Coffs Harbour - Byron Bay - Surfers Paradise

After a relaxing 2 weeks in Sydney staying at Col's lovely flat and generally chilling out I started my travels again up the coast with my new travel buddy Emma. It's nice to have a friend!

First stop was Coffs Harbour. It's a lovely little town but very quiet. You need a car to get to places of interest so we stayed on the beach! We stayed in the lovely YHA, very clean and very quiet and did not a lot. This was Emma's first time staying in a dorm and luckily we were in a small girl's only dorm (as boys smell too much!)
We had a nice Brazilian girl in a dorm and an older woman who went to bed at 7.30pm every night. Emma and I spent the day chilling on the beach after a long walk into town, dodging the humongous spiders in the trees. We saw the biggest lizard ever, photo evidence to come. The evenings we spent playing cards where a very strange man showed us a card trick which I have yet to try watching Brokeback Mountain again, right up until Jake and Heath's last meet up and then I had to leave cos the end makes me cry...

Our 2nd and last day there we walked to Mutton Bird Island and took some photos with the self timer and then we sent 5 kilos of clothes back to Sydney as we realised our bags were far too heavy!

So our first stop was very chilled out, perhaps a little too chilled? Don't worry, we make up for it...!

Byron Bay
We arrived in Byron about 8pm and were expecting good things from this little surfer town. We stayed at a YHA again and it was a little bit like a shit hole. Lots of American/Canadian youngsters running around getting drunk and having too much fun. One of the girls in our dorm was far too try hard, immediately letting us know that she was she had spent all day in bed because she'd spent the whole of the previous night on the beach having a 'crazy' time. We took an immediate dislike to this particular yoof!

We had an awful packet pasta meal in the dirty kitchen and Emma freaked a little and said that we had to leave the next day. I said that things may look better in the morning. We went for tea and cake to calm our nerves. Life in the bus lane eh?!!

The next day and things looked better, the sun was shining and the beach was 100m down the lane. Emma went off to get her 2nd lot of injections for her trip to Asia and I did some emailing. I then received a call from Emma asking if I would come and pick her up at the doctors as she had done her usual trick of fainting after her injections. Unfortunately there was nobody there to catch her so she hit the floor hard and got a little bit concussed and a massive lump ont he back of her head. Obviously I rushed straight round and had a good laugh at her expense and took a picture of her laid out in the surgery. The doctor gave me a list of signs to look out for if her brain started swelling such as confusion, dizziness, not making much sense (not at all different from her usual self) and then sent us off on our merry way.

The afternoon Emma spent in bed nursing her lump and I went to the beach and met up with Steph Ressort who I used to work with in London as she is also taking time out and doing some travelling.

After our first day we decided that we actually liked Byron, the try hard teeny bopper moved out of our room and a girl called Jo moved in who was cool and we had fun. Obviously with Emma's concussion we had to stay of the goon (ozzie name for wine!) but we did get introduced to Passion Pop by 2 Irish men on our last night. Passion Pop is the cheapest alcoholic drink you can buy - it tastes of really sweet fizzy pop and gets you drunk after about 2 glasses. This was going to be our new drink!!!! We were a little concerned that 2 Irish blokes told us about it this very girly drink but they assured us they would never drink it back home (for fear of death). Not sure we believed them.

In the end we stayed an extra 3 nights more than originally planned in Byron and had a great time. We did some serious sunbathing and had a walk around the town and up to the lighthouse and to the most easterly point in Australia. We hung out a lot with Jo who was a top bird. She couldn't drink at all so it was funny watching her get drunk on half a bottle of Smirnoff Ice!

We liked Byron and would recommend it.

Surfers Paradise
Now, despite what others said about Surfers (tacky place with too many high rise buildings) we decided to include it just to see what it was like and again, we had a great time!!

We stayed in a nice little converted house hostel called Trekkers. We had THE hottest room ever but there was just the 2 of us so it wasn't too bad.

As soon as we arrived we got talked into doing the pub crawl. Now this was something we had promised ourselves we wouldn't do as we knew it would be full of teenagers mostly young Amerdians (our new name for all young Americans and Canadians who are paricularly annoying - no offense!). However, we both agreed that it would be a very poor show not to join in, we weren't pensioners yet and we should go out and have fun!

As soon as we sat on the bus we knew we'd made a mistake!! It was like when you go to Ibiza or Magaluf as a teenager and you are all squashed on a bus and driven around town to loads of clubs and herded about by 18 year old reps. We tried to make the best of it and ended up having a great night and staying out until 4am! ha ha ha!!! Everyone we spoke to thought Em and me were 21!! THEY DID! Lots of teenagers bought us drinks and we had a dance and saw a (really bad) male stripper - Awesome night! Won't do it again though....

WE stayed in the next night and watched Finding Neverland and both cried like the girls we are!!

Emma broke the fan in our room and didn't admit to it.

Next stop Brisbane...