Day 81, 82, 83, 84 -Byron Bay -Thursday 5th, Friday 6th, Saturday 7th, Sunday 8th January 2012

Byron Bay is one of those places that you hear all about before you've even stepped a foot in town. Everyone raves about how lovely it is - literally we hadn't heard a single bad word about it. Well, it's fair to say it lives up to its reputation; the beach is gorgeous, the town really quaint and filled with hippy types and lots of organic stuff - even the graffiti is cool!

After some breakfast, Nikki, Danny, Ad and I decided to explore and walked along the beach to the Captain Cook lookout and watched the surfers catching some waves. It was a beautiful day and that coupled with the turquoise sea and white sand made it quite a sight, we even saw a wild sea turtle! We walked on to the Cape Byron conservation area and started the accent to the top where the lighthouse stood. We reached the most Easterly point of Australia and took the obligatory picture before walking on to spot a wild Wallaby - it was so cute and quite happily just sitting on the side of the path munching on some flowers. We eventually reached the Lighthouse and stopped for a frothy chai latte (reminiscent of India!) whilst taking in the view. From this point you can look across the ocean and not see anything except where the sea meets the sky - it literally feels like the end of the world.

In the evening we headed back to our hostel for our free dinner - at Aquarius you get a free dinner if you buy a drink. We were dubious but decided to give it a go and surprisingly the spag bol was really tasty - the free dinner was a winner! This was quite lucky as we didn't fancy cooking in the Aquarius kitchen, especially after seeing the dead cockroaches in the microwave oven!

Aquarius do different themes each night and tonight was a pub quiz so we decided to get involved. It was also happy hour - happy hour with $3 jungle juice and a pub quiz are a lethal combination! Armed with our quiz team name "Quiz-team aguilera", we went all 4 rounds and ended up coming 2nd and also won the best quiz team name! And guess what our prize was? Yes, a round of 6 jaeger bombs and a $20 dollar bar tab! Complete drunk oblivion was ours!

Ahhhh its Friday morning and our heads are thumping - what was in that jungle juice last night?! Perhaps it best not to know…………….

With our hangovers in full swing we decided to just have a beach day so Ad and I headed down to the beach and literally just lie in the sun, read our books and chatted all day whilst drinking about a hundred rehydration drinks! Whilst we were sitting on the beach the lifeguards suddenly sounded an alarm - confused, we sat up and watched the spectacle of everyone getting out of the water. Later when we asked someone what it was, they said it was the shark alarm!!! Adam now won't even put his toe in the water let alone get in - tomorrow's surfing should be interesting…..

After another free dinner of chilli and nachos we went out for a walk around the town and started chatting to one of the guys who worked in the Byron Bay travel bugs. His name was Buck and he was hilarious! When we asked him about our Noosa everglades trip his opening line was "remember to take some insect repellent, cos the mozzies up there, they'll f***ing destroy ya!" - pure brilliance!!

Saturday came and so did our Style Surf School lesson - my first ever surfing lesson; Soph has done it a few times before in Croyde so I was feeling the pressure especially as Danny & Nikki were coming down to film us too!! We will put the video up on here when we have it! We were picked up at 1pm by our instructor for the day - Gaz-Man! Try and picture this bloke… he was about 40 ish years old, long blonde/grey pony tail, plump beer belly and said "dude" and "wacker-tail" every 5 mins!! However, he could definitely surf even if his lesson was a bit all over the place. There were only 7 of us for the lesson but there was one really annoying woman with us who thought she had booked an intermediate course, not one for beginners, so every 10 seconds she was moaning and say that she had surfed in Indonesia and wanted to ride a green wave and that she was just about gods answer to surfing. The Gaz-Man was giving her some serious banter which I thought was hilarious even if it boarded slightly on bullying - meanwhile everyone else was getting a bit fed up with it all. Soph and I both thought she must be pretty good as she had all the chat and all the gear! But in my head I remembered my old mate Danny Wells saying "All the gear means no idea!" and he was spot on! Sophie literally surfed this lady into the sand!

Anyway after all the practising on the beach we were dumped into the sea. I caught my first wave and stood up for about 15 seconds which I was pleased with, Soph was awesome and caught more or less every wave she went for, and the intermediate woman very nearly got to one knee!! The water was really choppy and we (well me) had to wait quite a while to catch a wave so after about 5/6 goes I was done. I sat on the beach and watched Soph get better and better, she now thinks she's the female version of Kelly Slater, check out the photos!! (he's the current champion surfer if you didn't know!).

In the evening we washed up and went to a cool beach bar right on Byron Bays main beach, as we were pretty cold after being in the sea all day we settled back with all the other cool people drinking beers, shots and classy cocktails - whilst we had a coffee and a slice of cake - Soph said we looked like a couple of old gits, I said pass my socks over! And to bed we went!

With today being a Sunday our hostel we doing a BBQ at 2.30pm so Soph and I got up and went to the beach. Byron's beaches are the best we have seen so far on our journey through Australia, but we do have Frazer Island and Whitsundays to come so it may lose its title. Anyway that said it is an amazing beach. We stayed there reading our books and catching some rays till about 2pm then walked back for the BBQ. Now seeing as the Aussies are famed for BBQ's we were really expecting something awesome. Instead we got 2 burnt sausages, some cold pasta and a salad… we were gutted as we hadn't eaten all day in preparation for a traditional Aussie feast!! But seeing as it was free and served up in a hostel that has cockroaches stuck and melted in the microwaves what should we really have expected?! After the BBQ we had a couple of jugs of the local Byron Ale and then walked around the town until we came to the green. The green is just a really small patch of grass about 50 metres square behind the greyhound bus stop. As we got there we bought a coffee and sat down with about 30 other people and listen to a band that had just set up their kit there and played a few songs! It was really chilled out and relaxing, which is just what we needed before setting off back to our hostel to pack as tomorrow we leave for Brisbane & Wet and Wild Water Park - I literally can't wait!