Everyone else is on holiday now so it's been good to have more people around during the day. Christmas has been a relaxed affair with the usual massive amount of food and drink as you get anywhere. I've been staying with Lyn and Stephen in Torquay and they have been most gracious hosts. Arrived on Christmas Eve and the temperature today is 39 degrees so I'm sitting inside with the air conditioning watching the Aussies hammer India in the cricket. Was also at the first day of the test at the MCG with Stephen and Dan so have made it to the Boxing Day test for two years in a row.
Called into Byron Bay on my way to Victoria from Moreton Island and Brisbane. Very relaxed place although all the hostels and hotels are full at this time of year. Spent three nights there and met a lot of Scottish people who are all going to be in or around Sydney for New Years. One of them was even travelling with bagpipes and gave us an impromptu performance at the hostel. Surprisingly, another Scot in the same hostel also had bagpipes and they did a little duet, which was all very nice.
Byron is the most easterly point of Australia and also where the warm northern currents meet the colder southern ones. That makes it one of the top ten spots to dive in the country so I made sure to fit in a couple of dives during my stay and was not disappointed. I made good friends with a guy called Jake who was the first dive guide and who is moving to the Kimberly's in NT so if I ever get up to that end I'll have a place to stay. Byron is also a very musical place and bands play in the handful of pubs almost every night. However, on my first night one of the stages gave way to Chopper Reid doing his stand-up routine of thinly veiled racism and stories about killing people. Although the act was oftentimes cringe worthy I still got my picture taken with him.
On my last day in Byron I took a day trip to Nimbin, which is about 70km inland. It's renowned for it's tolerance of marijuana and it's not a problem at all to purchase any. So, a couple of cookies later I was absolutely wasted staring at the weirdos and soap dodgers that live there. It was like a ZZ Top convention. Every bloke, and I think some of the women, had a huge beard. Our tour guide took us to his mate's house in the middle of nowhere, which was a run-down shack with loads of broken TVs outside. He was weird, sorry living the alternative lifestyle.
I was getting an overnight bus from Byron Bay to Sydney so the trip to Nimbin made that trip an absolute doddle. Twelve hours went by in a heartbeat. That was Saturday 22 December and the night Daft Punk were playing at the Olympic Park in Sydney. It started at 2:00pm and was the most badly organised event ever. Average queue time for a beer was 25 minutes and each person was limited to 2 drinks per person. For a while in the afternoon I was getting the 2 drinks, drinking one and joining the queue straight away again. Daft Punk came on at around 8:00pm and they were so good that all my ill feeling evaporated away. Damn fine night out. Friends had a house warming BBQ on Sunday so that was that weekend gone in a flash.
No pictures just yet as the upload speed here is criminally slow.
A belated Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year.
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