Friday

Today was a good day.

Begin with a hike to the lighthouse lookout with my brother. We went up last night, and dear god the sunset. The most amazing views of the sea. Also, turns out Byron Bay is nestled squarely utterly completely smack dab in the middle of rainforesty trees on all sides. I knew there were rainforest national parks close by - the scale of the thing had escaped me. While up there Thursday night, we'd noticed a little cafe, and resolved to go back and apply for jobs. And so, this morning at seven am we were awake and readying for the hour+ hike up the hill. (Brekky was, sadly, out of the question, as the hostel locks the fridges at night to defend our munchables from the munchies of our less sober compatriots.)

The hike was gorgeous. The views of the sea from the headland is hard to describe. It's late (ish) and I'm pleasantly sleepy from running around all day, so I won't try, and will instead post pictures soon. The cafe was not hiring, but the climb was still excellent.

We returned to the hostel for a much-needed breakfast (nothing like walking a long stretch of beach and climbing a zillion stairs for three hours to give you an appetite) of oatmeal, Greek and vanilla bean yogurt, and apples, the breakfast of champions and our morning mainstay this last week.

After brekky, I ran up to the print center to run off another thirty resumes. Ben and I had both handed out individually and independently (except for the lighthouse trip) twenty five resumes in the last twenty four hours. Another thirty, I thought, ought to do the trick. I'd found a cheaper way to print, anyway, at the local print shop instead of the chain place. I was only intending to stop back in at the gelato place and talk to the manager (I think it sounds like fun to work in an ice cream shop), but I found myself and my snazzy new manilla folder stopping in every inviting looking doorway. After a series of refusals which lead my steps to the gelato shop and past and back again, and after a few promising scribbles made on an accepted resume, a few kind but flat refusals of the "really, save your paper" variety, I stood outside the door of a pizza shop waiting to introduce myself. A girl from inside stepped out and introduced herself and shook my hand before going back to work. A man said goodmorning to me while helping another man push a cart up the sidewalk, looked me over quickly and said, "You are here looking for a job." I said, with a touch of relief, "Yes, yes I am." He told me to take a seat across the way and wait a minute. I can't begin to describe how happy that made me. The last few days of job hunting have been not unpleasant in the least. Everyone has been friendly, the hoofing it around town pretty, and it's a great way to get the lay of the land in a new place. But still, I kept having to remind myself that it was unreasonable to expect to find an immediate 'yes' in a small town full of young people looking for work. Getting even that much of a nibble was a thrill. The upshot - in a few days, I have a working interview.

I returned to the hostel walking on air to change out of interview clothes into a swim suit, shorts, a t-shirt and flipflops to go back to the dive shop for my third day of volunteering. Yesterday I got to run around doing useful things, but missed the boat (literally), which was actually fine by me - I was doing something interesting, and I wanted to spend the afternoon running around applying for work anyway. Today, I returned and pretty quickly found myself scheduled on the boat. The pace picked up a little as the previous dive run returned and there were things to do, as well as the excitement of the crew going on about twenty-meter visibility and manta rays and sea turtles and sharks just hanging out by the rocks. I (and the other crew already on the go list) couldn't believe my luck, while the last two stand-by crew battled it out in rock paper scissors for a spot.

The boat bounced in the waves as we raced out to sea, the waves much higher than the Tuesday run. We arrived at the rocks unscathed (although already more than kind of damp), geared up, and jumped in. The visibility was pretty unreal. Not moments after beginning to swim, we came across the first manta ray. All told, two manta rays, a sea turtle who hung around and came up for air in our midst and played and swam among the rock formations, a woebegone shark (the first one I've seen! pointed out by a snorkeler with great eyes - she noticed everything!) tucked away between two rock ledges on the sea floor, two leopard sharks (one smaller, one quite large), a pipe fish, a pineapple fish, and scores of others big and small, some colorful, some shiny, and some darker and schooling in swaths. The manta rays seemed totally comfortable with our presence, and swam just feet beneath us, passing and hovering, their enormous black and white wings graceful in the blue, faces gentle and exploring.

Seeing a sea turtle so close, so unconcerned with human presence... right, good, easy. Like breathing in air, or falling in love, and somehow almost unremarkable, as though obviously that is how the world and life should be, and everything else is vaguely illusory.

Anyway, so that was good.

After wrapping up at the dive shop I ran back to the hostel to meet Ben, just back in from his run on the beach. We gathered up our smellies for a much-needed load of laundry and dropped it in the washer before heading to the beach.

The day had remained cloudy, and a heavy wind coming in from the bay made the air cool, and the water seem warmer. But it also kicked up a massive surf, white and turquoise and foaming, with a current running through it stronger than anything I'd ever stood in. We played in the waves for a while, but quickly getting biffed around by the surf and spray, combined with the lifeguards packing it in for the day, called us back in to warm showers and clean laundry.

The showers were lovely, but the dryers in use and the hostel kitchen slammed. We retreated to one of the common rooms, a lounge populated by large beaten up sofas and a pool table, to blog. The internet didn't reach that far, but a few fellow hostellers were watching Friends on the large screen TV, and being tired and comfortable, we needed little further enticement to chill until eventually the call of dinner pulled us from our complacency.

Let me say, Australian beef is delicious, even before they added the herbs. When you fry it in a pan and add it to peas and egg noodles with OLD BAY (Ben deserves a MAJOR shout out here for packing the emergency rations tin, over my objections since we'd inadvertently bought the travel size of the low-sodium version and I'd incorrectly believed it was sacrilegious to mess with the formula), it becomes the dinner of champions and kings. It's hours since dinner now and I'm still flying high on carb-y meat-y spices-of-home happiness. Over dinner we returned to the excellent couches, our first real vegging out since arriving, and watched more Friends, followed by the beginning of a poorly synched pirated version of Sherlock Holmes with Italian subtitles someone had put up on the TV.

Dinner concluded, and one of the best movies of the year lacking something while fuzzy and jumpy and partly in Italian, we returned to the Land of the Wireless to blog.

In short - lighthouse pretty, breakfast tasty, job hunt successful, snorkeling awesome, beach playing fun, dinner amazing, chilling with my brother - unbeatable.

Life is good.