After getting to know lots of places around Sydney, it was finally time to travel a little bit farther and get to know the natural wonders of Australia.

After a hard session of lectures, tutorials and assignments, I finally had time to leave all the stress away and go to relax for a whole week travelling to the East coast of Australia!

My first stop was Brisbane, I was only there for half a day because I needed to catch a bus so I didn't get to know it quite good. Although I was there for a little while I found it pretty cool, I got a really delicious breakfast in South Bank!

My second stop was Rainbow beach. There was the meeting point for my group before we went on a road trip to Fraser Island to do camping with a group of backpackers. We arrived around 7:00pm so we only had time for dinner, a few drinks and a quick chat to get to know the whole group better.

The next day we woke up early to prepare our bags, have breakfast and start our road trip. The staff showed us how to drive the 4x4 vans and gave us a quick presentation of how to drive in the sand, they explained the dangers of dingoes which are a type of dog/wolf that seems pretty harmless but it can actually attack you if you are not careful!

So the day began and we packed our bags in the van and started driving to Fraser island. As it is an island we needed to park the cars on a ferry so we could cross with the vans and our stuff. We drove in the sand for a few hours and we went to see the camping site which was really well prepared. The camping site had all the tents already built, they had small rural kitchens and and some bathrooms and showers for us to use.

We spent almost the whole day driving around the beach, we saw an abandoned ship that crashed in the island that you can see in the pictures above. Later in the night we settled down, we cooked some dinner and had a little party with the whole group!

The next day we went to lake McKenzie which is a lake in the middle of the island. It was really interesting because it was a sweet water lake with a very clear light blue water and the centre was deep dark blue, you can see in the photo below that there is a clear line dividing the deep and the shallow waters. We spent the day in there hanging in the beach and swimming. Then we drove to a place called Indian Head which is a very big rock where we could enjoy the view and see the marine life swimming below us.

After that we went back to the camp and had the same dose of dinner and party as the day before. So much fun.

Our next stop was Airlie beach. But before that we needed to take a 16 hour overnight bus to get there which I actually heated because I couldn't sleep for a minute, but well we finally made it to our destination. We slept there for one night and the next day we started our Sailing trip around the Whitsundays and the great barrier reef.

The sail boat was really fun because it was full of people my age and I got to know lots of them. We went to a hike to see the Whitsunday sand formation and I can say it is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen in my life. The sand was almost pure white and the water had lots of different tones of blue. It was 3 days of seeing 360 degrees of nature and marine life.

Just after we touched earth again we went out to party with all of the friends I made in the whole trip. Some of them on Fraser Island and some of them on the boat. I had a lot of fun!

Bernardo Chavez Peon (Study Abroad Communications Ambassador, Autumn 2017)

Architecture

Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México

Did I miss any good spots on my trip? Let me know in the comments below!