So yesterday our good friends, Stewy & Kristy arrived with the kids. Unfortunately this year we were unable to time our visits to spend our holiday together, but at least we get a day and a bit with them! Today we decided to leave early and head up to Sandy Cape for the day ….. things didn’t go quite as planned! All seemed fine until just after Orchid Beach. The cops pulled us over for RBT and advised that there were about 60 cars sitting up at Ngkala Rocks waiting to cross over! Annoying Easter break tourists! Haha
George and I had been up there a few days ago and saw how chopped up the track was – we drove over the Ngkala Rocks bypass and turned around and came straight back as it was getting on in the afternoon and we knew we could get stuck there a while. That was a good move as the car behind us got stuck …. as did the next and the next!! We parked on the beach and walked up to the rocks and watched people attempting to drive through for about 2 hours. I now get the excitement and why there is always a crowd of people up there watching!!
This was the track a few days ago and today it was worse! We reached Ngkala Rocks and the copper was right! We have never, ever seen so many cars up that end of the beach. With only one track (the same track to head north and south) to get to Sandy Cape, if anyone gets bogged (which is a regular occurrence) you can be stuck for hours – as we experienced last year when one of our friends got stuck!
Given the amount of people, we thought that it would be best to give Sandy Cape a miss and headed back down to Ocean Lake. It was so nice sitting in the sun and lounging in the water, Stewy had a fish, the kids went swimming and we drank beer! After lunch we headed down to Waddy Point for another swim and a fish. We’d had a little on/off rain which had lasted no more than 5 min at a time, but the temperature had still been up around 30 degrees all day.
Waddy Point
The kids wanted to go swimming in Eli Creek on the way home (do kids not feel the cold!) so we stopped in there for a while. This truly has to be one of the coldest places to swim (it’s right up there with Mossman Gorge!).
Just after we arrived we heard someone screaming that there was a snake swimming through the water and we didn’t think much of it, thinking it was just a sea snake. It swam across the water and up on to the beach, someone then identified it as a Death Adder (we later had a snake catch identify it by photos aswell). Now we have seen these in NT and heard the stories and know all too well how deadly these little guys are. You can be dead in as little as 45 min after a bite from one of these guys, so it’s not the snake you want biting you on Fraser Island!
He attracted quite a crowd and didn’t seem fussed by us at all, he certainly wasn’t scared of us (although he’d just swum through ice cold water, so he would have been pretty docile anyway!). We all took photos and watched as he slithered from car to car, just hoping that he wasn’t going to make a home under some ones car or in their wheels! We watched him until he made his way back over and into the bushland, we didn’t want him being hurt or run over, and certainly didn’t want anyone standing on him.