(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.
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