May 2008 Wallpaper - Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Planning New Guinea

I’m getting ready to go to Papua New Guinea (PNG). My original plan was to fly to Port Moresby back in July when I was in the Solomon Islands. However the flight schedule from Honiara was too unpredictable. There was only one flight a week and it was expensive and really didn’t fit into the flow of where I was going in that part of the Pacific at the time.

PNG is only about 500 miles away from Cairns. Walking around Cairns I can find brocures for attractions in Sydney, Tasmania, Perth, Darwin, Fiji, New Zealand and Vanuatu. I can’t find a thing about PNG even though it is much close than any of those places. I had to go to the office for Airlines PNG to get any information.

I’ve been in Australia quite a while now and I’m getting antsy to go someplace that isn’t so…..Australia. I think PNG will deliver that in spades.

My current plan is to spend two weeks in PNG. I’ll go diving on New Britian and then fly to Papua and go hiking up in the highlands.

I’ve been many places where I really no no preconceived idea of what to expect because they are so small and unknown that they don’t have real impact in the media (Marshall Islands anyone?) PNG is sort of like that. I know a bit of the history of the country and structure of the country, but the basically the only real image I have of the place in my mind is that of a “primitive” country. Most of the people still live in villages and live like they did for hundreds of years.

I have no idea if that is actually true, but that is the image I have from what little I’ve heard of the country. What little exposure I’ve had to the country since I’ve started my trip has surprised me:

• One thing you should always check is where a can or bottle of Coke is bottled. Usually is it whatever the nearby major metropolitan area is. In the Pacific, I saw Auckland, Suva, Singapore and Port Moresby as cities where they had bottling plants. The Port Moresby one I didn’t expect.
• I was talking to the owners of the resort I stayed at in Kosrea in Micronesia. I told them of where I was planning on going in the future and one of the places was PNG. She mentioned that they had gone to a tourism in the Pacific conference and the group which was the most organized and professional was the group from PNG.

I’m not sure what I’ll find.

I also have no clue if I’ll have internet while I’m in PNG (out of Port Moresby at least). I’m working under the assumption that I wont, so be prepared for a whole lot of daily photos for the time I’m away.

If you are a traveler and would like to do a guest post while I’m up in the highlands, send me an email. (I’m only interested in stories about places you’ve been or things you’ve done. Photos and video are big pluses).

Daily Travel Photo - Manila, Philippines

Daily Travel Zen - Wallaman Falls, Queensland, Australia

Wallaman falls is the highest waterfall in Australia. You might want to adjust your volume. I’m still getting the hang of video and the audio might be a bit loud.

If you have the bandwidth, you can download a High Definition version of the waterfall. You can see how much better the quality of my camera is on this.

Diving the Reef

I’m staying in Cairns a bit longer than I had originally thought for a few reasons: 1) It is warm and sunny here. 2) There are lots of girls in bikinis walking around the beach. 3) I have an opportunity to take my camera in a super fancy water proof housing and go diving with a real underwater photography professional this week.

If you’ve been following the site, I’ve posted some underwater photographs before, but it has all been with cheap point and shoot cameras rented for the day. The goal here would be to go nuts for one day and try to get as many underwater shots as I can. In the long term, underwater photography just isn’t possible for me. The equipment is too expensive, used too infrequently, and to bulky and heavy to carry around. While I’m sure I’ll be doing move diving after Cairns, this is probably the best opportunity I have to do this given the number of dive shops and underwater photography experts in town.

This is the third time since I’ve been in Queensland I’ve gone out of my way to get better photos. I took the short plane flight on Fraser Island, the helicopter flight in the Whitsundays and now this. I’m pretty excited.

I hope to hell the seals on the camera casing dont leak.

Daily Travel Photo - Mauna Kea, Hawaii

Fraser Island

Perhaps the biggest attraction on the drive from Brisbane to Cairns is Fraser Island. Fraser Island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and holds the distinction of being the worlds largest sand island.

If you look at a map of Australia, you will notice that the east coast of the country curves. Right after the point where it bulges out the most and starts to curve westward, you will find Fraser Island.

I bring this up because Fraser Island is, on a very large scale, the result of the exact same phenomenon which creates sand spits and sand bars. Given the nature of the ocean currents around the east coast of Australia, sand is constantly transported up the coast. At the point where Fraser Island is, is an extinct volcano. Today you can barely see it because it is covered with sand, but you can see basalt peek out at a few places on the beach. The sand which was transported up the coast basically got stuck on that volcano and started to pile up. Looking at a aerial photo of the island, you can see how the shape of the island is defined by sand getting extended down the island making it longer.

All this sand piling up also makes some interesting things happen on the islands. For starters, the interior of the island in forested. Parts of the island are in fact rainforest. The Fraser Island rainforest is the only rainforest in the world which grows in sand. As substrates go, sand is a pretty poor medium for growing plants. There is little in the way of nutrients to be found and it erodes easily. (it should be noted that Fraser Island isn’t sandstone, it is sand. It hasn’t been around long enough to become sandstone.)

Although you have forests growing, you also have sand dunes which are being created as sand blows around. From the air you can see large rivers of sand encroaching into the forest. The island is a constant fight between forest and sand.

Being the worlds largest sand island also sort of makes it the worlds largest sandbox for adults.

Getting to Fraser Island requires about a 45 min ferry ride from Hervey Bay. Hervery Bay is about three hours north of Brisbane by car and is the launching point for everything Fraser Island.

All the vehicles on Fraser Island have to be 4×4’s. I’m not sure if this is a law or just reality. Attempting to drive on the island with a normal car would probably be impossible within the first 100m of getting off the boat. You can rent your own car to explore the island or you can take a multitude of packaged trips. I took a day tour, which in hindsight, was probably not a great idea. Most of the day tours I’ve taken on my trip have been with very small groups and a guide. This one had 28 people and a bus (albeit a 4-wheel drive bus) and it really felt like I was on an assembly line. If I were to go back I think I’d rent a car and camp on the island for a day or two. You can fish on the beach and there are plenty of places to camp. You can drive right on the beach as well as many of the roads which criss-cross the island.

Getting a tour or renting a car is pretty easy if you can just get to Hervey Bay. Like most tourist towns in Australia, every hotel, bar and store will have a desk where you can book tours. They pretty much beat you over the head when you get there.

One thing which is heavily promoted is the dingoes on Fraser Island. While I didn’t see any when I was there, there is a population of dingoes on the island which are slightly different in breed from dingoes on the mainland. There are signs all over waring people about the dingoes and provide advice on what to do if you encounter them. I was told, and I don’t know if it is true or a rumor they tell tourists, that a 14 year old boy was killed several years ago by a pack of dingoes.

My plane on the beach

While traveling in a bus with 28 people wasn’t my idea of fun, an opportunity did present itself on the island that I took advantage of. There are pilots on the island who do short flights right from the beach. You can get out of your bus and meet up with it further up the island after taking a 15 min spin. I figured “what the hell” and plunked down the money for a flight so I could get some interesting photos out of the day. I am told that Fraser Island is one of the few places in the world where planes can take off and land on the beach. It was easily the smallest plane I’ve ever flown in and you can really get a feel for turbulence when you are in a plane that small. I was glad I did it and the photos I got made me do something similar in the Whitsunday Islands when I took a helicopter out to the Great Barrier Reef.

Fraser Island is definitely worth seeing if you are in the area. If I had to go back, I’d rent my own vehicle and explore the island by myself over two days, camp and fish on the beach.

Daily Travel Photo - Taipei, Taiwan