Surfing in Byron Bay, hippies, and free food! -- Sarah and Naomi's forum of coolness

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Date Posted: 22:30:24 07/08/03 Tue
Author: Sarah
Subject: Surfing in Byron Bay, hippies, and free food!

Hi everyone!

Well, we finally got around to trying one of Australias most popular pastimes-Surfing! We're staying in a big surfing town, it seems like 90% of the stores here are surfboard and wetsuit rental shops. It was actually pretty fun, though I think both of us will need a little more pratice before we can take on the tube waves you always see in the movies.

About 10 or 11 of us were driven out to a beach a little ways out of town(it was a little more secluded, so there weren't as many people there to laugh at us beginners). We spent the fist while on the beach learning the correct way to stand up on the board once you catch a wave, how not to be hit in the head by your board when you fall off, and other such important stuff. When we finally got into the water, our instructors would hold our board for us until a wave came, and then tell us when to try standing up. Once we'd gotten the hang of this, they showed us how to catch our own wave.

Now standing up on the board we could do, and catching our own wave we could do, but the difficult part was trying to do both at the same time! When we concentrated on trying to catch the wave at the right time, we'd often end up jumping on the board incorrectly, which can lead to some unpleasant wipe-outs. Sometimes we would get on the board correctly and were able to stand up, but we'd have missed the wave so the surfboard would slowly move forward only a couple of feet before stopping and sinking.

We both maneged to ride the waves in an upright position at least a few times throughout the lesson. We had a neat experience right at the end though, we both managed to catch the same wave and stand up on our boards, and we rode side by side all the way to shore. It's too bad nobody else was there with a camera, I think it would have made a neat picture.

The town we're staying in right now(Byron Bay)is also really cool! It reminds us both a lot of Victoria, it seems to be quite a hippy town. There's plenty of people walking around in hippy-style clothes and dread-locks. There's also plenty of organic/vegan/vegetarian food stores and restaurant here, which is certainly a nice change for me! Most places we've been in Australia have very little in the way of soy or tofu, and the cheeses never say if they ghave rennet in them or not. The Woolworths(the major grocery chain in Australia) here however has a huge vegetarian/vegan section, we can find just about everything made out of tofu here. They even have some cheeses I can eat!(I havn't had cheese in quite some time, so it's a nice treat).

Incence is burned in most stores and hostels here as well, so it always smells like Victoria. Also, the're having a march here in the next few days in protest of sniffer dogs being used to smell for pot, smoking up seems to be a poplular pastime here as well. We even have our own resident guru in our hostel, he's started his own religion which he calls, "the church of the occasional giggle". He was telling me the other day that his mother ship is parked just a few hills over, and was asking if i'd be interested in going along when it left. He's a cool guy though, he gets up at something like 4am every morning to collect flowers which he places all throughout the hostel.

Speaking of our hostel, we have the absolute greatest hostel in all of Australia! Well, the hostel itself is fine, but it's the FREE pancake breakfast that makes it so great! We had fairly low expectations of the free breakfast, we've had bad past experiences with hostels that claim to give free meals. The free food has however has turned out to be REALLY GOOD!

This one guy stands in front of the grill for 1 hour every morning turning out crepes, and he'll make you as many as you can eat. For toppings you can have maple syrup, sugar, lemon juice, lime juice, jam, strawberry sauce, chocolate sauce, caramel sauce, chocolate chunks, nuts, ect. It's absolutely wonderful food! I usually start getting excited about breakfast before i've even had dinner the previous night!

Anyways, my hour of free internet(it came with the surfing lesson) is just about up, so I think i'll go for now. Nomi should be posting in the next few days about Fraser Island, she got a little distracted today. Bye for now!!!

Love Sarah

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