Beach Hunting, 2nd Attempt

After getting a good night’s sleep, we struck out again in search of a hostel on those fabled Queensland beaches. This time, however, we had the people at the YHA reception desk call other YHA hostels and book our room for us. Our first attempt was Surfer’s Paradise (seriously, the town is actually called that), but they were full up due to a big NASCAR race being held there that weekend. Upon the advice of the guy at the tour desk, we booked in at Byron Bay, which is approximately 2 hours south of Brisbane, in New South Wales.

Byron Bay is the quintessential spring break/surfer town. It is very beautiful, extremely touristy, always busy, and contains more new age shops per square inch than anywhere else in the world. I defy even San Francisco to have more new age stores per yearly capita than Byron Bay.

The YHA hostel there is crowded and noisy but well laid out with a big patio, a nice pool, and a great pool deck area for lounging. This is a very, very good thing because I managed to get sick (again) on the bus ride to Byron Bay. Just about the only comfortable position I could assume that didn’t leave me nauseated beyond all reckoning was doubled over with my head on my knees and my arms clamped across my stomach. I have no idea what sort of illness it was – a small touch of stomach flu possibly – but I think I was as nauseated as I could get without actually vomiting. It didn’t let up for a minute, eating was impossible, and moving around just exacerbated it. I spend most of my time hunched over a picnic table on the deck with my book trying not to think about bile, while Glen explored the beaches.

I was laid up for about two days, unable to get comfortable, and sleeping at night was next to impossible for either of us thanks to the noisy, noisy, drunk British kids who were sharing our dorm. Our dorm had a rather odd configuration; there were two levels, the main floor had two bunk beds while the loft where we slept had a double bed. We could easily forgive a bit of noise at night – after all, it is a hostel, so we do expect more night time partying than your average holiday accommodation. This group, however, took it to a whole new level. The guys yelled at the top of their lungs whenever they opened their mouths, the girl screeched as loudly as the guys, they slammed the door as hard as possible whenever they entered or exited the room, and they spend their entire stay in various stages of crapulence.

Glen and I agree that they could have been quite entertaining to hang around with had they not been making so much noise. They were very nice kids and we chatted with them frequently, but they were so phenomenally inconsiderate when it came to piping down at night that we were very irritated by their presence. According to their conversations, which were impossible not to listen to, they had been kicked out of most hostels they stayed in and were making arrangements to find work in Byron Bay. How they expected to find work when the lot of them were on permanent hangovers was totally beyond us. They must have looked and sounded like hell at their interviews, because when they came in at night the reek of alcohol coming off their breath and their bodies was so thick that it stank up our loft area as soon as they walked through (and then proceeded to slam) the door.

Noisy hostellers aside, Byron Bay is beautiful. It is fun being in such a touristy area, and once I was well enough to eat and walk around, we had the biggest, greasiest burgers we could hope for and thoroughly enjoyed the window shopping. The beaches were lovely and the water was an ideal temperature for wading. There were quite a number of jellyfish washed up on the beach. At least I suspect that they were jellyfish. When I poked one with the toe of my boot, it was rather firm. It is entirely possible that the firm clear blobs all over the beach were silicone breast implants that one of the many boobified bathers had managed to lose when their bikinis fell off in especially hard-hitting ocean surf. Or maybe the implants simply fell out when they were sunbathing topless. There are lots of topless sunbathers in Byron Bay, and no one seems to mind or even really notice.

Oh, and there enough anorexic women in teeny, teeny, teeny bikinis to give anyone a complex. For the first time in my life I felt self-conscious in my very flattering one-piece bathing suit because I was not showing enough skin. I must have been the only female on the beach under 48 years of age who:
a) wasn’t wearing a stringy little bikini, and
b) didn’t have a cocoa-bean tan.

Then again, I was also the only girl there not to be running the risk of skin cancer and sun damage related premature wrinkling. So there!




PS: I know that I mentioned this already, but the window shopping was really good. At several points I was rather tempted to blow a couple hundred dollars picking up some really fantastic clothes. Fortunately for our budget, my willpower is stronger than any temptation thrown up by a nice, floaty, waist defining, funky-print dress!