We had a sad goodbye to Barraba being waved off from the bus stop by our hosts Haddon, Andrew and dog Gus! But, we were moving on to new things! We took a one hour bus into Tamworth, followed by a four hour train to Maitland. Here, we had to wait for five hours so we had a look around the rather sorry-looking town, got a bite to eat then went back to the train station for our nine hour overnight train to Casino. At 4am, we had to change onto a bus to take us to Byron Bay, where we arrived eventually at 6.30am!

We made our way over to the hostel but unforunately the reception didn't open until 8am, so we had a longer wait on our hands. The hostel, Byron Beach Resort, is a little out of the centre on Belongil beach. Sally and me took a walk along the beach but it was a bit cold and very grey. By 8am the skies had opened and it has poured down ever since. There has been no let up at all and as Byron is essentially just a beach town, there is nothing much to do! We were going to take the hostel bikes out today but it is well too windy. Then we thought we would walk up to the lighthouse at Cape Byron but it is too flooded and misty everywhere. The picture of the lighthouse on this blog post is not mine, as we can barely even see it! It is just a photo from the library of what it should look like on a nicer evening! Instead, we have booked a couple of trips for later on in our travels and our greyhound bus ticket for our remaining five weeks in Australia. We have also combed the shops of Byron, found Jade a waterproof coat (ours have definately been our essential item as the rain seems to have just followed us around!), done our food shopping and now just writing this blog post! It is good though as the hostel puts on a free shuttle bus to the town which saves us a ten minute walk in the rain! The hostel is very good and we have met some nice people here.

Tomorrow we are planning to head over to Nimbin, a quaint little town outside of Byron. The weather apparently isn't going to improve before the weekend at least, so at least it will be nice to have a change of scene.

Amy. x