Surf's Up

We decided to leave the camp site for a few hours to visit Byron Bay and Lennox Head. Unfortunately we had a conflict with the one way system on the camp site and by misjudging the width of the camper ended up damaging a wall which had only been completed two days earlier. The "boss" saw us clash with the wall and was understandably upset, but he was a phlegmatic guy so he didn't let it show much. By the evening he had calmed down. Turned out it was a council-owned site so they just had to get the builders back in... If this guy had been the private owner it could have been a whole different kettle of fish.

Anyway, we had this on our minds in Byron Bay so we didn't enjoy the town as much as we could have, since our thoughts were somewhere else. There were still hordes of 20-somethings milling around after the Splendour in the Grass festival, which made a nice contrast to the "grey nomads" who are all we see at the camps. Saskia bought a boomerang from an aboriginal crafts store (better than the ones at the seaside junk store in Hervey Bay, that were actually made in Indonesia!) In fact the owner of the shop had a fact.-sheet on the artist and it turned out that he came from Atherton Tablelands and was now an arts teacher in Queensland. Derek found a clothing brand with an image he can relate to: "Old Guys Rule". Great slogan too: "The older I get the better I was". Must get one of those... We spend a lot of time trying to find a cheap body-board but alas. Then we headed down to Lennox Head, which is said to have one of the world's top ten surfing beaches. There in a sale-out shop we finally got the bodyboard and Saskia enjoyed it in the waves and we watched a man parasailing, or whatever you call the sport which a combination of paragliding and surfing. The waves are really different here and so impressive! In Ballina we walked to the end of the pier and were met by some very grand waves. At a distance dolphins were playing in them, just exactly right! A couple told us they had seen a whale out there, but sadly we didn't catch it.

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