The best way to sum up Byron Bay is to say that I planned on spending 2 or 3 nights here, ended up staying for 10, and still didn’t want to leave. Beautiful, small, friendly, great surfing and diving, this place had it all. Also, the hostel I stayed at was so much better than anywhere else I’ve been before or after. The place revolved around a huge assemblage of picnic tables in the middle, which meant everybody got to know each other really well, and 15 to a side flipcup tournaments in the evenings were commonplace. So here’s the only hostel shoutout you’ll find in my posts – if you go to Byron, stay at Holiday Village Backpackers. I’m writing this a couple weeks after I left Byron, and I’m getting really excited just thinking of the place again.

It took a while for me to realize how long I was going to be there, so my first few days were loaded with activities. The first of these was a diving trip to the world-renowned Julian Rocks Marine Reserve. Even now, two weeks and many GBR dives later, the two dives I went on here might just be the best I’ve ever done. The first one took us to Cod Hole, named after a long swim-through tunnel 20m down that teems with big fish – cod and grouper mostly. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the hole and the number of divers, the place became a bottleneck and wasn’t all that great. The highlight of the dives appeared immediately after popping out the other side. A big ol’ manta ray was circling above maybe 15-20m away – words cannot convey the sense of grace and beauty one feels watching the flight of a big ray. Oh, and I saw my wobbie on this dive. Before I got to Australia, the thing I most wanted to see diving was a wobbegong shark – these beasts have beautiful tan and brown mottling on their backs, and the most hideous, whisker-covered faces. I saw a picture of one in an aquarium magazine maybe 6 or 7 years ago, and the wobbie immediately became my favourite shark. Anyway, I almost landed on one as I descended at the beginning of the dive. I proceeded to lie down on the sand next to it and spend a few minutes staring into its eyes from less than a foot away. The divemaster urged me to hurry on, and I was a bit confused – we had found a wobbegong after all. As we started swimming though, I saw another, and then another, then one more. The wobbie count for the first dive was a “whopping” 16, a record that immediately got blown away as I saw over 30 on the second dive.

Actually, the second dive blew away the first one in every way. My divemaster for this one was an amazing lady who never swam past a crevice without peering inside with her torch. These nooks held treasure after treasure - mantis shrimp, cleaner shrimp, nudibranchs, lionfish, green moray eels, puffers, anemones filled with clownfish and coral crabs, rock lobsters, sponges, clams, blah, blah, blah. The best was a deep crevice maybe 4 feet long and 6 inches wide that was home to 4 juvenile wobbies and some cuttlefish huddled together. Immediately after peering into this crevice we got buzzed by a huge school of yellowfin tuna, a couple hundred fish each 2-3 feet long. They started feeding on a school of small fish hanging nearby, and the activity got all the other reef predators going – even a couple of the normally nocturnal wobbies got involved in the frenzy. A few minutes later and it was all over, and the tuna were gone. A few minutes later gave me my favourite moment in Byron Bay. Perched on a rocky outcrop was an eagle ray – 5-6 feet in diameter, jet black and dotted with ivory spots, with a stinger that only added to its majesty. As it posed for us, holding its wingtips up, a group of cleaner wrasse swarmed over the ray’s back and hurried in among the gills to gobble up whatever parasites were causing trouble. Unreal.

I feel like I’m rambling, but this dive was just so good. Right after we reluctantly left the ray to her grooming we came upon a green sea turtle, lying on the bottom and eying us curiously. I think it liked staring at its reflection in my mask – it was amused by something anyway. The turtle’s shell was as busy as the ray’s gills, as another species of fish grazed away on the algae that must have been providing some unwanted drag. The interconnectedness of everything on the reef is just so dramatic and in-your-face. And as for highlights, there was one more surprise near the end of the dive. An utterly gigantic black cod, at least 10 feet long, hung under an overhang slowly rocking back and forth with the swell. Critically endangered, there may only be a couple hundred of these groupers (anything big and ugly here is colloquially called a cod) left in the world, most only a few feet long. The chances of a comeback is virtually nil – too few fish, too long to sexual maturity, and delicious enough to tempt poachers. The divemaster, visiting Julian Rocks pretty much every day for 15 years, had never seen a fish like it. It was that kind of dive…

Hah! That seems like it should be a post in itself. But that was the first of my 10 days in Byron, and the writing will continue…

The next three days were sunny, warm, and perfect for surfing. I took a four hour surf lesson each day with the most hilarious stereotype of an instructor. A 40 year old lifelong surfer, this dude was super tanned with long bleached hair, a haggard face covered in countless surfing scars, and absolutely jacked. He was, without a doubt, also the craziest driver I have ever shared a vehicle with. The 10 minute drive picking up people from the hostels and heading to the beach was the main adventure of each day. The surfing lessons themselves were as expected – lots of repetition on the beach, getting into the water, falling, and then finally getting it right and learning to stand on a wave. However, this was with an instructor pushing your board from behind to help you catch the wave. The hard part is the paddling and timing of catching your own wave. This was what I worked on for days two and three, and improvement was quite rapid. I can now definitely see how surfing can be such a lifestyle for so many Aussies, and I know I would have surfed every day had the weather stayed nice. However, Byron and the rest of the east coast got hit with a week-long, once in 50 or 100 years storm…

My notes from May 20-25 pretty much read the same each day – lots of cribbage by day (replaced by euchre later in the week), and lots of drinking at night. The storm was unreal. Several hundred mm of rain fell each day, flooding the hostel, the streets, and everything else. No one had ever witnessed anything quite like it. Roads all along the east coast got washed out, buses were canceled, and the winds were too strong for planes to take off. I was stranded in Byron for these days whether I liked it or not. I met so many good people here though, and there was nowhere I’d rather have been. Running to the bottle shop every night in the pouring rain never stopped being an adventure though.

The second last day in Byron brought some sun, and the whole town headed to the beach. By 9am the roads were clogged with beachgoing cars, and the sidewalks were crammed with people. Most of the businesses were still closed due to flooding though, but no one seemed to care. So the 50 or so meters of beach between water and grass were covered in towels and sunbathers, while the rest of Byron ventured out into the craziest ocean I have ever seen. Going out just 20 meters from shore meant getting clobbered by waves easily two to three times my height, but the body surfing was amazing and the experience mindblowing. Never have so many young males had so much fun playing in the ocean… okay, maybe the real best part was when a rogue wave came in and cleared the beach. Literally. One wave came out of nowhere and reached up over the entire 50m of beach and got the grass wet, destroying hundreds of cameras, cellphones, and iPods in the process while stealing thousands of towels for itself. The power of the ocean… man….

I could go on about other Byron activites that took up my week, the basketball, drinking, cards, flipcup, feast-cooking, crazier-than-the-movies parties at the bar across from the hostel, but this has gone on long enough. On May 25 the highway north reopened, and I was off along with everyone else going north. The road south was still expected to be closed for another week, leaving people with the choice of killing another 7 days in storm-battered Byron or paying the exorbitantly inflated airfares to get south. I was sad to go, but it was high time to move on.

So my dreams of diving Vanuatu were dashed, but I think I’m glad they were. The five weeks I now have in Oz aren’t nearly enough time to see the east coast – three would have been nuts. The flight from Christchurch to Sydney was uneventful, and I chose my hostel by finding one that offered free airport pickups. So I saved myself a $20 train ticket that way, but ended up in a very mediocre hostel. It didn’t really matter though, as I didn’t spend much time there anyways. After dropping off my stuff I set out to grab dinner and wander for a bit. An amazing falafel made the dinner part great, but the wander was more on the “interesting” side of things.

The neighbourhood where I stayed, King’s Cross, caters to two distinct and disparate groups of people. On one hand, this is Sydney’s backpacker mecca, home to endless rows of nearly-identical hostels, cheap eateries, budget travel agents, and whatever else backpacking vagrants require. The other element that dominates King’s Cross is sleaze. Interspersed among the hostels are nearly as many strip clubs, porn stores, and massage parlours, while strung out strippers seem to outnumber backpackers on some blocks. I got harassed by three hookers in the first 10 minutes of my wander, and eventually decided to loop back to the hostel and leave the exploring until morning.

Sydney reminded me a lot of Boston – small and dense. The sidewalks, though much wider than we have in Toronto, were more crowded than anywhere I’ve been before, but despite this I was able to pretty much walk the circumference of the city in a day. King’s Cross is on the outskirts of the city (call it Yonge and Finch I guess) and, setting out by nine, I was able to get all the way downtown to the two famous Sydney landmarks before noon. The Harbour Bridge was far more impressive than I was expecting. Despite being what I would typically write off as a concrete and steel monstrosity, the bridge somehow managed to look good anyway – aided by the smooth lines of the cables and the ornate patterns in the girders. The amazing panoramic view of the city didn’t hurt either.

I spent most of my time crossing the bridge gazing across the harbour at the Opera House, and from up there it looked just like I expected. Getting closer, however, I found that it lost most of its charm. A huge flight of stairs wrapping completely around the land-facing side just gave a sense of poor planning and inaccessibility, not the grandeur they were surely hoping for, and the illusion of the sails turned into the reality of poorly maintained sheets of rusting metal. I have a feeling that the new ROM and AGO will fare similarly, and it makes me wonder if we would marvel at history’s great buildings if the people who built them were “sophisticated” enough to move beyond stone.

I decided to wander around the Botanical Gardens for a while before heading to the Sydney Aquarium, and I’m really glad I did. The coastal boardwalk certainly lived up to its billing as the gardens’ highlight, while a small exhibit illustrating the history of the Aborigines was informative without being preachy. My favourite part wasn’t mentioned on the map though – there were three trees in the middle of the gardens that were positively teeming with flying foxes, a large fruit eating bat. There must have been hundreds of them squawking and chattering to each other, and every once in a while a tree’s worth would erupt into flight in response to some perceived threat. The hundreds of bats would then circle the trees, their wing beats creating a roar down below, until landing back on the roost. It was a promising start for seeing Aussie wildlife.

Last stop of the day was the Sydney Aquarium – I felt kind of silly paying to see, behind glass, fish that I would surely be seeing while diving in the coming weeks, but I couldn’t resist. Awesomely for me (though I’m still a bit puzzled it), the focus of the aquarium was on the freshwater fishes of Oz, particularly the rainbowfishes. I recognized several of the species from the aquarium trade back home, but can still not figure out why some of the most impressive species haven’t been exported. It’s not like they’re rare over here – several of them are commonly used as baitfish by fishermen. Maybe I’ll try to import a couple bags… There was also a large dugong display, housed in a floating building out in Sydney Harbour. I was surprised that the harbour water quality was good enough – maybe dugongs are just tough buggers. Considering that diving with these guys was to have been the highlight of my proposed hop to Vanuatu, I was glad to at least see them in captivity.

My final day in Sydney allowed me to investigate the subway system of the city – I love reminding myself how much the TTC sucks. The Sydney trains obliged totally – cheap, clean, fast, and well-signed, my double decker train ride from Kings Cross to the central bus terminal was a breeze. Considering that a slower (same distance though), more crowded (and I went at 5:30 pm) trip in Toronto would cost nearly three times the cost, I once again must conclude that there is something horribly wrong with our priorities, execution, or both back home.