The Road Trip
We have the car. Getting it at Brisbane airport was unusually efficient for Australia – one girl sorted us out very quickly which goes against the usual Aussie philosophy of ‘why employ one person to do a job when you can employ three who can all get in each other’s way’.
Sat Nav on, Aussie Rock tuned in on the stereo and we were ready to hit the road. I had plugged in the address of our hotel in Byron Bay into the sat nav and it was taking us down Highway 1 which is a road that circumnavigates Australia but does it a mile or so inland. It’s therefore not the most scenic route so when we got near the Gold Coast so I made a sharp left and headed for the sea. We drove through Southport until we got to Surfers Paradise. Two things struck me – first of all what an amazing place this looks: the beach, the town, the surf and the sun but, secondly, I was glad not to be staying here as it was totally infested with Schoolies. This week marks the start of the Australian summer holidays and all the kids who have just left school head to the coast for some joyriding and underage drinking, Surfers is their preferred destination.
We were getting peckish so we drove another couple of miles and found a spot called Mermaid Beach which looks up the coast to Surfers, not a bad spot for some dinner.
I had really wanted to see these beaches and doing so meant that time was getting on, we therefore got back on the motorway for the remaining hour long journey to Byron Bay.
Byron Bay is Australia’s most easterly town, and we were staying in the most easterly hotel with great views over the beach and South Pacific. We picked the most amazing couple of days to spend in Byron, the weather is gorgeous and there’s plenty of toned surf dudes and pert topless young ladies to keep Pezza and I occupied on the beach all day. By night Byron is a quaint yet bustling town with many bars sporting live music and bad behaviour. Pezza was in her element getting down with all the schoolies in the famous Cheeky Monkey bar.
We were a bit confused on the first night as places seemed to be closing a little early, we thought they were giving themselves a treat after what must have been a huge weekend with the schoolies. We went to bed and got up at about 10am as breakfast closed at 10.30am. It was as they were packing away breakfast we realised we were still on Queensland time and hadn’t wound the watch on an hour. We spent a good 18 hours on the wrong time zone.
After a couple of days in Byron is was time to make the trip down to Coffs Harbour. We were in no doubt that Coffs would be very different to Byron but we were told it had good beaches and a decent nightlife that would keep us entertained until our chosen activity began – white water rafting on the Nymboida River.
Again, this was a 3 hour journey that took us over 5 hours as we stopped at many of the outstanding beaches along the way.
We were due to be in Coffs for two nights, when we got there on Wednesday we rang the rafting bloke who told us it was cancelled due to lack of numbers – it is the working week after all. We therefore decided to have an hour’s nap before seeing what Coffs had to offer. The answer is absolutely nothing, it’s a terrible place that even its own mother would hate; nothing is open after 9.30pm and it is a dirty dirty place. We managed to persuade the chef in our hotel to burn is a pizza and we then hit the sack. When we got up the next day it was cloudy and beginning to rain – it would have been ok if we were rafting but there was really nothing else to do. We decided to cut our losses and get in the car and head south.
It rained all the way down and we are now 250 miles south of Coffs in Newcastle (very weird as you have to drive though Stockton, Morpeth, Jesmond & Wickham to get here). It rained a lot in the night but we found Newcastle to be far more accommodating to the average person who just wants to sit and drink. That being said it wasn’t a late one, I was pretty tired after the day driving and Pezza’s having a bit of ear sadness.
The Aussies definitely lie about the weather. We had a cyclone in Dunk and the picture below is the rain in Newcastle, on top of this who can forget the ‘hailstorm on Christmas Day in Melbourne’ incident last year? Don’t believe the conniving conmen when they say they live in a sunny paradise!
As I write this it’s 11am Friday morning and the sun is just coming out. Newcastle has some great beaches and we’ll head there hoping for more sun. The rest of the road trip involves another night here followed by the 3 hour drive to Bowral for a night at Grace & Billy’s and then the 2 hours back up to Sydney where we dump the car and get drunk with Dom and Alex.
It’s election time in Oz at the moment and the country is going a bit mental with it – but do they have Peter Snow??
Andy
Show on map
I did not kmow that the Byron Bay was the most easterly hotel in Australia – how the hell did you come up with that fact?