The Canadianvasion

6/12/2010 to 13/12/2010

Of course it was raining when I left Yamba – another travel day, another wet ride.  This one ended up being ok though, as things warmed up and dried out as I got to the Byron Bay coast, and I was just about totally steamed off by the time I made it into town.

Byron Bay is a hippie / organic / alternative culture tourist haven.  Like Yamba, it is blessed with beautiful landscape in the hinterland and great beaches, though the surfing is almost an afterthought (at least at the main beaches).  Unlike Yamba, it is packed with chotchkie shops, hostels, and vacation apartments, meaning it is a major backpacker and schoolie (think spring break) Mecca.  It’s also crammed with tourist agencies, who (for a fee) will book your day trip to a place called Nimbin, where you basically step off the bus and get accosted by hippies wanting to sell you weed and space cakes.  For what it’s worth (not many of the visitors care to know this, they’re so spaced out after their trip to Nimbin – or should that be “trip in Nimbin”?) it is the easternmost point in Australia and has a beautiful lighthouse at the cape where one can be the first in Australia to see the sunrise.  In my time in Australia I’ve never seen such an oversaturated, commercialized, tourist destination as this one (which is probably why I’m skipping Surfer’s Paradise altogether).  Don’t get me wrong – as I said it is blessed with a natural beauty not many places can compete with.  But unlike Yamba, Byron Bay knows it and flaunts it.  Both places are “exclusive” property locations, but Yamba is what happens after locals and what I would call “community conservationists” see Byron today.  In any event, everyone should go see it – it’s a beautiful spot, with wonderful shopping opportunities, and probably the only place where you can quasi-legally get stoned in Australia if that floats your boat (but even that is so transactional that it loses its illicit appeal).  Just suffice it to say it’s not the place I am looking for on my adventure around Australia, and I’d go so far as to say I think it has lot quite a lot of its soul.

The hostel?  Party central.  Flyers up every morning with the day’s and evening’s happy hour offerings, empty beer bottles, wine bottles, and goon bags around every corner.  Not that it was dirty – it was actually a nice-ish hostel – just that everyone’s daily routine involved waking up late, hung over, going to the beach, probably starting to hit the booze at beer o’clock, back to the hostel for quick hotdogs or hamburgers or pasta dinner, and then out on the town.  Rinse and repeat.  Maybe throw in Nimbin for one day (in which case the routine is: wake up, get on bus, buy space cakes, come back to Byron and hit up Subway, buy three foot-long subs with chips and cookies, realize you ate one too many space cakes, have most god-awful trip of your life, and spend the next 18 hours in bed), and that’s what goes in amongst the backpacker crowd here.  The ones who have money go shopping for the same stuff you can get anywhere else (Billabong, bikinis, sunglasses, dresses, etc).

The hostel also had $10 per day parking, and there’s no place in the “central business district”, as they call it, with free parking.  I was here for eight days.

Anyhow, a few days in I’m tired and 3/4 asleep in my bed at 10pm.  Not anymore.  The door to the dorm room crashes open an in stampede four bulls into the proverbialchina shop.  Yep.  Canadian girls.  In their defense, they’d probably never stayed in a hostel before, but they were the LOUDEST people I have ever experienced.  At 10pm, they take half an hour to find their beds and settle in, all the while whispering at a talking / yelling volume.  Tired?  No…they head straight out on the town and come back at 4am not even bothering to whisper.  The next morning (I really should have seen it coming), they wake up bright and early at 8am and block up the bathroom for two hours straight getting ready to go SURFING!  Not to the prom or a wedding…TO PUT ON THEIR SWIMSUITS!!!  Later that night, admitting defeat, I joined them out on the town.  They were actually pleasant girls, which I guess was to be expected.  We had a nice tapas dinner, and then did the typical evening exercise in Byron Bay – walking from one bar/club to the next, to the next, and back to the first in search of something that didn’t suck, for lack of a better word.  They left the next morning, and the world was a better place for it.

Apart from the partying that went on all around me, the lighthouse was really a pretty cool spot.  About a 30-45 minute walk from town, the path takes you through littoral rainforest, up and down hills, back up again, down a little bit, and back up a really steep bit for a mile.  It’s nice to be out of the direct sunshine, even if the humidity is a bit higher in the forest, but avoiding spiders the size of your fist is not a favorite pastime of mine.  I did this around 4pm, got some nice pictures, and headed back to the town and hostel.  I did some research and found out that if I wanted to see the sunrise in the morning, I’d have to get up at 4am to get there in time…hmm…Well a few days later I decide to do it anyhow, with two other girls from my room whom I’d really met after going to the townie bar the night before for some live music.  We got up at 4am, I led the way up the hill, and we saw the sunrise.  The lighthouse is a nice place, and the sunrise is a nice thing to see, but one doesn’t really serve as a great backdrop for the other…or at least you can take about two nice pictures of both together and that’s it.  My unintended sunrise at Seven Mile Beach a few weeks back was a lot better.

That’s just about all that went on at Byron to be honest…it’s an interesting place, but I’m feeling more and more like I’m just biding my time until Christmas.  Spending eight nights in one place doesn’t really give oneself the feeling of “adventure” – more like vacation.  I’m not a backpacker, and I didn’t come here to party every night.  But I have to do it (bide my time, that is) since I’m driving back down south for Christmas, and I’d prefer a 10 hour drive over a 24 hour one! 

I’m really looking forward to heading away from the party coast and into the outback just after the New Year.  I think it will mean a lot more hardship for me, but that’s part of the adventure.  The coast is by all means a beautiful place, but it’s an easy place as well.  I can’t wait for a change in the landscape, even if it means trading the more temperate (and wet) coast for the dry and hot interior of the country.  For me, the Australia is the sparsely populated, less visited places in the outback, not the coast or rainforest.  Can’t wait to see what it has in store for me, my bike, and my sanity!


Oh, and the $10/day parking rip-off?  The exit gate was broken the morning I left, so I saved myself $80.  Karma...