The End of an Australian Era

---

You may have noticed that I'm not in New Zealand as I'm supposed to be. Unfortunately, due to yet another earthquake on my journey, I was unable to go. I was offered a reroute to Auckland (I was originally going to Christchurch, two days after the earthquake) but my schedule was so tight in NZ that there wasn't really a way that I could do it. I'm still itching to get there and hopefully one day in the not too distant future, I will.

So instead, I made my way up to one of my favourite places in Australia, beautiful Byron Bay. The perfect place for relaxing during the day and partying once the Sun has gone down (and once it's come back up again.)

After a few days of doing pretty much nothing, I decided to join Lucy and Ellie to go kayaking with dolphins.

We were picked up by Ben, who with his Kiwi accent actually called himself 'Bin' and driven to our kayaks.

It's two to a kayak and I team up with a girl from Essex who has studied sports science so she should be pretty good at this.

On go the helmets and life jackets and up goes the kayak which we carried down to the beach. Those things are heavier than they look!

After we'd put our kayaks down, we stumbled across two super ugly cane toads mating. Our lead kayaker tried to pull them apart with his foot (they're poisonous so you can't touch them) to do his bit for nature (as they're killing pretty much everything native in sight) but was unsuccessful.

We were shown how to kayak, jumped in and were away. For some reason, it was difficult to keep the boat straight and we bumped into Lucy and Ellie. Opps but then throughout the morning, I think we bumped into each a little so all was fair!

We kayaked out a little way into the ocean and were quite lucky because the water was as flat as a pancake. Within minutes, we'd spotted our first turtle. This was going to be a good morning!

Kayaking a bit further on and we came across some surfers. Well, I've seen them before, they're not the most interesting things in the sea! But wait! What is that surfing with them? A dolphin! Just getting its early morning surf on.

Soon, a whole pod of dolphins were swimming by and we just happen to see a pair mating. I supposed it is coming into spring in Oz.

Sitting still in the boat, we watched as dolphins swam in the distance and then, all of a sudden, one swam directly towards us and straight under our kayaks whilst he pod watched on. He was obviously scoping us out for his family, making sure we were okay.

Dolphins, dolphins and more dolphins passed us by until it was time to head back to shore but not before being joined by another turtle for a while.

Getting back onto the sand was the fun bit. We had to lean back and wait for the tide to bring us in and jump out quickly before being dragged back out again. And the tide took us in fast! Kind of like a little roller coaster, but not really.

What a great way to end my time in Oz. Such a great place with such great people. Thank you Ellie, Lucy, Helen,Jess, Steph, Emma, Dan, Jamie and Tom for making my last week one of the best - it wouldn't have been the same without you!

Oh... and thank you Australia. It's been fun.

---