Byron Bay

From Sydney, we took a 14 hour coach to Byron bay. I actually enjoyed sitting on a coach for 14 hours as it gave me time to have a much needed rest after the hectic rush of Sydney. Byron bay is a chilled out 'hippy' surf town on the east coast and we were lucky to get some really great weather there. We stayed in Aquarius backpackers and they gave us free boogie boards to go to the beach with. The beach was only across the road from the hostel so we spent the whole day there playing in the waves. At night we wandered around the town and had an ice cream. The hostel also gave us a free meal when we bought a drink so we didn't have to cook. The only problem with Byron Bay, and Aquarius hostel and a lot of the east coast of Australia in general, is that it is full of half naked 18 year old Swedish, British and German youths whose soul purpose for existing is to pull, flirt, check themselves out in all available reflective surfaces and congratulate themselves on how adventurous they are to be travelling around Australia. We have been lucky so far, in Melbourne and in Sydney to have avoided this scene, by carefully choosing hostels targeted at the older, international backpacker. However, in places like Byron it is simply unavoidable and it just really isn't my idea of travelling and not what I came around the world for. Not only this, but I can't help being annoyed that I am paying a lot of money for the hostels (much more than any other country) and yet the services are substandard (again, with the exception of Sydney and Melbourne where we chose our hostels wisely). Maybe if I were 18, just out of school and all I wanted to do was drink every night, it might appeal to me more, but this isn't what I came away for. However, as I said, we have been lucky enough to avoid this (apart from Byron) and we are now in Surfers paradise, just a 2hour drive from Byron Bay (Australia's answer to Blackpool, which I really like so far!) staying in a hotel come hostel which is very anti-social (suits me just fine as it means less naked drunken Swedish girls wandering the corridors). In a few days our friend Louise is arriving (Shauna's cousin) and we are renting out an apartment and plan to visit three of the big theme parks here (including wet and wild and movie world). Hopefully the weather will be ok, as Queensland is currently going through a period of heavy floods. We have also arrived in Australia at an interesting time politically, when the ex priminister (Kevin Rudd) is trying to overthrow the current priminister (Julia Gillard) who Jemma thinks looks like Scully off the X Files. There is to be a vote on Monday to see who will be the leader of the Labour party. We had quite an interesting discussion with our Ozzie room-mate last night about it, and laid awake until the early hours discussing politics and psychology whilst the rest of our room-mates were on an 'epic pubcrawl' around Byron bay.