Day 196-199 - Byron Bay

Day 196 (Monday 28th) - To Ballina! Then Byron!

Back on the road again today - Dave left at obscene o'clock to get his flight back to Melbourne - he's flying in then going straight to work at 9 am - sounds horrible. Rob and I said goodbye to the girls and got the 0755 ferry across to circular quay. It's an awesome journey, Rob said it puts him in a much better mood than all his colleagues who get the train or drive. I got the train to the airport, and flew to Ballina/Byron. The flight was really short, and I fell asleep almost instantly - sleep is one thing I've been missing the last few days. I was dropped at the Arts Factory, where I have been wanting to stay since I wandered past 5 years ago. It is as good as I had hoped - an enormous load of buildings, teepees and shacks, all decorated in various styles and giving a pleasingly bohemian feel. It really reminds me of a permanent Glastonbury, with the amount of hammocks, Didgeridoos and hippy paraphernalia dotted around, (as well as the number of hippies, of course). There are daily yoga & meditation classes, live music all over the place, and a generally laid-back and wonderful atmosphere. Anyway, all I succeeded in doing was wandering around town getting a bit lost, coming back, having a few drinks with the Canadian girls from my room and then collapsing into bed by 10, where I slept for a good 11 hours - much needed after a weekend that lasted from wednesday-sunday.

Day 197 (Tuesday 29th) - Nimbin

Last night I booked a day trip to Nimbin - if you haven't heard of the place click on the link, I think Wikipedia gives a pretty good synopsis. Jim's alternative tours, the one everyone told me to go on, was fully booked so I had to go on the Grasshopper bus. This was cool, we had a driver called Steady who had good taste in classic rock, and the trip had a few extras - we went to a waterfall where a couple of people had a dive off some rocks, then we had a BBQ and rainforest walk at Rocky Creek Dam, before heading into Nimbin proper. I paid a visit to the Soundrooms*, entry to which is gained by a complicated sustem of ropes and pulleys - genuinely, you pull one rope to ring the bell, then wait for a click and pull another one, which causes the greeen canvas door to swing open. Subsequently I managed to lose everyone else from the group and went for a little wander, to the Museum and just up and down the street really. The trip home was a little bizarre, Steady asked if we wanted his chillout mix, which he warned us had been called depressing by some. People requested cheese instead, which started off with wake me up before you go-go and got steadily more ridiculous. At one point we had the Spice Girls followed by Shania sodding Twain. Just horrible, and not at all what was needed. A friendly Canadon whose name I have entirely forgotten told me all about the best places to surf in Byron.

Myself and the girls from my room went to thew Lounge Cinema to see Be Kind Rewind when I got back. This was awesome, both the cinema and the film. The cinema doesn't have seats, it has fake cowskin loungers for the first few rows and sofas for the rest - it's definitely the comfiest I have ever been in a cinema. The film was great too, really nicely shot and cleverly done, as well as being a pretty sweet story. Afterwards I watched a little of the talent show that was supposedly going on in the games room. This was the last two songs of Cockatoo Paul (more of him later) and a Didge show from a girl called Vialynn, who made the most unlikely and incredible sounds, and was really impressive. I then hung out with Matt, Mike & Ben from my room, and ended up sitting around outside the games room listening to a few guys from the campsite play a few songs on guitar, the most memorable of which being a rendition of Where Is My Goon, the words to which everyone picked up fairly quickly. For those not in the know by the way, goon is cheap boxed wine, of the 4 litres for A$10 variety. Before too long we were moved along by staff, which just meant that the guys with guitars went to the campsite and everyone else came inside, where there was a blazing log fire. It's freezing at night here, I have been sleeping with all my clothes on and a sleeping bag, and I still wake up cold.

*or something like that, had the word sound in the name anyway.

Day 198 (Wednesday 30th) - Surfing & The Teepee

Ben and I took two girls from our room - English girls who were on the Nimbin trip, possibly called Jenna and Carly - down to the beach for a surf. We hired some rubbish plastic boards and went down to The Wreck. This is a stretch of beach so named because of the shipwreck that lies just below the water - the propellor shaft pokes out of the water to remind you where not to surf. It was an ok day, I didn't really catch that many and spent a lot of time rolling around on the bottom and cursing. The problem was that the waves, when they were there at all, came suddenly and violently, as huge walls of water that Ben and myself were ill-equipped to deal with. We bumped into the friendly Canadian from yesterday, who gave the girls a brief lesson before we went in. With his help, the girls managed to stand up a few times, and were pretty pleased with the whole day - good preparation for the surf camp they're going on en route to Sydney.

We came back and went to the Buddha Bar for Cockatoo Paul's live show. He plays a drumkit, guitar and didgeridoo - the latter very well. His songs are pretty catchy too, easy to remember and sing along to, and mainly centred around travelling. It would have been pretty good if it weren't for his repeated attempts at comedy - this week's theme being IKEA. After him, there was a pretty impressive fireshow. The actual feats performed were not too impressive, any Thai beach fireshow would be better, it was the people performing that were impressive. There were two or three generations of the same family, with the youngest not more than 12. She was pretty good at fire poi, and was probably the highlight of the show. After the show I went back to the big Teepee with Big Joe from my room and a Canadian/Norwegian couple, Jason and Anna, who live in there. They have a pot-bellied stove in there which the French guys in there had got up to a roaring heat - the back of the stove was glowing bright red from the heat. We had some music on, were drinking and chatting for a while when one of the staff came in and told us to shut up. Apparently some people were trying to sleep (even though everyone in the Teepee was involved in the merriment). We were asked to leave if we didn't live there, and in a baffling display of blame taking Joe claimed he lived there, and that the music was his or some such nonsense. All very chivalrous but entirely unnecessary. As we fled I realised I had left an almost untouched box of goon in the Teepee, which I don't think I'll see again.

Day 199 (Thursday 1st) - Surfing Again, & The Teepee Again

Joe, Jason, Anna and I went for a surf today. We headed to The Passes, way out by Cape Byron. This is the place that Canadian guy told me about, where the waves break perpendicular to the beach, and continue to break for a few hundred metres. It proved nearly impossible to get to the spot where all this was going on though, as the current was incredibly strong, and we had opted to paddle 200 m or so instead of walking 500 along the beach. Fools. There were loads of older guys on Longboards, walking up and down them and catching the waves for ages - another thing I saw was that there were loads of people standing up on their boards and paddling with oars. This looked really odd, and meant that they could gain extra speed while they were riding the waves, so they could go for way further than normal surfers. We moved from The Passes to Clarke's, where the waves weren't so long but were far closer to the beach. I caught a few, after swapping my little board for one of the bigger plastic ones (made by Bic, bizarrely). Two of these were the best surfing I have ever done. I managed to turn and ride along the wave as it broke, instead of just heading for the beach and zig-zagging a bit. Also I caught one perfectly, and managed to walk along to the end of the board and back, making me feel very cool indeed.

After a little shopping excursion and an explore I came back and made a few changes. I changed the start date of my Oz Experience bus, and Joe and I got the last two beds in the place for tomorrow and Saturday night, as we are both now staying for Nimbin Mardi Grass. I'm moving to the Wagon, a kind of Romany Gypsy canvas affair, while Joe is moving into the Bus, which is a double decker bus converted into dorms. We met two girls from the Teepee, Prem (from Greenwich) & Liz (an Australian backpacking round Australia, the first I've met I think), and were planning to go to the Railway Bar and watch some bands, but after some discussion we decided that was far too far away and we'd just go to the Pub Quiz at the Buddha Bar instead. This we did, and we formed two teams with the guys I surfed with and a few others. We put a few jugs of beer on it too, to make it more interesting. 40 questions, a prize draw and a load of crap jokes from Cockatoo Paul (the compere, unfortunately) later, my team won it! Our prize was all the entry money (A$2 per person) from the whole quiz - this worked out at about A$25 each, as well as the free beer from the other team. We went back to the Teepee afterwards, for the warmth, and yet again got told to be quiet at about midnight. By an odd chain of events I ended up sharing a single bed with Big Joe, in a kind of "I don't think this is wierd, do you?" game of chicken. This lasted for a very long time, as I didn't end up going to my bed until about 4, when the fire had died down a bit.