Fraser Island Intro: Our Guide (Feb. 4-6)

(View the best of my Fraser Island photos here.)

Friday morning we got up at the actual crack of dawn, which down here in the Southern Hemisphere is roughly 4:15 a.m., so that we’d have enough time to get ready before catching a cab to school. After throwing Powerbars in a duffle bag and checking to make sure I had all of the camera equipment I might need, we hopped in a cab and headed to campus. It was now 5:15 a.m. and the sun was far more awake than we were.

           

We got to campus around 5:30 and had 15 minutes to spare before we were getting picked up so I set to work on my photography homework for the weekend. We had a five-part assignment that was due on Monday: shadows, reflections, low-angle, close-up, and something red. The area around campus has all sorts of rivers and creeks, but during the day it’s usually too windy to catch a good reflection shot in the water. At the crack of dawn, however, the wind was just light enough for me to catch some nice reflection shots of the blue sky and the pink clouds over the water. After assuring my roommate repeatedly that I needed “just one more shot!” we eventually made our way over to where we were supposed to be picked up. Only we’d really received very little information as to where that actually was. All they’d said when we booked the trip was to “wait out on the grass out there,” as they vaguely gestured in some direction. So we sat on a bench still amazed that we were awake at that hour and waited for our chariot to whisk us away.

Just as we were beginning to think that the trip had been cancelled without our knowledge, an old, white, military-jeep-type vehicle drove through the parking lot, flipped a U-ee, and stopped in front of us. Out hopped the man who we would come to know as our guide, Russ. But in that moment he looked like a former military drill instructor turned tour guide, which as it turned out is precisely what he was.

Before I can go into further detail on our Fraser Island trip, I’ve got to fully introduce you to Russ because, as we learned over the course of the weekend, he is likely the most interesting person we will ever find.

           

So meet Russ.

           

He’s a native Australian who grew up in the Tweed Valley going to school with an eclectic combination of surfers, farm children and aboriginal children of the tribe. Because he had friends from all walks of life and a best friend who was from an aboriginal tribe, the stories we heard were amazing. He also frequently referred to “his tribe” as in the aboriginal people he grew up with who had taught him all about nature.

           

We also came to discover that the Tweed Valley is not far from Nimbin, the local hippie town/ marijuana heaven, where as chance would have it most of his high school teachers came from, clearly making for an interesting school experience.

           

From high school, he spent 4 years in the Army before returning home to play on the Sydney professional rugby team, the Tigers. The exact timeline from this point forward gets a little jumbled, but it includes a few years as a forest ranger living on Fraser Island, six months spent roadtripping from Alaska to Guatemala (including four weeks in Costa Mesa, Ca.) and some time spent living, working and skiing in Park City, Utah. Eventually he returned to Australia where he tried out surf photography and had photos printed in several magazines.

           

At some point he moved to Japan where he lived for ten years, some of which were spent training a sumo wrestler from Mongolia (who at one point was one of the top wrestlers in Japan) and coaching rugby. As we came to discover once we were on the island, he also seems to speak fluent Japanese and would frequently shout things to the foreign tourists in their native language. He also now lives with two Japanese girls who both make sushi and brought some along for our trip.

           

Despite his rugged exterior, Russ was also incredibly welcoming and friendly. Forth-five minutes into our drive north he’d already invited us to his Super Bowl party, offered to take us back up to Fraser Island later in the spring when the water had cleared back up and the bugs had largely disappeared, to give us surf lessons and to take us jet-skiing to Stradbroke Island for a picnic.

And so it was with this worldly guide we set off on an amazing adventure to Fraser Island.

Week 3 of Classes (Jan. 31 - Feb. 3)

(View more of my Gold Coast night photos here.)

Time seems to fly by so much faster here. Entire days go by in a matter of minutes and weeks disappear in the blink of an eye. It was hard to believe that I’d already made it to the third week of classes. It felt like just yesterday that I’d unloaded my luggage from the Expedition and wandered through the international terminal at LAX.  

           

Yet somehow it was week three and in the trimester system, week three is when school starts to get real. My week started with a bit of schedule juggling. One of my classes had been moved to Thursday, one of the many days of the week that I refused to go to school, and I was forced to mix around my entire schedule so I could get into a different section and keep my dream of being done for the week at noon on Wednesdays a reality. Eventually it all worked out and another week (or rather three short days) of school flew by as I prepared for a weekend on Fraser Island.

           

But while the week flew by, there was one noteworthy development. It happened on Monday. Because of my schedule juggling, I ended up on campus much longer than I had expected on Monday with several extra breaks between classes so we decided to head over to the nearby plaza for food. It started out like any other journey. We walked over, made a pit stop at the Post Office and headed into the mini-grocery store, IGA. But it wasn’t long after we started wandering the aisles that magic happened. After passing the fruit section and then the lunchmeat section, we approached the frozen food aisle. And there it was. COOKIE DOUGH!!! Because I still had to get back to class and had to catch a bus home from there, I couldn’t actually buy the cookie dough, but just knowing that it existed somewhere on the continent of Australia made going back to class a little more bearable.  It was also more than enough excitement to get me through the week as we anticipated our weekend on Fraser Island.

           

Because our Fraser Island trip that was set for last weekend had been postponed after we’d already packed, we put off packing until the last minute on Thursday night. But as Wednesday afternoon and Thursday began to pass and we had yet to receive a call that our trip had been postponed, I had to scramble to get all of my week four homework done before we left.

Burleigh Heads by Night (Jan. 30)

(View the best of my fire show photos here.)

When Sunday came around I was thankful that our Fraser Island trip had been postponed. The Bond University Photography Society was organizing their first trip of the semester down to a weekly fire show at Burleigh Heads (a beach to the south of us).

We met up with the rest of the club on campus at 6 and boarded a bus down to Burleigh. It was literally the longest bus ride I’ve been on since arriving on the Gold Coast. But the beach itself wasn’t far from campus, we just happened to have the misfortune of boarding the slowest bus in the history of slow buses. I’m pretty sure the bus driver was trying to coast the entire way despite a lack of hills. It got to the point that everyone on the bus was looking around trying to figure out what the deal was. After an hour of moseying along we finally arrived, having traveled a total of 7.8 kilometers or roughly 5 miles (yes, I believe if you did the math you would find that we could’ve walked faster).

As the bus pulled up to our stop one of the guys in the club looked out the window with a wild-eyed expression and began frothing at the mouth. He had spotted Big Chief, a hole-in-the-wall looking burger establishment that he claimed was to die for. We followed him across the street, explaining how much this burger had to live up to given that we had In-N-Out and Five Guys back in the States. After getting our burgers we sat down along the counter and our friend, Kyle, pulled from his backpack the largest bottle of Heinz ketchup I’ve ever seen. He must have had the clown car of backpacks because I literally have no idea how it fit with all the camera equipment he also had in there. Once he had sufficiently doused his burger in ketchup, we began to eat. Our burgers were indeed delicious. I hesitate to say they were better than Five Guys of In-N-Out mostly because they aren’t fair points of comparison. This burger was more along the lines of an enormous restaurant burger cooked to perfection. We wolfed them down as Kyle paused before each bite to add more ketchup to his burger.

From there we headed back to the beach to see what this fire show was all about. It definitely wasn’t what we expected. We walked up to find a large group of people sitting in a circle around about twenty teenagers painted like demons who were juggling various forms of fire as the sound of beating drums played over speakers in the back of a hippie van. We walked over to the side of the circle with the fewest people, set up our tripods and started shooting. The kids juggling were ridiculous. There were two girls who had fire hula-hoops that they spun up and down their entire bodies. But the boys were the coolest to watch. They had sticks with balls of fire on either end that they threw and twirled every which way. The show was really cool to watch and especially fun to photograph so we stayed quite awhile before heading back on a (much faster) bus home.