Sorry for the Group Email

From Byron Bay we headed to Brisbane. We did an unintentional and bewildering lap of the city, before being abruptly spat out in the direction we’d come from. From there we spent a rather miserable two hours touring Brisbane’s picturesque suburbs before we finally hit our campsite.

Which was full, so we drove another forty kilometres to another site. Since we left Byron Bay we’d done three hundred kilometres and were exhausted. Still, it was good to be near a city – Brisbane sat about half an hour down the road, and we spent the evening browsing a shopping mall and watching Wall-E. Which was great, by the way.

The next day we decamped and headed in heavy traffic to Fraser Island. Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world: 1,800 astonishingly lush square kilometres of sand dunes, formed over two million years.

First, we needed wheels. Wombat, our rented Toyota Yaris, was proving remarkably frugal, but the only vehicles allowed on the island are four-wheel drive.

We spent forever looking for a tour that would take us. Our arrival coincided with unfortunate perfection with the Australian school holidays, which meant the tours were full and the four by fours were gone. Even the group hires, in which you’re grouped with six other backpackers and sent off in a troop carrier, were full.

In a way it was a happy co-incidence. I couldn’t (still can’t, actually) think of much worse than being at the wheel of a four-ton truck with six people shouting instructions and encouragement.

Eventually we spotted a collection of rugged-looking trucks by the side of the road and popped our heads in. At the counter stood a lavishly-tattooed man in a baseball cap.

“What’s the smallest four by four you have?” I asked.

“A Wrangler.”

My heart soared. I want a Jeep Wranger. I think they are approximately the best-looking small four by four on the planet, and even better, they’re not the Suzuki Jimny.

Most four by four rental companies around Fraser Island offer Jimnys as their smallest option. I drove one in Indonesia and it may have been the worst car I’ve ever driven, including the Citroen AX I learnt to drive in, which was made chiefly of Airfix-grade plastic and had no engine.

Hell, the Suzuki Jimny may be the worst car ever made. A Wrangler for two days would be heaven.

“But that’s out,” he continued. “I’ll do you the Hilux for the same price.”

Bummer. Still, the Toyota Hilux is a legend. Remember that episode of Top Gear where they make a concerted effort to kill one?

I glanced out the window. A row of gleaming Hiluxes sat outside, their wheel arches towering above their chunky tyres. Want one? Yes, please.

Still, it was terrifying. Rental cars almost always are. The insurance excess on Wombat was A$3,000, which, on a 1.3 litre two-door compact, covers just about anything you can do to it. The insurance excess on the Hilux would be A$1,500, which wouldn’t be so bad except that off-road that kind of damage could be done in a heartbeat.

Worse still, that insurance excess only applied in a two-car collision. “If you punch into a tree,” said our tattooed man, “there’s no excess.” Our bill, effectively, was limited only by the value of a new car.

On the desk in front of him was a picture of a Hilux. Its roof had caved in and its windscreen was smashed. Underneath was written: “25 minutes. $40,000.”

It was worrying stuff. I pointed at the picture. “Is that a record?”

“Aw, yeah. That was a group of students on holiday. Five minutes before that I was getting calls from friends saying they were driving like clowns. They rolled it over and got billed for the whole lot.”

There was another photo, this time of the front bumper of a Hilux. The bumper was spotted with innocuous-looking bits of minor damage, with some truly startling figures written next to them. A crack in the bumper would set us back more than A$1,000. A cracked headlight (easily done if a hot lamp dips into cold water, apparently) was a three-figure bill.

“All these,” he gestured at the expansive range of photos and bits of broken truck, “were the result of people going too fast. 96 per cent of people return the vehicle with a full fuel tank of petrol and we all get on with our lives.”

The worry increased to near-panic. We nervously signed the rental form and waiver and agreed to come back the next morning.

The next day, hyperventilating at the prospect of having to buy a ruined truck, we came back. Our A$155 a day rental included a five minute in-car training session, and the truck was ready for idiots. You could shift into four-wheel drive while moving, it was automatic, and the tyres were pre-deflated for better grip on the loose sand we’d find on the island.

We rolled off the ferry on the island with a few other cars, which promptly roared off and left us nervously purring across the sand. Fraser Island’s eastern beach is paradise. We drove along firm, tightly-packed sand with the ocean roaring to our right and the horizon clear. Every now and then we’d thump through a freshwater creek, and I tried to ignore the sticker on the inside of the windscreen that said “No insurance for immersion.”

We’d been on the island for all of three hours when we got stuck for the first time. Coming on and off the beaches is a four-wheel job. The sand is churned up by the 350,000 people who visit Fraser Island each year, and as a result is dry, loose, and extremely deep. An instant crowd of concerned-looking Australians gathered. If we were stuck, it at least looked like there would be no shortage of offers to pull us clear. A man came up while I frustratedly tried to rock our Hilux (nicknamed Shirley, by the way) free.

“You need to deflate your tyres a bit more. What are they at at the moment?”

My inner caveman winced. I had no idea. Did we even have a tyre gauge?

“Say, 22 PSI. When you get free stop on the wet sand and have a look. Have fun.”

I loved him for that last bit. We eventually rocked ourselves free and made our way to our inland campsite.

The real reason for visiting Fraser Island – except for larking about in a four wheel drive, which I suppose is good enough in itself – is to visit its inland lakes. We were on our way to Lake Birrabeen when we came across a traffic jam stretching up a particularly unpleasant-looking hill.

“Bloody backpackers got stuck, as usual,” growled a man from a Mitsubishi. “They were going to the lake, then decided they were going to miss their barge to the mainland. They want us all to back up around the corner so they can get past.” He sniffed irritatedly. “Only wanted to take the kids for an afternoon swim.”

The backpackers were having trouble. They were in a Land Rover and, and continually dug the wheels into the ground, creating foot-deep potholes in the track. Eventually, with much reversing and shunting around, they were past. The other cars moved on, and we promptly found ourselves struggling to get over the craters left by the Land Rover. Every time we moved forwards one of the wheels would sink into the ground, leaving us to reverse out of the hole to try again, with identical results.

Presently, a man, who had been watching patiently, came up. “May I make a suggestion?” he asked. “It’s all about momentum. You don’t have any grip at the front, so…” he made a thrusting motion with his fist.

We backed down to the bottom of the hill, and steeling ourselves, fired our forty thousand dollar truck towards the top of the hill. The wheels bit the sand, the suspension banged alarmingly, and anything not bolted to the floor flew towards the ceiling. We weren’t strapped into the car, we were strapped down. We flew over the crest and thumped down on the other side. It really was all about momentum. From there on, we were set. Large hills required plenty of power, four wheel drive, and a kind of blind hope that there wasn’t something large at the top of the hill coming the other way. We also had success revving the engine at the first hint of getting bogged down in sand, and before long we were motoring up sandy hills in two wheel drive. If things slowed down towards the top we began to bellow: “I believe!” as the engine revved. For some reason that was often enough.

By the time we arrived at Lake Birrabeen, the irritated father had already arrived, parked, and was in the water with his kids. Even so, the lake was deserted except for him and us, and it was – and this may be the only time you see this word used in its most literal sense – spectacular.

The lake is surrounded by hills, and on the clear day we were there, was a livid translucent green in its shallows: approximately the same colour as lime jelly. The sun was scorching and the water was cool and incredibly clear. We swam and marvelled at the sand, which was as fine as the snow we’d seen in Siberia.

Fraser Island’s tracks are hard enough during the day, and we left before the first hint of dusk to avoid having to negotiate them at night. Our campsite was beautiful. There were no showers and not much in the way of running water, but before long we were cooking pasta under a canopy of trees with a pair of candles stuck to our picnic table by their own wax. If it sounds idyllic it’s because it was: besides the muted noise of a few other campers all we could hear was the rainforest. Lizards crept through the undergrowth and birds screeched through the trees. Were it not for our need to drop the car back the next afternoon and our dwindling supply of cooking gas, we might still be there now.

In the morning we set out for Lake McKenzie – the largest freshwater lake on the island – and Lake Wabby. It took the better part of four hours to cover twenty kilometres, but our itinerary – drawn up by our tattooed friend at the car rental shop – was immensely satisfying. The lakes on Fraser Island are works of art, and Lake Wabby in particular. A sea eagle flew overhead and fish swam about while we swam.

By the time we rejoined the beach highway back to the barge in the middle of the afternoon, we were nearing the end of our tide window. Low tide, you see, occurs around midday, and the three hours either side of that are safe for beach driving. Outside those times you have to use the inland tracks, or risk your car being swept away by the tide. The beach was much narrower the second time around: at one point we needed to double back on ourselves when we went down one side of a creek, only to find it culminating in an impassably deep lake that hadn’t been there the day before. We breathed a sigh of relief when we made it safely onto the boat. Another half hour and we might have come seriously unstuck. Or, indeed, stuck.

Our Hilux inhaled petrol. Wombat, our Yaris, was routinely delivering six hundred kilometres on its forty-two litre petrol tank. Our Hilux had a seventy litre tank, and in doing less than three hundred kilometres, had used nearly all of it. We filled it and nervously dropped it back to Tattooed Man.

“Looks like the same car to me,” he said breezily. We wandered around the car and he confirmed that we hadn’t done anything catastrophic while we’d had it. We rented a car that was virtually uninsured, driven it over technical, difficult terrain, got stuck, escaped, and emerged from the whole thing unscathed. But my favourite part of our adventure? Getting stuck in two lanes of traffic behind a Toyota Troop Carrier that was having difficulty negotiating a pile of rocks coming off a beach. As a four by four passed in the other direction, the driver – a wide-brimmed hat-wearing, leather-faced Australian – leaned out the window and dismissively remarked: “Amateurs.”

Of course, I was an amateur too. But he wasn’t to know that.

Dave inadvertently reaches for the four wheel drive lever in his everyday car now.