Thumbing Queensland: Aquatic Themes Revisited
Hitch-hiking north along the Queensland coast recently, with so many islands on the way, the Great Barrier Reef and all, I couldn’t help but face yet again the question of aquatic transport. Ardent hitch-hiker I, always keen to explore new and interesting social, adventurous, and cheap forms of transport, every new waterway posed a thumbing challenge. Some of the surprises on the way are well worth the sharing. Anyone following the same coast might be glad to learn of some of the hitching options Queensland presents along its coast.
Fraser Island, allegedly the world’s largest sand island, lies just off the coast, is for all intents and purposes a peninsula of the mainland separated by a narrow channel. It and the area on the mainland south of it form the Great Sandy National Park. The long unbroken stretches of sandy beach running all the way from Noosa to the tip of Fraser Island, form a kind of sand superhighway stretching some 200 km!
Yes indeed, this stretch of beach is sign posted with speed limits and has road rules. More to the point it’s friendly traffic and the hitching is fine. Traffic though is concentrated around the low tides, when hard sand is available for driving and goes up and down with the holiday period. But it’s best when it’s not too busy anyhow and the experience of riding in the back of small utilities (pick-up trucks) in the free air along long stretches of beach is worth the hitch alone.
The ‘road’ is punctuated by the Great Sandy Straight at its narrowest point (Inskip Point to Hook Point barely 1 km). There’s a ferry, and it too is perfectly hitchable, though the return fare of $5 leaves the merits rather moot. The longer (11 km) ferry back from Kingfisher Bay to River Heads (Hervey Bay) is just as hitchable and just as cheap. For the record the four wheel drive tracks around Fraser Island, where trafficked, proved most affably thumbable as well.
The Whitsunday group of islands was our next aquatic encounter. Airlie Beach is a fine place to find crewing spots around the Whitsundays. Several notice boards around this small tourist village are full of ads for crew, most demanding no prior experience. The Bowen Yacht Club not far north is a smaller more personable environment to poke around for rides, north or south as the winds are blowing … We happened upon an opportunity to sail the tall ship South Passage through the Whitsundays for a weekend.
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