The weather has been amazing the last few days and we both have cute rosy cheeks and not so cute burnt shoulders. You know how much it hurts when someone touches sunburnt skin? Painful right? Now imagine trying to lug 15kg of crap around on lobster shoulders. Not clever. We found that out the hard way when we walked to the bus stop this morning.

As you may have guessed from the fact that we're burnt, we've spent the last three days down at the beach. It's easy to see why the Aussies are a nation of surfers. Not only do they live in a very hot country, thus mandating lots of sunbathing and frequent dashes into the sea when doing so, but they are also blessed with very, well, 'wavy' sea. It's a lot of fun to jump onto the waves as they hurtle towards you and ride them back towards the shore. It's quite funny to watch as well: the lifeguards only watch a stretch of water a few dozen metres wide meaning that, even though there's a massive beach in Byron Bay, everyone is bunched up on top of one another in the water, squealing and splashing around and catching the waves and generally getting in each others way.

On Thursday evening we watched a live acoustic set at the hostel bar where one of the longterm residents sang his own songs and played the guitar, drums and the didgerido - sometimes all at once. It seems that Byron Bay encourages musicality. There's generally someone in the kitchen strumming on a guitar or someone in the garden singing their heart out. Sometimes it's really good but not everyone is as talented as they think. One guy spent half an hour just singing 'Byron Bay, Byron Bay, oooh Byron Bay' over and over outside our room the other night, which was exceedingly irritating.

On Friday we woke up at 4.45am (!!!) to watch the sunrise from Cape Byron, the most easterly point of Australia. We were both pretty excited about this as neither of us had ever watched a sunrise before. We still haven't. We think it must have happened quietly behind the clouds without us noticing as all of a sudden it was light instead of dark then it got lighter and lighter until neither of us could deny the fact that it was well and truly daylight. We went back to bed in disgust. When we got up the sun was grinning down at us from a cloudless sky. No-one seeing it then would have believed that it had been so shy that morning.

That night we watched the rugby then sat around with people from the hostel drinking and talking. At one point someone randomly came out with pans and pans of rice and laid it all along the bench in front of us, before bringing out heaps of chicken in a spicy sauce and dribbling it along the top. The resulting curry was longer than a man would be if he laid flat on his back. Everyone dug in with their fingers and it was gone within five minutes. I wondered if I'd imagined it but decided I hadn't, especially as I hadn't had any of the suspiciously fragrant cigarettes being passed round. A couple of hours and lots of goon later we found ourselves on the bus into town where we spent around 45 minutes walking around trying to get into somewhere. For such a laid-back hippy town it's quite hard to get into a bar past midnight unless you aren't wearing 'thongs' (which we all were) or are in a small group (which we weren't). Eventually we gave up and headed back to the hostel, where I promptly fell asleep with my clothes on.

Today we are heading up the coast again, this time to Surfers Paradise. It's meant to be quite trashy. We can't wait!