Hippie Beatniks and Me

Km Driven: 7074

This is a picture of me at the eastern-most point of Australia, so that is the closest that I can be to you guys. Well, I was in the water and I paddled a bit further out to surf and technically that was the closest that I could be to home. But on land that is the eastern-most tip of Australia. And if I didn't look like an absolute serial killer in that photo then maybe it'd be nicer. Moving on!

I've described surfing to people as similar to golf (yes back to surfing). That's because when you play golf you have days where everything goes right and then others, or in my case 'most', where you feel like you're swinging at the golf ball with a wiffle-bat. Surfing is the same but more 50-50. Sometimes I feel on top of the world and then there's times where I paddle out and then procede to look like a blind drowning cat: wet, hairy and unable to see anything around me.

The past two days have been sort of like the cat routine. I'd been getting thrown over-top of waves over and over again. I smashed my head on my board a couple of times, swallowed tons of water and had a hard time putting anything together. You guys know those days where nothing goes right and you just look at the sky and go 'what the shetaki mushrooms is happening to me' ? So after yesterday's 3 hour drowning lesson and a couple of hours in the water today I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn't as hot shoot as I though I'd been. The waves kept beating me up and at one point I even thought that I'd been stung by jelly fish all over but that just turned out to be pieces of sand that had embedded themselves into my side after I faceplanted in the shallow water too hard.

And then, just as quickly as my skills had dissapeared I suddenly felt something click and had one of those epiphanies where one small change, like a 2.72 change in the angle of my foot, suddenly made everything work! It was like I'd reached a peak before, then bottomed out, and then gone way past my peak again. Suddenly I was riding the wave from start to finish instead of just struggling for a few seconds. Suddenly I knew what I was doing and I wasn't flying through the air only to crash into the water.

The lesson is, never let a blind cat swim. And always keep trying.

Tomorrow I leave Byron Bay and head closer to Sydney. I'll miss this place, it's my own little haven. The best way to describe the atmosphere is to imagine the government putting all the hippies and beatniks of the world in one beach town, giving them free reign to do anything but work, and then parking 100 campervans sporadically through the streets. It's a beautiful little place and I don't think anyplace, besides Banff maybe, compares to the relaxed nature here.

Beautiful Sport

Km Driven: 6848

I've decided that surfing really is a beautiful sport and one of the few in the world that can be both exciting and calming at the same time. I think that it's the dishotomy of the two that makes it so appealing to me and I think that it's pretty rare to find elsewhere.

Let me explain. In surfing you spend the beginning of your session fighting through the fury of the oncoming waves, ducking and weaving your way from the beach all the way out to the back of the swells. Once you push through the crashing waves and manage to get to the open ocean, you are greeted with an almost unmatchable serentity. Just imagine yourself sitting on a gently swaying ocean, hundreds of metres from shore with nothing around you but the sound of the wind and the smell of the sea. How can that not be perfect?!

That's my favourite part of surfing, the calm time sitting on your board that you get before catching a wave. You can just sit and relax however long you want, or you can chat with those around you about politics and beer, or you can slip into the water and cool off before heading back to shore.

And that's only half the sport! Then you actually have to do the surfing part of surfing. So now you go from the super-serene state of waiting into the hectic and adrenaline heavy wave riding. It's so cool how you can move from one to the other so quickly.

Well, enough of my ranting about my secret sport love. Today I'm in a place called Surfer's Paradise (great name for a city) along the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is a reaaaaaaaally long stretch of beach that goes on forever, almost. Yesterday I visited some McGill friends in Brisbane, where I reached my most northern point in Australia. As of now I'm only heading south, back to Sydney to (sigh) return my home on wheels in 6 days. I've stayed in the streets and refused to go to campsites because of largely shady sites

Ok, so back to surfing because I wasn't done before. I had one a really unique close encounter a few days ago out in the water. It was the end of the day and there were only a few other people around me as I paddled out to the calm waters at the back of the crashing waves. As I turned around to look out at the beach I saw something rise up out of the water about 10 meters to my left. Picture something like a whale slowly surfacing and looking at you. It quickly scurried back underwater. Ok, so it wasn't a whale, but it was a huge turtle! I swam over to where it had been and because the water is crystal clear here, I looked down under my board to see it slowly manouvering about. It was giant! It must have been a metre wide

No sharks yet, only turtles

Today I am truly a bum

When you are awakened at 5:30am by a police officer banging on your camper van window, threatening to give you a 200$ ticket for squatting in front of the beach, that's when you truly realize how homeless you are.

I didn't mind the fact that I immediatly reached for my knife and covered my surfboard with my body, thinking that someone was trying to break to steal my baby. Nor did I mind the fact that I'd gone to bed at 3am and had barely fallen asleep. It was worth it to see a line of 6 campervans full of happy and sleepy surfbums all close up shop together, wave to the cop and drive one block down the street to a new home.

Come on, I know you're all jealous of the life

Outback Recap

Km Driven: 6445

Much has happened over the past thousand or so kilometres. As most people know, Paul flew home a week ago which means that I don't have to contend with his snoring in the van anymore and have more than enough room for myself. With the days winding down I'm still trying to get the most that I can out of this lovely country. Just today I saw a crocodile on the way to the beach but was too slow to take a picture (fact is, it was probably just a big lizard that looked ugly b/c I think the croc are further north). but don't worry, soon enough!

There are a few pictures from the end of my trip with Paul that i thought were really cool. We did a long drive out to Broken Hill, from Melbourne. When we got there we had to trek across dirt roads and dusty trails to get to this old abandoned mine in the area. Really cool and really authentic aussie. It was the kind of desolate emptiness all around that I nervously kept checking our fuel situation for fear of having to resort to some kind of worst case scenario kangaroo hunting.

The mine that we got to was (as eveything else is in the outback) in the middle of nowhere. There were two guys working there who seemed to have been waiting forever for visitors who took us around the area and underground. COmparing this to the Krakow mine is cool b/c of how unregulated this one was. It was pretty much some guy taking us out to the the mine in his backyard. Very un-touristic and very cool.

We donned hard hats and lights and trekked through these antfarm-like tunnels that had been cut through solid rock. One of the weirdest things was when our guide lit a candle at one point and instructed us to turn off all our lights. Then we sat around looking at how gloomy it was without powered lights before he blew out the candle and we were surrounded by the darkest darkness that ever darknessed, really scary stuff.

The amount of driving that goes on in Australia is hard to picture by just looking at the map or listening to me whine about how there's no good radio stations to listen to. Some of the treks that we've done have been to remote areas that were 200km stretches without gas or towns. Here's a cool photo that sometimes made me reconsider how much I like driving.

Just kidding, I love driving. It's like a game. Especially when you're dodging wildlife. On the way back to he coast from the outback we were driving down a one-lane highway when the sun started to go down. Desperate to find a place to pull over, we suddenly found ourselves on a long very straight strech of highway with no where to stop. As the darkness started to increase, we joked about the lack of (live) kangaroos that we'd seen on the highways. All of a sudden, two tiny roos appeared within 10m of the car, skipping happily across the highway and completely oblivious to the careening doom in front of them. I yanked the steering as har as I could, without tipping the van and we narrowly avoided having a huge mess to clean up.

To give you all a little update, since dropping Paul off last week I spent a couple of days cleaning up the van and enjoying the Bondi life once again. That place has really become a new home for me. I even have 'my parking spot' which is right beside a park with a cliffside view of Bondi. The park is a 3 minute walk from the beach and a 3 minutes walk from the hostel which provides me with showers, facilities, movie night and social fun (at least until they realize that I actually live in a van down the street). Here's a view from my backyard

I spent a few day trying to round up people to drive up tp Byron Bay with me. When two Italian signed up for my bus I was excited to have some van company. Unfortunatly they pulled out the day before I thought to leave so I decided to drive up alone instead. Luckily, they felt bad for ditching me and cooked me a fantastic Italian pasta lunch to make up for it. And then, because I felt bad for myself too, I went and bought a surfboard! I haggled with the guy at the desk to lower the price b/c of the lessons that I'd taken and to throw in some freebies. He accused me of 'using the system', to which I just smiled and nodded Either way, I ended up with a cheap board taking up Paul's place in the car and have now spent every day since my purchase out in the water. I think I'm addicted

Aussie Animals

Km Driven - 5543

By popular request, here are some Australian animals we've come across. The first photo is actually me with a dingo that some friends of our have domesticated. The animal is really nice and looks like an athletic dog. I kind of wanted to steal it.

The second photo is more of a riddle. Dad wanted a koala so as his 50th b-day present we went hunting for some. There is a koala somewhere in the photo but you have to find it. That phot owas taken as we drove the van the the Great Ocean road with our friend Rhi who we had met way back when in Krakow. She took the weekend off to show us Canadian some of the coastal beauty of Australia. You drive down this two lane highway and every few km there are huge structures and cliffs that you can stop and gawk at. The kind of cliffs that look like they might fall down at any second but in fact took thousands of years of sculpting by wind and waves.

Back to the van

Vroom Vroom

Km driven: 2422

Stories and photos to come (animals included)