Up at 5.30am this morning! Woke up just before the alarm went off as well. Don't feel as tired when that happens.
Checked out by 6.15am and ready for our bus which came at 6.25am. There were about 10 leaving from our hostel to get the same bus as us. It's called Oz Experience and is a hop-on hop-off bus taking us from Sydney to Cairns. There's lots of stop off points along the way and we can jump off wherever we like and stay as long as we want. Cost us £335 each and we booked it through STA in the UK.

There were about 40 On the bus and we had a funny driver called Sconesey. He gave us a bit of a briefing about stuff and then we were on our way up the coast to "Spot X" - Arrawarra being the real name. Drove over the Harbour Bridge for the first time too! About 2 hours in we had a 30 minute stop at a normal English style service station. First time we've been to a normal service station on a motorway since being away. They even had the Golden Arches or Maccas as the Aussies say.
On a side note, Burger King is called Hungry Jacks over here...?

There wasn't a great deal to see on the journey, just lots and lots of trees and open land. But then we had a quiz! Can't beat a quiz can you? We got into teams so it was good to get chatting to other people near us on the coach. Didn't win though. Won't bother talking to them again. Just kidding.

After another quick toilet/fuel stop, the fun started up again. We had to make a stop because "the turbo on the engine had popped". Luckily he got it going again within about 15 minutes.

We got some sleep in over the next couple of hours until our next stop in Kempsey. Sconesy introduced us to a song by a some very famous Australian guy who has released 108 albums I think he said. Kempsey is where he was from an I think the song was called G'day. Appalling song, but kind of funny. It was what woke Therese up so she absolutely hates it. I like to sing it to her.

We grabbed some quick lunch and then it was back onto the bus for a couple of hours. We got a history lesson about surfing. First person to surf in Australia was a woman. I'll spare you the rest.
Saw a couple if Kangaroos! I'm sure we'll see loads more too.
Just before we got to Spot X, we dropped a couple of people off in Coffs Harbour and then made a bottle stop at CellarBrations to pick up some booze for surf camp.

We turned up at this surf camp and a surf dude jumped on to give us our briefing. It's got a small caravan park attached to it too and is just off the beach. It's cloudy today, but still looks nice. There's nothing around here either. It's just like a small caravan park on the coast. We're not in a caravan, but it's a bit like one. It's like a cabin with three bunk beds in. We ended up with a sea-view one too.

Once we got sorted we went for dinner which is included in the price. $50 (£37) for one night dorm accommodation, tonight's dinner, breakfast and lunch tomorrow, plus half day surf lesson. The dinner was massive too, we got loads and it was help yourself salad. Our eyes were bigger than our bellies though and we got a bit greedy so didn't finish everything that we got. Good value for money though. We nipped back to see if we had dorm-mates yet and we did, 3 guys, so 5 of us in one cabin.

We got chatting to plenty of people at dinner and got some good tips for New Zealand from one couple. We cracked open the beers and got talking to a load of other people. I decided to get the Spoon card game going so ran back to grab our deck of cards. There was a thin brown longish snake slithering under our cabin! Cool. Then when I got back, someone had spotted a pretty big lizard hanging out on one of the trees. We're in the wild now!

Spoon was a good laugh and we had about 12 people involved so it's a good ice breaker to get talking to people. We'll be seeing most of these people all the way up the coast at some point as pretty much everyone stops off at the same points but for different periods.

From there we played a few other games. The one where you blow the deck of cards from the top of a bottle and then the games moved onto another table. There were about 20 odd people involved then, and most of them were absolutely smashed! We played a couple more games and called it a night. Mainly because we had no booze left, which is a good thing because those guys will be drinking until very late and I know will regret it tomorrow!
And I don't want to be hungover for tomorrow.

Jeez, one of the guys in our cabin is snoring already. And the other two aren't even back yet. It's going to be a long night.

Anyway, really looking forward to tomorrow...