Ride the wave

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Not suprisingly after no sleep and way too much drinking, our first Oz Experience journey was a messy one made worse because it was one of the longest legs on the east coast. But we soldiered through, and with our driver named Sonic at the wheel we made good time into our next stop known as Spot X which was a surf camp. We got settled into our dorm which looked out over the beach and got given a free dinner followed by a couple of drinks before heading to bed for yet another early start for a surf lesson.

The next day we grabbed an early breakfast, got straight into a wet suit and grabbed a surf board for a 3 hour surf lesson at one of the best beginner locations on the coast. Such a good feeling catching a good wave and standing the whole way to the beach but also hilariously funny wiping out, unless of course you get hit in the head by your surfboard fin like me. The surfing went really fast and before we knew it we were out of our wetsuits for some lunch before another pretty long trip out to Byron Bay with Sonic. We arrived in Byron Bay in the evening and after a quick check-in we headed to a bar/pub called Cheeky Monkeys for some extremely cheap food and jugs of beer which is always a win in my book! One wierd thing about the Aussies is there beer measurements and the fact that you can't get a pint! The largest glass you can get is called a Scooner which is basically two thirds of a pint and the smallest being a pot which is practically a small tumbler and therefore pointless. We had our own reserved table for the Oz bus with a competition which Sophie was asked to go up for. She was then asked to pick a helper, which was me. Little did I know the competition was to put as many pegs as possible on my face and neck in the time allowed, which hurt like hell but fortunately we won so I guess it wasn't all bad.

During our first full day at Byron Bay we decided to hire out these bikes from the hostel which turned out to be the worst bikes in the world because you couldn't peddle backwards and there was only one gear to use. Despite that we headed down to the beach and chilled for a bit before heading into the surf only to get taken out by some nuts waves. Also managed to get some pretty awesome sunset photos along the beach before cycling back to the hostel where we headed out to a couple of bars with some new found friends from Scotland and Ireland, realising more and more the importance of pre lashing on goon due to some of the mental prices for drinks out in Aus, most of them worse than drinking in England!

Day 2 in Byron called for a trip to a nearby town called Nimbin which just so happens to be the hippy capital of Australia. We took a bus out called the 'Happy Bus' which was painted in the standard psychedelic colour scheme popular among many hippies over the world. Nimbin itself is basically one long street and kinda reminded me of a small version of Camden which was pretty cool to see. We spent 45 odd minutes having a look around before jumping on the happy bus to a huge waterfall well within the rainforest where I managed to get a close up view of two Kookaburras standing on the forest floor in front of me. Since that evening was the knock out match between England and Germany we scowered the whole of Byron to find a tv to watch it and ended up paying 5 dollars to get into a bar where the match was being played with no sound only to watch England get mashed up, made even worse due to the bar being half full of germans all going mental at each goal. Huge fail England! So we headed back after full time for a relatively early night for yet another early start to get to our next stop at Surfers Paradise.

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