Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Dingo Hunting

I had been itching to break the cycle of work all week, run all weekend, so when Anton was leaving his job to travel north I figured I should snag one last adventure with him.

We were shipping off to Fraser Island, a train and ferry away from sleepy Caloundra. Fraser is known for its crystal clear lakes and population of wild dingos. Frasier is known for its 37 Emmy awards and being the most successful spin off series on television. Together, you can make a verbal pun because they’re homophones.

We arrived at the barge landing minutes before launch. You could say we barged into the office to get the tickets in time. The lady in the office didn’t want to sell me the tickets to this ferry, because “it lands in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have a car”.

That was kind of the point. We were going camping. But Fraser directs most of its visitors to use 4x4s to get around the island because of its mass (the largest…) and sand (…sand based island in the world). I lied and told the lady I knew what I was doing and bought the tickets to cross the bay.

I really had one goal for this trip. To see these dingos that are the big hubabaloo on the island. Since they’re isolated, they’re more genetically dingo than a mainland dingo, since mainland dingos hook up with normal non-dingo dogs all the time and the half dingo offspring are able to reproduce. So these dingos are dingo dingos. Dingo.

A lot of care is put into keeping these dingos as wild as possible. Before we even landed there were signs everywhere giving us dingo instructions. On the map, on the boat, on coffee cups. Don’t feed the dingos, don’t approach the dingos, don’t play bingo with dingos. So I was pretty into seeing what the fuss was all about.

Anton was leader of the expedition. He was in charge of having the tent and cooking supplies, planning a route through the island, making fires, packing most of the supplies, and directing the activity for the day. Mostly he did everything. But he has one weakness. He can’t see animals! He’s blind as a bat when it comes to spotting beasts in the bush. So my job was basically to point to interesting things. I’d like to think it’s my own little super power.

We scrambled along for 2 days without dingo incident. We passed through a town called Eurong, and every sign for it I saw I screamed “NO YOU’RE WRONG!” Eurong and every little town on the island is surrounded by fence to keep the dingos out. But the gates for the cars are these weird electrified grid roads, which look like pretty surreal secret research facility type security.

A photo posted by Taylor (@tayloredtotaylor) on




A bit about me and camping. I don’t do it. I’m naturally unnatural, and sleeping on a pad, eating on the ground and not showering and doesn’t come easy to me. My family never camped and at one point in my life I took 3 showers a day. I know it’s not healthy, I got over it. So I’m not especially at peace when camping. I like chairs.

But I do like animals, and was willing to make the necessary sacrifices to meet them on their terms. On the second night, we had failed to find our campsite and Anton had come down with a case of the limp leg (not a euphemism). So we were stranded along the eastern beaches facing the roaring Pacific. Rather than hiking back to Eurong (NO YOU’RE WRONG!) we made the executive decision to set up base here.

We scrambled behind the dunes cuz the beach is like a highway of 4x4s and we didn’t want to get run over in the night. We improvised a little more than usual for camp. Anton cleared a level surface, propped up our tent, prepared dinner and made an app while I collected sticks. For a fire. Like a useless talentless beetle. Like Ringo.

Anton lit the fire and we chomped on flavorless pasta from Aldi. New rule, bring salt and pepper for camping. The sun went down fast and early. The darkness crept in, bringing a dome of “billions and billions” of stars. I’ve been watching Cosmos.

Near the fire I was comfortable enough and tired enough to fall asleep on the ground. Even though I’d just tested a theory on flashlights and spiders and found the results disturbing.

Eyes reflect light really well. And spiders have eight so there are many angles they can shine. If you go out at night with a flash light and point it at a bush and look really carefully you can see dozens of little sparkles. Those are all spiders. It’s gross.

So I had just confirmed that but was drifting off to sleep, so we had to get ready for bed. Normally there's a dingo box where you can lock your food away so they don’t smell it and eat it at night or come in your tent tearing it to pieces. Anton knew to bury the food. So we dug a hole and buried all our food like dogs. We kept our backpacks and clothes though to prevent excessive sand and stowed them under the canopy of the tent, just outside our mesh door.

I awoke to a pot banging. Someone was banging a spoon against a pot?? Why? Eurong.

In a daze, I grabbed my light and splashed it out underneath the awning of the tent. Nothing was there. I waited a moment.

Antons backpack rocked spontaneously. On top of it was the cooking pot and our spoon and they clanged. My dingo senses were tingling. Anton woke not to the literal banging of pots above his head but slowly to my light.

“Why are you shining the light?”

“Dingos” I mouthed.

We sat up and waited, and again the bag was shuffled. But then I realized my backpack was on top on Anton’s when we stashed them. And my bag was gone. And my shoe.

I brought this to Anton’s attention and we discussed it for a moment. It was slightly unreal, Dingos have no business with shoes, they don’t operate Zappos. We had no food in our bags too. Plus there is something scary about wading into the darkness with a number of wild dogs.

But they had all my money and my phone. And my shoe is really nice. So I had to see if I could find them. I gingerly towed outside the tent. Ready to be dingoed.

Luckily my pack was nearby, with its rainproof parachute torn out and water bottle thrown aside. My shoe was not much further.

But no sign of dingos! They vaporized after I exited the tent. Must have been scared off by us talking. I went back to sleep a little disappointed. Hadn’t even seen a paw or snout poke into the tent to steal my things.

The next day we hiked to Lake Mackenzie. It’s a perched lake, which means it’s only filled with rain water. It was a sand lake too, since the island was sand and it was blazing white. There were little ripples from wind waves and we saw purple spotted gudgeons swimming in the pool. It was a good reward for hiking these past days. And we swam and called it a shower.

A photo posted by Taylor (@tayloredtotaylor) on

As evening rolled in, we made friends with a Czech and French couple. Lake Mackenzie is a tourist attraction on the island so there are tables and they are gated to protect eaters from the dingos and dingos from the eaters. We heard stamped and crumples from behind the fences, and walked the perimeter many times to find them. But we never did. 

Dingos it seems, are shy. And smart. And cute! Sounds kinda like an ideal girlfriend.

But we never saw a wild dingo on Fraser. There are plenty more on the mainland, and some of the farms I work on have them. But it’s a bummer not seeing these special wild, electric fence requiring dingos. But maybe that’s why they’re special.


Anton and I played with weird eggshell colored crabs and waited for the ferry back to the mainland. But I still had another adventure ahead of me. I didn’t have a way back home.