Baywoes

The next day I was fit for fight again, and had a nice, long walk in the morning. The easternmost point in Australia is here, at the Cape Byron itself, a bluff where a most picturesque lighthouse is standing, beckoning for ships and photographers from near and far to come nigh, but only close enough to get a good picture and stay off the reef. From up there you stand a good chance of seeing whales and dolphins at various times throughout the year, so it's definitely a worthwhile walk for most people, it'll take you about 40 minutes of walk from the town centre, each way. It's also very popular with suicidal surfers, who flock to the tip of the cape, where the waves are large and many, and so are the murderous rocks at the waterfront. Get your testament written before you give it a try.

If you want to become one of the cool dudes you have to start somewhere, and I started with a 3 hour surf lesson at the more tranquil beach waves in town. At AU$20 it seemed like a good deal, as it included a surf board, a wet suit and access to an instructor who seemed quite out of his mind. He was quite the stereotype, with long, blonde, curly hair, a really slow, hoarse laugh, the result of years and years of smoking marihuana between the surfing, and of course with a shark tooth around his neck and a silly walk obviously very inspired by how you put your feet on the board when you get up on it to surf. A proper Matt, definitely. It took 55 minutes from the lesson started before I was able to actually stand on the board for a few seconds. And that was about how good I got on my first day of surfing.

On the second day of surfing my AU$25 sent me to the other good beach near Byron Bay, barbeque included. I was only slightly intimidated by the name of it: Broken Head Beach. Going with Perfect Break Surf Company I started to worry exactly what would break perfectly, but it all went very well, except the waves were 2-3 meters high and came in very close to each other, so I spent most of the day learning how to drown. I'm sure it can be rewarding, but I soon got tired of the taste of salt water, and decided I'd stay at the beginner's beach from now on.

When my surfing technique was perfect, I moved on northwards. First I thought my next stop would be Surfer's Paradise, of course, both because I was now a surfer and because that is a funny name for a city, which normally is a big plus for me. When I came there, I discovered this was not Surfer's Paradise, this was Fat and Rich Japanese and Russian Tourists' So-called Paradise. The 32 kilometers long beach is lined by a continuous wall of condominiums built to house the tourists that come here. Most places along this strip you can be 50 metres away from the beach and not know it. It's a good beach but swimming is only allowed in a small number of 60 meter wide stretches that are guarded by lifeguards, and there the beach is really, really crowded. I found a place with no guards and no people and laid down to read my philosophy books.

It worked for a while, I must have read at least 4 pages before three young ladies laid down just next to me and disturbed my concentration. That was okay, though, because this was the beginning of a great study of anthropology. Just a few minutes later, five Italian young, slick men entered the stage, fitting themselves into the narrow space between me and the girls. The smell of coconut oil reached everywhere as they with great care and staginess rubbed sunscreen on themselves, inviting the girls with some incomprehensive Italian and their pleading eyes to help them reach all over. The girls ignored and turned their backs towards them. Full of optimism the men used finger signs behind the girls' backs to indicate to each other which of the girls would become the property of which Italians, before they got up and into the girls' field of vision and started playing with a ball to attract the girls' attention. Didn't work. They turned over again, towards me, and we shared some rolling eyeballs. This move seemed to confuse the Italians, who withdrew into the water where they could plan their next push undisturbed. The girls packed their stuff and walked away. The Italians couldn't believe their misfortune, they started yelling at each other for having made this and that mistake, and desperately looked up and down the beach for new victims. As I got up to leave, a fresh batch of Swedish blondes came down to the beach, and the last thing I saw was the Italians looking up to the sky with their hands folded, thanking their compassionate God for his mercy. It was a good show.

The highlight of the day, though, was when I discovered that when you step on bluebottles, a kind of not quite lethal jellyfish that are numerous along the coasts of Australia, that have been laying around on the beach to dry for some time, they explode with an excellent popping sound. I spent quite a while walking up and down the beach, hunting the bluebottle carcasses down.

Already fed up with Surfer's Paradise, I walked back to the Greyhound station to go on with the next bus to Brisbane. After a month in Australia I was shocked to experience my first delayed departure, we were 25 minutes late when I boarded. The driver was shaking with guilt and did his best to get us to Brisbane in time, something he just about managed. I didn't really care, I just wanted to make a point to you about how incredibly efficient the buses in Australia normally are. It's amazing, almost like home.

I stayed at the YHA in Brisbane, which was central and nice enough. I was the last riser in my dorm room, even though I got up at 7 in the morning. The rest of the beds were taken by a gang of Austrians who were totally jet-lagged after spontaneously leaving the snowy and cold Salzburg and getting on a 40 hour airplane zig-zag through Asia to come to the, on this day, very rainy Brisbane. Anyway, thanks to their jet-lag and noisy getting-up, I too got an early start of my day. I spent it walking. My first destination was the South Bank Parklands, which was the location of the 1988 World Expo, so there are a few interesting things there to see even now. The most prominent sight is an "authentic Nepalese pagoda", which I, since I was now such a man of the world, could only barely agree on actually was authentic at all. The wood carvings are definitely good craftsmanship, but if you want to have anything authentic Nepalese, there are a thousand smells, noises, decay and desperation that needs to be in the picture as well. And the electrical lighting doesn't really add to the authenticity, either. But it's good. Really. The park itself is nice and tidy, as is the small beach along the river bank here. I'd take this place before Surfer's Paradise's beaches any time.

A few really nice, old-looking buildings are more than evened out by a number of the incredibly ugly, square and grey stategallery, state museum and state library. On the inside they are nice enough, however. The museum had a very good exhibition with lifelike models of prehistoric giant marsupials and lizards, and a whaling section with lots of videos showing stupid, murderous Norwegians commiting crimes against the most intelligent beings on the planet. We should probably be happy the whales never developed thumbs, or we would be at war with them now, likely to lose. The library was not so good; London Times was the only European newspaper available, and the next opening on the sign-up list for the Internet access was on Christmas Day, so I left the library not knowing more about what was going on at home than I did when I came.

I had a proud moment when I suddenly jumped out of my skin. The skin in this case was the one of my shoes, and I felt strangely satisfied by actually having worn out a pair of shoes on this trip. Fate wanted this to happen outside the largest sports store in Australia, so I just walked in, spent an hour finding the shoe department and got a good pair of new walking shoes. They were disturbingly clean and nice-looking, but I immediately started a process to change that as I stepped into a dog turd on the pavement just outside the store.

The next morning I woke up to the smell of beer. Everywhere. The reason was that the enormous Castlemain XXXX brewery was just around the corner, and this obviously was a beer brewing day. Since I am not a beer enthusiast, and since I knew that I would be coming back to Brisbane to fly out to New Zealand, I went straight to the bus station and continued north on my Greyhound pass, destination Hervey Bay.