20 points. I tested this by ensuring they knew at least the chorus to Devil Went Down to Georgia. They did. Once the B-team went to bed we had a flip cup game. Then a bunch of people went skinny dipping. In the shark infested waters. In the dark. Stina and I watched from a safe distance and saw things we cannot unsee. Went to bed once thoroughly intoxicated.

I’m going to post Friday’s blog tomorrow, because I my rambling has gotten out of hand.