Monday 18th January.

Surprisingly not feeling too bad this morning, I managed to get myself up in time for the mini bus to pick us up for surfing at 8:40. There were two buses, we were on the bus with two French girls, two Swish guys called Cyril and Cyril, three Swedish guys and Carl who was Dutch. He ended up sitting next to me on the way there so we were just talking about our travels and what we were expecting from surfing. He said his friend wouldn't come because she's scared of sharks. Surprisingly so am I and they are known in the area we went to, but I just blocked it out and got on with it. There's a lot of things to be scared of in life on a daily basis and you can't always let them block you from doing what you want to do or you would never do anything. We arrived in Ballina after about 20 minutes and were given our wetsuits and surf boards. We paid $40 for everything which we thought was good. Terry kept trying to do a cockney accent back to me every time I spoke, but he was really funny. There was Terry, Eric and an Italian guy called Phillipe who were there to look after us. We carried our surf boards down in pairs and they were a lot heavier than I thought they would be. We had to be shown, and practise, before we got in the water which positions we should do to gradually get to standing up when we were in the sea. We tied the cord around our ankle and followed them in to the sea. The hardest thing about the whole experience was actually getting back out in to the sea against the tide, with a surf board, and eventually having no strength. The first time wasn't too bad, once you are so far out you just lie on your belly on your board and paddle with your arms doing front crawl. I went over to Phillipe first and I was lying ready to go. He waited for a wave to come then pushed me in front of it and shouted "up" which meant go go go! I pushed myself through the positions so I was then standing and was surprised I had manage to do it first time. I didn't last too long the first time before I jumped in to water before I got thrown off. I went round and on again and stood up most times, and managed to surf my way right in, but had to jump off before I plummeted in to a rock pool where the waves were crashing against. It was really good fun, but tiering, and the group were all really nice too. It was funny watching other people as we were all there for the first time and some were picking it up quicker than others. We spent a couple of hours in the sea then got out and showered to head back. We went straight to the beach when we got back and lay down there for the rest of the afternoon. We went for a stroll late afternoon along the sea to the other end of the beach. Dogs are allowed on this part of the beach so they were entertaining us. It reminded me of the scene out of Marley and Me where they have a dog beach. We saw one dog which was surfing. His owner stood him on the surf board and pushed him towards the beach and he was just casually surfing along which was funny. We had a chilled out evening after a tiering morning, and just spoke to a local Australian man at the campsite for a while, before we went to bed.