1.  When you go four wheel driving on Fraser Island you will often be travelling on bush tracks like this one through the rainforest.

Several hire companies in Hervey Bay city will hire you a vehicle equipped with camping gear, enabling you to set your own itinerary and visit the best spots at your leisure, even if you don't have a 4WD with you.  A short trip by barge departing from River Heads will then transfer you to the western shore of Fraser Island.

You will need a permit for driving on Fraser Island, and for camping, and for goodness knows what else.  Hire companies will probably organise these for the vehicles they hire, but anyone can get them at the outlets listed on our camping page.

2.  One of the sights awaiting the 4WD traveller is known as The Pinnacles, part of the high coloured sand cliffs fronting the eastern surf beach.  Fraser Island consists of sands compacted and bonded by silt and clay to a hard consistency.  Loose sand has blown over most of the core, but where it is exposed it gives the island some of its most magnificent scenery.

3.  Most rocks encountered along the beach are known as 'coffee rock', a dark brown sedimentary rock made up of sand grains cemented together with decomposed plant remains.  Coffee rock is often soft enough to crumble easily, but in other places can be surprisingly hard.

Tourist brochures tend to show vehicles travelling easily along the uncluttered eastern beach at low tide, but several outcrops of rock exist at various places along its length.  When combined with a high tide, the rocky outcrops form a formidable obstacle even for 4WD vehicles.

4.  Detouring inland to avoid obstacles on the beach can mean a steep climb into the dunes through soft sand.  Attention to tyre pressures is often necessary to make the climb successfully.

5.  Every year several vehicles are damaged and written off in mishaps on the island.  This one became trapped by a high tide at the Ngkala Rocks which guard access to the northernmost beaches.

Other traps that regularly claim vehicles are sand washouts where streams cross the beach.  Their vertical banks can be difficult to see travelling at highway speeds, yet are quite high enough to cause suspension damage to vehicles plunging over them, television advertisments for 4WD vehicles notwithstanding.

6.  If you successfully negotiate the obstacles and reach Fraser Island's northernmost tip, a view of the Sandy Cape lighthouse awaits you.  It was built in 1870, at a time when shipwrecks in the area were many.

7.  Transporting four wheel drive vehicles from Hervey Bay City to Fraser Island and back is easy aboard this drive-on, drive-off barge, seen here at River Heads.  Other barges operate from Hervey Bay's boat harbour and from Inskip Point, north of Rainbow Beach.  Passengers are catered for, too.