We arrived in Byron Bay with our fingers crossed for some good weather. We had three days to spend here due in no small part to the fact that we hadn't hung around in the rain further north. We were also keen to spend at least a couple of days learning to surf in the fantastic breaks.

Byron Bay itself is a lovely small town (one of Australia's best beach towns) set on a fabulous stretch of horseshoe shaped beach where the sand is soft and the waves are 'fully sick'. Our prayers had been answered and during our time in Byron Bay we were blessed with warm sunny weather.

Apparently our luck hadn't entirely changed however as the surf lesson we had booked for our first afternoon were cancelled due to strong rip tides.

Undeterred by the rough seas we hired some body boards and tried our hand at body boarding which Gemma had previously tried in Cornwall. The surf in Byron Bay was much stronger than Cornwall and it wasn't quite the same as Gemma remembered but Craig picked it up fairly quickly. The sun shone all afternoon and we had a lovely time on the beach.

We were both still on a high from diving on the Great Barrier Reef and whilst we were walking around Byron Bay we had noticed a couple of dive shops offering trips to Julian Rocks which turns out to be one of the top 10 dive sites in Australia. Craig couldn't resist booking himself onto a trip whilst Gemma needed a little more cajoling given the price of AU$95 for one dive! The dive trip set off at 6 am on the second day of our stay and it turned out to be a truly remarkable morning. Gemma did her first backward roll entry into the water and as soon as we hit the bottom we saw fantastic wildlife all around us. Within seconds we had encountered a lion fish and well camouflaged carpet sharks, shortly afterwards we swam with a leopard shark (and saw many more during the dive) and went on to see turtles, a swimming moray eel and an eagle ray. We were sold the diving based on the promise that we would see more on a single dive here than we could see on 10 dives elsewhere and we were not disappointed, this was by far the best single dive we had been on.

Byron Bay has a kicking night scene which we sampled a couple of times taking in the live music, a grotty hotel bar and a nightclub. We had to be a little careful as budget constraints and the price of drinks meant we couldn't really party hard in Australia - although if we'd had the cash we could have gone crazy.

Our last day saw us taking our postponed surf lesson with the local surf legend that is Gazman. Neither of us had surfed before and after an hour or so of tuition we were both standing up on our boards cutting some wicked shapes on the waves staying low and loose waiting for a fully sick wave. More lessons are however required. We had an awesome time and it was a shame our lesson had been delayed until our last day as we would have liked to have some more time surfing, maybe even graduating from foamies.

Surf lesson over we packed our bags and waited for the overnight Greyhound bus to take us to Sydney.