The Week

The Hostel

The Main Beach Backpacker’s Hostel is a true hostel, in every sense of the word. It’s populated by an ever changing sea of the twenty-something kelp and driftwood of the word. It’s colorful, it has bright murals of sea life and beach life and local flora and fauna (on one memorable occasion with a live lizard briefly including himself in a painted sea scene). There’s a giant lounge room with furniture so beaten up its passed from comfortable to unusable to exceeding comfortable again, a pool table, and a wall of DVDs and VHS’s, nearly none of which are in their corresponding cases, creating an entertainment scavenger hunt full of treasures like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other classic films, with a healthy peppering of ‘Oh god, why does anyone own this film,’ to the Ghostbusters Sequels. The showers are… well, let that pass. The outdoor patio area is populated with old wood picnic tables covered with giant umbrellas that make outdoor dining a pleasant possibility in all but the most torrential rainstorms (which occur here in the tropics with some degree of frequency.) The bunk beds could potentially replace words in the Merriam Webster Dictionary as the definition of the word “rickety” but somehow still comfortable to sleep on. Whether or not the guy on the bottom remains alive is a question only answered by the sunrise. Speaking of sunrise, the first thought which tends to cross a backpacker’s mind in the morning is the matter of breakfast. In the morning, all three of the gas burners work. Which, to clarify, would be three of the twelve. Push the dial, turn the knob, listen for the clicky sound of the lighter and the gas, and voila! Hot flames for preparing your pancakes/oatmeal/bacon/strange squid looking noodle thing – whatever has taken the fancy of those not hung over enough to cook. To be honest, cereal was a popular choice. In our highly impoverished, or should I just say financially insecure, state, oats and apples and free instant coffee was our mainstay, with exciting deviations into store-brand nutella pancakes. Life, and the Tupperware of free raw sugar, was sweet. The last area where we spent a fair bit of time was the rooftop balcony. As well as having a nice view the street below and being just inside of the wireless router’s range, it was one of the least used areas of the hostel and provided one with the occasional bit of solitude. ‘Solitude’ being qualified by the three rooms whose giant windows opened directly on to the balcony, but let that pass. It was sunny, and there were three sprawling lawn chairs and two picnic benches. It was good. Coming home late at night, we’d let ourselves back in through the back gate, a wood affair with a traditional turnkey lock. Towering palm trees reached toward the moonlight and Australian constellations in a navy blue sky, and if one listened hard and the street was quiet you could just hear the roar of the ocean. Opening the gate beyond was the trash bins, a distinct smelling affair even through their heavy black lids, and the small parking lot, not infrequently landmined with beer bottle caps. But even in the dark, as long as you put your flipflops back on before crossing the dark pavement, there was little risk of pulling a Jimmy Buffet style heel injury. The deck was inviting after dark, with its trees, canopies, and dim but soft lighting. This romantic atmosphere lasts until about 9:30pm. Then it turns into a raucous, but good natured, boozing extravaganza. The drink of choice is known as Goon. It is an Aussie and New Zealand term for really cheap, really sweet, and really bad box white wine. Also at these nightly gatherings is an everpresent soundtrack of the local radio station playing pop hits (all American pop hits, as far as I could tell), and the cheers of drinking games in whatever language the predominant number of players spoke, except for the end of our last night, in which several bars of the chorus of “The Wild Rover” were heard.  True, the floors were manky and the rugs would have been alarmingly stained had they been a lighter color, and the upholstery was vaguely oily and sandy from oodles of sweaty suntanned sunscreened salty beachgoers flopping and sprawling after their time in the sun and surf, the fridges were locked after eleven and until eight am and there was really nothing for it if a number of the sixteen people inhabiting the dormer room were themselves personally or their personal belongings less than aromatically pleasing, but for a happy period of two weeks, it was hostel sweet home.

Monday: The Irish & the Sea

Monday was just another day in paradise. Livin’ at the hostel, meeting an international assortment of travelers like ourselves, bodysurfing and movie watching and generally chillaxing. We met an Irishman, the second to pass through a tenure in our sixteen person dorm, this time a Northern Irishman who told us when we went to visit the Fair Isle we should drive up the coast.

We bodysurfed in the afternoon and played in the waves.

Karen went to work at the pizza shop.

We reconvened and watched for the first time, “How I Met Your Mother,” a show which was universally recognized by every nationality of backpacker, some of whom passed by for three seconds and said ‘ah, How I Met Your Mother’ with a variety of accents, and some pulled up a patch of rug to watch. (Sean, you’re right, it IS a very funny show.)

We went to sleep.

Tuesday: Hostel Cleaning and Apartment Searching (and Success Singin’ in the Rain)

*Tuesday was my second day working as a cleaner in our hostel in exchange for free accommodation and Karen's first. The hostel was and incredibly fun place to stay, the owner was an awesome guy, and I am extremely glad of the time we spent there. Cleaning up after backpackers was...interesting.

~We loved it there. It was a little dive-y, true, but full of character and charm, prime location dead center in the heart of town, two blocks to the beach, excellent company and companionship, a Wednesday and Saturday night BBQ on the sweet outdoor patio to die for, plants everywhere, loads of windows, and a huge kitchen that, despite the drawbacks of having limited shelf and fridge space, keeping our stuff in leaky plastic bags, and the fridges being LOCKED at night, had the awesome, incomparable, communal, interesting, delicious, and entirely fun experience of cooking meals on a full set of three ranges with people from all over the world. Some of the culinary exposure that occurred was stimulating and inspiring. A lot of it was confirmation that EVERYONE loves nutella and pasta. In short, the hostel was great, and living there was fantastic. 

~I cleaned there one morning in exchange for rent for the day. We were having such a good time we thought it might be a reasonable way to stay, permanently. After a two hour shift, I grabbed Ben. I shook my head, speechless, a few times. Cleaning up after backpackers is not an experience that bears repeating. Or discussing. Ever. We decided jumping in the sea, and then showering, was the only reasonable course of action. We donned our swimmers and went to the sea. The day was overcast, windy, and chilly. The cold salt water was perfect, a slosh over ourselves to clear our heads. The sunshine, metaphorically, returned to the day. It was time to find a place to live. 

*That afternoon we went back to searching for apartments/house shares.

~Which meant we got to plan our search standing in the lounge while Star Wars played in the background, and I got to sit in the lounge at the picnic tables outside circling apartment listings while Friends played, which somehow felt very American.

*A couple of exciting options turned up but the one that we ended up visiting (and ultimately inhabiting) was a little blue bungalow/cottage on Browning St. It is a lovely little place that we share with three other occupants. One’s a Canadian, one’s an Australian, one’s an Asian and all three are completely wonderful.

~But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We had our listings, and an address to go check out. The day was gray and chilly, the first cool day we’ve had in Byron, so with jeans and a jacket we walked to the address. The drizzle turned into an actual rain two blocks away, and we stepped up the pace and went to stand on the front porch. And then we stood for a time, admiring it’s porch-y qualities, the excellence of it’s non-leaking roof, watching the rain falling over the street. It really is a lovely street. Loads of blossoming tropical plants, a huge aloe-like thing of Jurassic Park proportions growing behind our mailbox, a little white step in front of a front door that will most certainly keep you dry. We had a good feeling about the place, and had a bit of a sing-along waiting for the rain to pass.

*There is absolutely no chance that we stood there for twenty minutes singing our way through the score of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode.

 ~Yup, definitely no chance of that. Eventually, one of our future roommates opened the front door and, when we explained that we’d come by to see the room for rent. They let us in, and it took us, what, thirty seconds?

*I’d say twenty five.

~To decide that we loved the place. We were home. We stepped back out onto the front step, called the real estate agent, and scheduled our move-in for the very next morning. In triumph, we returned to the hostel carrying a celebratory package of Jaffa Kisses (which were on sale, and we’ve been looking for jaffa cakes, after hearing them so tantalizingly referenced in Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys.” If jaffa kisses are anything like jaffa cakes, we understand why Enligsh people like them) and watched Gnomeo and Juliet with the very same Irishman.

*For anyone who has not seen it, Gnomeo and Juliet is a retelling on the famous Shakespearean play but, of course, with gnomes. It is charming, heart warming, rather funny at times, and worth watching exactly once.

~I have nothing to add to that statement. We went to sleep. 

Wednesday: Move-in Day & The Arts and Industry Estate (or Glassblowing, Boats, and Apple Turnovers with Fresh Cream) & The Full Moon over the Lighthouse (with a cool photographer dude)

~Wednesday morning, move-in day, began as all Wednesday mornings should. With nutella pancakes. Duly fortified, we packed up our things. Backpacks over our shoulders, personal items gathered, groceries condensed and packed into a satchel, we were ready to move out. Ben had a meeting with a manager early in the morning, so he was dressed to the nines like no backpacker has ever been before, and rocked the look.

We carried all our personal belongings, a full kit to start a new house, supply any adventure or creative effort, and ALMOST all of the creature comforts a person needs.

It turns out, a person really needs sheets.

We arrived at our new front door and met the real estate agent on the front walk. She gave us one set of keys, promised us another set soon, and sent us in. We dropped our things in our new room, and set to exploring our new digs. The night before, we’d fallen in love with the vibe, saw that it met all our basic needs and felt nice, and were hugely delighted that we’d have space of our own. This morning, we really looked around in the sunshine. There’s a kitchen decorated in happy yellows with an oven and a stovetop, electric but very hot, a sink and a fridge and freezer that no one ever locks at eleven pm. A set of three laundry lines are strung over a wood deck that looks out on a jungle-y yard with beautiful flowering trees, including at least one tree with bunches of not-yet-ripe bananas hanging. There are palm trees out back, and trees to the side of the cottage where fruit bats hang at night.

Our room is lovely. There’s a large old beaurea with a closet rack and shelves and drawers (I can’t tell you how much I’d been missing shelves) two night-side tables, a few nails in the upper moulding which work nicely as hooks, and floorlength bamboo slat window hangings that roll up and down, just as soon as you’ve run a length of string through the top and tied a knot to make a loop to hang the roll in. There is a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table in a little living room with a television, and a small breakfast room attached to the second bathroom/laundry washer room that is separated from the back porch by a sliding glass door which is never closed. The whole cottage is on one length, so the front door and the back door look at each other, and all of the rooms can be seen from any spot in the house, barring a few doorway angles.

The outside is largely blue, with loads of plants and trees and purple, white, and multi-colored flowering trees and plants blossoming, inhabited by large interesting looking spiders.

It is completely lovely.

We dropped off our things, explored a bit, Ben went to his interview, I unpacked a bit, nearly fell asleep – it’s amazing how delicious a nap can be when you’ve psychologically settled somewhere – and in the early afternoon we walked to the Jonson street bus stop next to the Woolies to catch the bus for the first time to the Arts and Industry Estate, about which we had heard so much, and were we thought we might find a purveyor of reasonably priced powerbars and sheets.

*The first order of business was getting there. The arts and industry estate is no more than a few miles away, but some days that just seems like an awful long way. So we consulted our bus schedule. Not long after we had strolled to the bus stop and boarded our chariot. The bus driver was a friendly fellow in a direct sort of way, and a several stops later, he dropped us at the edge of the Arts and Industry. Where we landed was still a little ways off from the market stores where we hoped to procure our necessities. But that did not matter as we were quickly distracted by the myriad of small and wonderful craftsman whose shops and stores were tucked into every available location. Some were well marked while others could only be found by stumbling upon them. However, those stumbles were well worth the while. One little door we entered was the workshop and studio of a glassblower. While practically unmarked from the outside, his gallery held such beauties as multi colored, gently twisting champagne glasses, vibrantly striated glass rings, and little green, blue, and yellow glass jellyfish contained in tiny spheres. In another store we found jewelry made from native Australian opals and in another we encountered a collection of carved art and furniture that did not appear to have owner present, just a welcoming sign bidding visitors to take in the simple beauty of wood workings. After slowly meandering our way through many of the marvels of the art section, we gradually moved to the more industrialized areas. Upon arriving outside the largish Giant/Targetlike store, we came to the conclusion that it was very much time for tea. So, it was a hard left into the local bakery where we dined on apple turnover dressed with fresh cream. After snackifying and bit a shopping, where we were sadly unable to locate sheets but were happily successful in procuring some food staples, we decided it was time to return home. The bus stop was just across the street, so we meandered over and stood waiting for the bus which was scheduled in another fifteen minutes or so. Enter Inca. Within sixty second of our coming to the bus stop, a big, brown, and happy floppy eared dog can running from the nearby mechanics yard and dropped a stick at our feet. He then laid down politely behind it and looked up at us with a  well groomed expression of “would you guys maybe like to throw my stick for me?” However, despite the training, there was no disguising this dog’s hyperactive enthusasim. What he was really saying was “throwthestickthrowthestickwon’tpleasethrowthestickcomeoncomeoncomeonpleeeeeeaaaaassssssse?” We spent a happy quarter hour throwing the stick.

The bus arrived, and we returned to Byron Bay.

Where we decided we hadn’t done enough for one day, and bought a bottle of white wine, used our back-of-the-grocery-store-recipt coupon for a buy one get one foot long sub from subway, where the excellent subway employee let us swap the required drink purchase for cookies and pick up our second sub on our way back from the beach, and we took our bottle and our sandwiches and our cookies to the sea. We ate on the little grassy bluff looking over the water. The sandwich was fresh and tasty. The cookies were soft and happily white chocolate raspberry cheesecake flavored. The sea was stunning. The moon was full and rising – we had both flown to Australia and moved into our apartment under consecutive full moons. The wine was sweet, and highly alcoholic. Happily and slightly unsteadily, we looked up at the lighthouse and the moon and resolved to climb to the white towery heights through the rainforest and by the sea to see the moon, and made our way home, to our new apartment, with our groceries put away and a sheet borrowed from one of our new roommates and our very own key, second set pending, and grabbed a few light-house-adventure necessaries, like flashlights.

As we hiked, the alcohol began to burn off a bit and our steps became a little straighter, but no less awed by the moonlit vistas and no less delighted with our new move in life. And we continued to congratulate ourselves on our choice of celebration. Inexpensive white wine, Subway BMT, cookies and the sandy, sandy sea are an amazing combination, especially when high on a place to live that really feels like living, and not just subsisting in a laid-back-but-survivalistic way. No, we were home, and the full moon and the lighthouse and the wine and the ocean combined in an irresistible siren call.

The hike was beautiful, as it has been every time before, with familiar elements and still moments that still your feet and take your breath away. (There are some stairs that take your breath away too, but for the moment let that pass. It helps sober a person up, anyway.) Upon gaining the top, we found ourselves very nearly alone, and for quite a time we simply looked at the moon and the stars, and watched the moonlight and the beams of the lighthouse play over the waters.

When at last we’d had our fill of moonlight and we stirred ourselves toward home, we circuited the walkway surrounding the lighthouse, and heard a friendly voice ask us if we wouldn’t mind making a detour out of our way. It was a photographer, whose tripod and equipment were nearly invisible in the dark. He seemed to have set up a long-exposure shot, and genially informed us he was preparing for a photo competition in… somewhere interesting that I’d intended to recall at the time, under the full moon at midnight after half a bottle of wine. Fiji mayhaps?

Anyway, we descended from the hills and returned to the little blue cottage on Browning Street, feeling completely at home.

Thursday: Sheets, Cheese Tasting (with a date!), and Deck Fencing

Thursday was very successful. Bohotopia (yes that’s really it’s name) was running a fifty percent off store-wide sale, and we bought an excellent camel-covered, caramel colored sheet/blanket and an excellent turquoise and elephants pillow case. The Woolies provided a burgundy fitted sheet, and one of the local second-hand shops had a rack of pretty new sarongs on sale. Add to this the remaining airplane blanket, and we had a full complement of sheets.

We were on our way home to put our new laundry in the wash when we were waylaid by a Woolies cheese tasting.

Cheese is delicious.

Fresh dates are TO DIE FOR.

The combination is beyond words.

So we returned home, and started our laundry.

And proceeded to engage in swashbuckling shenanigans. While we were out earlier that day we had bought a couple of totally excellent (if ever so slightly floppy) plastic foils. It was a very entertaining hour fencing back and forth across the deck with our swordwhips. Making short swords of out cheap plastic does make them very whippy. But they were sturdy little sabers, and held up admirably to our attacks and counter attacks and buckling of swashes.

Yup. It was Thursday.