Adventure 16: Australia, Days 2-4 - Beaches, peacocks, markets, and finding Nemo!

April 23^rd- 25^th

After leaving a thank you note under the door of the church, we piled back in the Yaris and made our way back towards Surfers Paradise, stopping at a shopping centre to use Macca’s bathroom and get groceries, which consisted of bread, peanut butter, jelly, carrots, and Honeycomb Crush TimTams (a flavour unique to Australia, needless to say Amanda and I were very excited to try them!).  A well balanced diet, no?  Since we’d risen so early, it was only a little after 9 when we got to the beach.  We were still pretty tired from our travels and short sleep in our short tent, so we decided to spend the morning lounging on the beach soaking up the sun, relaxing, and reading our books.  The sun was plenty hot by 10am, which was a welcome change, and by lunchtime we were feeling rejuvenated and ready to do some exploring of the town.  There was a lot of shopping right near the beach, but most of it was a bit out of our price range.  I’ve never seen so many Ugg boot stores in my life, and it doesn’t even get that cold there! Guess it makes sense since they originated in Australia, but it still seemed a wee bit superfluous.  One of my favourite parts of the day was walking by a Zumba (Latin dance aerobics) demonstration near the beach.  All of the instructors were dressed in obnoxiously bright clothing and one of them was an older gentleman who was one of the more enthusiastic dancers, which was quite entertaining!

Learning from our mistakes of the night before, we hunted down a pay phone and called all of the Byron Bay campsites that were listed in our Lonely Planet, all of which were fully booked except for one.  The guidebook told us that Maca’s (not to be confused with Macca’s!) was a campsite located about 15k outside of Byron Bay amidst a macadamia grove; sounded good to us! Unfortunately, we slightly overestimated both the amount of daylight left and our navigational abilities so we once again ended up driving around in the dark, attempting to follow the directions which we’d written down on a napkin.  After driving on dirt roads in the dark in what looked more and more like the middle of nowhere, we stopped at a lone cafe/convenience store which was just shutting down for the night (around 6pm).  We completely lucked out that one of the patrons who was just leaving was heading in the same direction that we needed to go and told us to follow them out and they would flash their lights when we needed to turn for the campsite.  Thank goodness for helpful and friendly people!

I was driving at this point, and after our lovely guide signalled our turn-off onto a very small, poorly marked drive to the campsite (which we totally would have driven right past if not for the guidance!) our wee Yaris had its first big test: MUD!  We’d only driven about 20 metres into the campground when all of the sudden I felt the wheels slip and the car did a nice little swerving manoeuvre as I tried to keep the wheels straight.  To a chorus of “Stop! Back up! Turn around! NOOOO!!” I quickly put it in reverse and was guided blindly backwards by my wonderful backseat helpers, since the dark and packs rather impeded my vision.  This was a rather nerve-wracking couple minutes, as I literally had to put all my faith into Amanda and Kathleen’s directions and pray that I wasn’t going to back into a tree or end up pushing Yarrie out of another unseen mud pit.  After a few tense minutes, we made our own parking spot on what seemed to be a firmer patch of ground on the side of the road and set up camp, hoping that doing so in the dark wasn’t going to become a pattern.  With the help of headlamps and torches (flashlights) we made our way to the other side of the campground and up a wee hill to the main shelter area, which housed a kitchen, TV, laundry, and...showers! Yes!  Speaking only for myself, of course, I was feeling more than a little grimy and in need of a serious scrubbing.  I was very pleased to find that they had hot water and enjoyed the decorative (if not slightly old and broken) tiled walls of the sinks and stalls.

While enjoying another dinner of PB&J and whole, raw carrots, we witnessed another car get completely stuck in the mud at the bottom of the hill, which made us feel a bit better about our near miss.  Later, the group that was in the car came up to the shelter and we got to talking, finding out that they were all from various countries in Europe, with the exception of one guy from Mexico, and were utilising their break to travel as we were.  It would have been fun to stay up and talk with them more, but by this point it was already a little after 9, aka our bedtime.  Amanda and Kathleen kindly agreed to switch tents every other night so Sarah and I got the luxury of stretching out as we fell asleep beneath the macadamia trees.

 In the morning, we were woken by the sound of the varied and extremely vocal birdlife which inhabited the campground.  Upon further inspection in the daylight, we came to think of it as more of a zoo than a campsite.  There were three or four peacocks strutting about right outside our tent.  They were some of the major contributors to the noise; Amanda’s dad described their sound as analogous to that a woman getting her towel stolen from her after the shower, which is surprisingly (and unfortunately for us) accurate.  On our way up to the bathroom and kitchen, we also saw a kookaburra perched on a post, some huge rams with long, spiral horns, and a couple of dogs running around searching for love and table scraps.  Sarah is not a coffee drinker, but the rest of us were extremely pleased to see that there was free (instant) coffee and that it was one of the better brands, not the Budget brand that we were used to!  Not seeing much point in hanging around, we packed up soon after breakfast and were back on the road towards a market that we’d heard about just outside of Byron Bay. 

This was one of the coolest markets which I have ever been to, with a huge variety of food, artwork, crafts, clothing, and pretty much everything in between.  There were so many different aisles to wander down I’m still not sure we saw everything.  One of my favourite stalls was an artist who made everything out of a diverse assortment of cutlery.  There were frogs playing the drums, a wine holder which looked like a person lying down and taking a giant swig, and glasses with eyes and beaks on them, just to name a few.  After wandering around for the better part of the morning and sampling some delicious falafel, we all met up again and continued into the town.  It was a rather cloudy day, but Kathleen decided to brave the beach anyway while Amanda, Sarah, and I wandered around the shops and enquired about potential sleeping options. 

Once again, most of the campsites were full, but the one remaining was charging an inflated rate of $30 per person to stay the night, which seemed rather absurd since you can pay less than that for a lot of hostels.  Since all we were planning on doing was sleeping there, none of us felt too bad about sending Sarah and I on our own to register and only paying $15 per person for our unpowered patch of land.  This seemed reasonable too since Sarah and I ended up sleeping in the car that night to avoid getting soaked in our subpar Wal-Mart tent, which we decided probably couldn't handle the rain if it couldn't manage to even keep out the morning dew.  When people camp in Australia, we discovered, they normally mean business.  Our two wee tents were dwarfed by the palaces which surrounded us.  Most people not only had extremely large sleeping tents but patio tents as well for sitting (around their real tables on actual chairs) and eating their fancy barbequed meals.  We were rather jealous of all of these luxuries until we realised how much more efficient we must be at setting up and taking down than they all were.  This provided us with some small consolation J   

Monday was a morning that, for once, we were all looking forward to.  We’d signed up for snorkelling at a little rock island a short way off the coast and couldn’t wait to swim in the warm water and hopefully see some exciting sea creatures!  After getting all (wet)suited up, we were driven down to the beach, from where we took a boat out to the rocks.  One really cool thing was that we were able to pay $5 each to put my camera in a waterproof case so that we could take pictures while we snorkelled, which was really convenient and seemed like a pretty good deal.  As promised, the water was around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which was much warmer than any of the waters surrounding New Zealand. 

Almost immediately upon entering the water, Amanda waved us all over to a little cove and pointed down towards the bottom.  She’d spotted a sea turtle! It was rather difficult to tell if I was actually getting any pictures of the turtle, as opposed to just the bottom of the ocean, but I gave it my best effort and then settled for watching him swim along and out of sight.  Along with Crush, we found most of the other characters from Finding Nemo, which seemed appropriate since we were in Australia J Along with Nemo and Dory, we got to see hundreds of brightly coloured fish, a huge stingray resting on the bottom, and a couple of (harmless, thank goodness!) leopard sharks.  It was so much fun floating around and swimming with the different schools of fish that before we were quite ready to leave everyone was called back to the boat. 

One really nice thing about the company that we went with was that they provided free (yes!) hot showers after our swim so we took advantage before heading back to the beach for some more relaxing.  That was one of my favourite afternoons, just being able to lie on the beach, reading Pride and Prejudice, and not worrying about deadlines or other things that I should be doing to feel productive.  With a bit of regret, we finally tore ourselves away from the beach in the late afternoon and stuffed ourselves back into Yarrie for our first long drive of the trip...on to Sydney and more exciting adventures!  To be continued...