After the initial day from hell on Fraser Island, the Crazy Canadian spent most of the next morning down at the beach enjoying all it had to offer.
I’d been informed the day before about the island’s mechanic, Pete, and that I should take my car to him to give it a once-over and see if he couldn’t sort the problem out so we could salvage this portion of the trip.
The car was still drivable, as a matter of fact, which pleased me. It just wasn’t running very well, which displeased me.
Pete’s workshop… Well, words can’t really do it justice.
When I arrived, there was an English backpacker who had to reattach a timing belt and recharge his car battery in order to get it running again, and a group of three Aussie guys who needed a washer fashioned out of plastic (which is what Pete was doing when I took this photo) so they could attach that to their steering column in order to actually steer their car off the island.
The chalkboard you see on the left there actually says – translated from French – “Show us your tits, you slut!”
The first conversation I had with Pete went something along the lines of this…
Me: Excuse me, Pete?
Pete: Yeah, that’s me.
Me: Hi, I’m Paul. I was wondering if you could look at my car.
Pete: (SARCASTICALLY) What’s wrong with your car?
Me: It’s not running well. It’s drivable, but barely.
Pete: I got a yard full of cars that aren’t drivable!
Pete’s place is, without exaggeration, a car graveyard. I counted at least 15 cars in various states of disrepair and despair.
Pete is a character. I know a lot of people use that term – character – to define someone eccentric or a little bit whacky. I’ve always been wary of using it to describe individuals, as somehow these days ‘character’ has someone come to mean the same as ‘arsehole’.
I don’t really know when that happened, but I’ve just found that there’s far more instances of it these days then there used to be.
Pete spent the better part of the day agonising over the engine of the Tribute trying to figure out exactly what was wrong. He felt terrible asking me for $50 for his services because he was unable to determine the nature of the fault or fix it. Even though he had spent four hours trying to do so. Any mechanic would charge you four times that for half the amount of time spent on it just for labour.
Another characteristic I noticed of Pete’s was his tendency to say ‘Mmm’ between every thought, sentence or pause.
I spent a few hours getting to know him while he was tending to the Tribute. Cars – and fixing them – is his livelihood. His raison d’etre, if you will. And what he manages to do in that workshop sans assistants, technology and access to parts is walking a fine line between genius and evil mastermind. I honestly can’t thank him enough for his efforts.
Considering the fact that I took the car to him on a Thursday, his recommendation was limping the car off the island the next day, getting it to Rainbow Beach and calling RACQ.
This left several hours to explore what we could of Fraser Island on foot.
Based on our location, the best we could hope for was Lake Wabby, a three-hour return trip. Unfortunately, after walking for two hours along the 75-mile beach, we were no closer to finding Lake Wabby, so that adventure got nuked because I didn’t want to be in a position where we were going to return to our place too late. This segue took place while I left Pete to really work on the car, so I wanted to find out what the situation was as early as possible.
Also, when you see dingo tracks – not just like one or two, but what looks like at least three or four dingoes worth – you don’t really want to hang around those places too long.
I did get to see this, though.
And I posted it here because – remote island, obscure placement of antenna equals…
L O S T
I’ll guarantee that’s the first reference to the awesome (Yes, I will go on record as saying it was awesome) TV show that many of you have read in some time. At least the first LOST reference in 2012, you gotta give me that.
So, there was the misadventure that was Fraser Island. It was unfortunate that events played out this way, as I was looking forward to seeing all the wondrous sights and experience first-hand what the island has to offer.
We closed out our time at Fraser Island with dinner at the Eurong Beach Resort again, where I befriended a Canadian clerk named Dustin. He’s going to contact me when he and his girlfriend make their way down to Melbourne as they’re looking to spend a few months in Victoria.
After dinner, we made our way back to the backpackers and spent a night out by an open fire with the rest of the people staying there. It ended up being a really lovely night under the stars, chatting away to other travellers and listening to acoustic guitar renditions of some classic Australian songs.
Next time – Departing Fraser Island and Rainbow Beach.
Did you photograph the dingo tracks?
No, I did not. The Crazy Canadian may have. I’ll have to ask her!