Travelogue Nine: Byron Bay Birthdays
November 18th, 2003
*brought to you by the letter A for Andrew*
The sun had already climbed above the horizon but we were still over a kilometer from the summit of Mount Warning, the highest most eastwardly point on Australia.
Steph’s plan was make this day particularly memorable - and what better way for Andrew to recall his 40th birthday than to wake him up in the middle of the night and have him walk for hours? She’d already given him a carpet snake (which he wasn’t going to be able to take home).
We were to watch the sunrise from the peak - and be the first on the continent to welcome the new day, but the complete lack of traffic at 3:30 am had meant an unexpected 4 km trek just to reach the trailhead. We were running a few minutes late but we weren’t complaining too much. The view was incredible, the air fresh, and the temperatures perfect. It certainly wasn’t a tourist trap: as we reached the top, we found only four other couples drinking in the panoramic views.
The sunrise climb was just the latest high in six weeks of great experiences in Australia.
For Steph, coming to Australia was a chance to return to a country she fell in love with a decade ago and see firsthand what had changed. For me, it was an opportunity to understand Steph better by learning what she had experienced - and that had made such an indelible impression on her. I’ve heard endless stories about how amazing the country is.
Our reintroduction to the Oz could not have been better. After breezing through the notoriously suspicious Australian customs at Melbourne International, we were collected by our friends David and Danielle, who we first met in Thailand. These amazing folks had everything planned for us: the use of one of their apartments, spectacular food at David’s workplace (he’s currently part owner of a fantastic restaurant in St. Kilda’s called Quiet Earth Cafe), and activities about town, like visiting the Botanical Gardens or Danielle’s sprawling family retreat home in Warrendyte. Overall, we spent ten days in Melbourne being spoiled rotten with great food and friends. We wanted to stay longer, but we had WWOOFing obligations in Byron Bay.
What is WWOOFing? It is the awkward acronym meaning Willing Workers On Organic Farms - a popular worktrade scheme here in Australia and elsewhere. Steph was willing to work enough hours WWOOFing to cover our accommodation and hoped to learn more about organic farming. I just wanted comfortable places to write and think. She scoured the WWOOF listings to find people that she felt were doing interesting projects and that would be a good match to our personalities and tastes.
Getting to Bryon was a long haul, because Australia is a BIG country. The only reasonable way of getting between the big cities is flying - but we are not reasonable people. We bussed it straight through on Greyhound, only stopping in Sydney long enough to apply for a new passport (mine was going to expire soon), walk down the waterfront, win a pub lottery ($50 cash, but it could as easily have been fresh meat), nap in a park, and have a couple of pints with Steph’s friend Tym - a computer geek/lawyer/traveler. All this with practically no sleep.
When we arrived in Byron, we stayed at a popular hostel called the Arts Factory. If backpacking has a business class, this is the demographic the Arts Factory shoots for. A double room cost 1000% percent more than our bungalow in Thailand, and breakfasts were $14.00 each. To preserve the budget traveler "feel", however, the pool was a deep shade of algal green and had only 30 centimeters of visibility. Although thankful for a chance to get a good nights sleep, we quickly shifted into WWOOF mode to conserve cash.
We stayed at four very different farms in our six weeks in the Byron area, and were able to sample some very interesting lifestyles. Paul and Britta, our first hosts, were trying to build a full scale organic produce farm. Their business was called the Garden of Eatin’. They’d had a wealthy benefactor to help build the farm and were in the early stages of growing their first crop, and told me they’d spent over $500,000 in the last two years getting everything set up. I tried hard, but I couldn’t see where it went. It was the most "ghetto place we stayed at: their home a trailer parked in a field with only a generator for electricity, and the garden seemed to have been built on swampland. Still, the couple seemed happy enough. They worked hard during the day on farm projects and watched every movie that played near town.
A few days later, we hitched to our second farm, in Rosebank, owned by Doug Stewart. Doug was a charming 60-ish divorced ex-physicist and teacher happily living a simple country lifestyle. He cared for his aging parents, and shared his land with his son, Rohan, who was building a biodiesel empire in the backyard. (Biodiesel is a homebrew fuel cooked up from used vegetable oil, usually collected free from restaurants.) But Doug was anything but a simple farmer. Each day, as he became more comfortable with our presence, another layer of personality was revealed - like his deep love of dancing to trance music. Steph did a lot of work around the farm, and I helped out on the heavier stuff, like fencing. (I will never be able to drive by a fenced field again without thinking how much work was involved to plant those posts!) I also learned that I was a natural wire-whisperer - able to coax long strands of barbed wire into perfectly round coils - and became an expert in bug removal when Steph had a moth attempt to nest in her ear canal one night. But Rosebank wasn’t all work. We would walk to the local cafe in the afternoon and we went dancing or hitching off the markets on the weekend. This introduced me to the little country halls that Steph had told me about.
The Byron area is very similar to Ontario lake country in summertime. Just substitute raccoons, skunks and porcupines with wallabies (mini kangas), kookaburras (noisy, quirky birds), koala bears (they sound like rutting pigs) and bush turkeys. Oh, and the black flies with something even nastier: ticks. (Ticks, as I discovered, can quickly and painlessly burrow into your scalp, back, or other exposed flesh - making extraction painful and leaving irritated welts that last for weeks.) It remains temperate year round, and is peppered with small communities of a few hundred people. These towns come in a variety of flavors that reflect the maturing hippy culture that invaded them, and each host local traveling markets on Sunday - a weekly social event that brings tourists and locals from miles around. A lazy afternoon listening to live music, buying vegetables, and sipping chai or sugar cane juice is as appealing as it sounds.
Interspersed between these towns are small community halls. Rented for as little as $50, these halls host events ranging from small clubs or weddings to full on raves, complete with lasers and thumping sound systems. We went to a couple of shows, an annual gay friendly event called Tropical Fruits and a smaller gig with three live bands. The music was as fantastic, as was the audience. Almost everyone danced throughout the shows and happily chatted with the band members after their sets. How cool is that?
Hitching was a new thing for me, too. I had never, ever hitched a ride - although I have picked up a few people in the past. I had to get over it since, around Byron, hitching is just a normal part of life. We rarely waited more than 10 minutes, and were often dropped off right to our door, even if it was a few km out of their way. One woman, Cathy, was so interested in our experiences that we had tea with her at her home, and went back for an overnight visit a few weeks later. By the end of a couple of weeks, my thumb was getting a lot of use, and I was a lot more comfortable about the random nature of the connections that hitching creates. The only downside is that outside of Byron, hitching was not as reliable as it had once been. When we tried thumbing our way towards Sydney at the end of our stay, we spent many hours on the side of road, getting tired and sweaty as the SUVs sped past.
Steph’s selection of host farms proved to be inspired, with each place (and experience) somehow managing to better than the one we’d left. Our final host farm was a retreat center being built by Donny Tillsbury, on a private 900 acre shared community. Donny seemed to have the whole worktrade idea a little backwards and made us feel like we were paying guests, going out of his way for us. He gave us relaxing work (sanding and laquering wood in a dance studio space he was building) and full house privileges. Donny’s birthday was a few days before mine, and we spent long evenings enjoying his music (congo drums) and talking about life. He also introduced us to a great watering hole called Hanging Rock, a freshwater oasis popular with the locals. Donny even drove us to Cathy’s place - an hour away - for our final day and night in the Byron area.
The next few days were filled with boring travels, hitching and Greyhounding. The bus in Australia generally attracts a better clientele than in North America, but one fellow we picked up lowered the average for the rest of the country. The 12 hour haul from Sydney to Melbourne proved to be a very smelly ride, with the passengers caught between the odors of a nasty chemical toilet at the back and possibly the foulest smelling feet south of the equator at the front. Steph survived by coating the underside of her nose with "Monkey holding Peach Balm (Thailand’s reformulation of Tiger Balm) and worked on a new variant of frown (stinky bus frown), while I invented a new form of circular breathing that allowed me to recirculate air through my liver. I survived with only minor hypoxia, but Steph suffered permanent damage to her respiratory system and has hacked and sneezed constantly for the last week.
Our return to Melbourne was bittersweet. We got another chance to spend time with David and Danielle, but the countdown was on to leave. We took a couple of days to recharge, visited with Steph’s family in Mt. Eliza, bought some needed clothes and supplies, and even caught the director’s cut of Alien (Steph had never seen the movie) - but by Friday it was time to go. We flew out from Melbourne on the hottest day they’d had in months (it was generally chilly) on a spanky Malaysian Airlines 777. (Note to Air Canada: You Suck compared to these guys. The women could be models and the men wear tuxedos - and they actually appear to like their jobs!) And now, late in the night, I’m writing the last of this travelogue back in our favorite room, in the less-than-luxurious but oh so air-conditioned Kameleon Traveller’s Lodge in KL, just a couple of hours after our flight has landed.
Was Australia worth going to? Absolutely. The thing that gets fused in memory is the birds. I don’t think there’s any place like it at 5 am, when these critters wake up. The range of sounds that come from the trees is incredible - the whoops, whistles, and caws sound like a modem connecting, only slower. In two months, we only scratched the surface of the country -- but we hope to come back soon.
