A Date With Cheese

Yesterday we went swimming, had another crack at surfing, and saw some astonishing fish before running to the lighthouse. We adjourned to the theater to see the Lorax (one of the best pixar films yet). Today Karen went to work, then ate sushi takeaway on the beach. Ben went running in the rainforest. We planned by telephone, divided the grocery stores, and met back at home with ingredients to make apple pie. We stuffed dates with double Brie as an appetizer (we've been talking about it for weeks), carved palm fronds on the deck while the pie baked, and ate apple pie for dinner. Now we are going to Buddha Bar for chess and beer, and good live music. Life is sweet.

Writing, Hiking, and Hot Chips

~Today was Saturday. Hot and dry and sunny, the weatherman said yesterday. YES! Thought I. I have the weekend off! Bring on the surfing!

~Well, this morning was rainy. It started out pleasant enough – I went to the Green Garage and bought two apples and used the wireless (which we JUST found out they have, one block away), and it drizzled. I wore jeans and a jacket, I was fine. I came back, we made breakfast, and it RAINED. One of those pouring, drenching, hang around all day sorts of rains.

~Ben can tell you, I was totally cheerful about this. Damn it, thought I, I don’t like feeling grumpy. I’m going surfing come hell or high water, and I’ll get all tired and sandy and happy.

*Surfing sounded lovely. It really did. It’s just… well… that rain looked awfully cold and wet.

~Undaunted and resolute, I donned my bathing suit, picked up my surfboard, and marched out the door. I don’t know exactly how warm I’d figured a rain which had required me to wear a jacket and pants and closed shoes a moment before was going to be, but DAMN it was COLD. I got less than a block from the house when the more reasonable part of my brain asked, “Do you really want to do this now?” Oh, hell, no, was the answer. Happily, I turned back toward the nice warm and (relative) dry of inside. “How about Twisted Sister instead?” I asked. To Ben’s credit, there was no mocking.

*Twisted sister is a charming café we have been meaning to go to. It was a warm color scheme of yellows, reds, and oranges and sells some thoroughly enticing baked goods and smoothies. We decided, given the dampness of the day, that sitting with a smoothie called “Jamaican Dream” and working on our book was the perfect way to spend the afternoon. So we sat and drank our smoothie (a tasty combination of banana, mango, coconut, and pineapple) and it kept drizzling.

~Uh, it was clearly raining, not drizzling.

*Well, it was rain/drizzling. Right until it started pouring.

~Anyway, it was pretty to watch. We sat at the streetside tables ensconced by warm fun paint and delicious smells and watched the rain and wrote our story. It was pretty excellent. Eventually, Plucky’s battery died...

*NOOOOOOOOO!

~... drama queen.  And we repaired for lunch.

*Oh, that’s alright then.

~As we lunched, the sun returned, and we returned in turn to our original plan: hiking. We were seeking out the trails by Tallows beach.

*We had been told that if we followed the road up to the lighthouse, rather than taking path across the beach,  we would find some trails through the rainforest.

~Retrospectively, these rumored trails (which we never actually found) are probably hippie trails in defiance of the bush regeneration effort, but let that pass;  at the time, all we heard was ‘trail’ and ‘rainforest.’

*Quite. Anyway, while we totally failed to find the trails we were looking for, we…

~…found something way cooler!

*Oy, who’s telling this story?

~Just because I’m letting you type…

*Trouble. Anyway, we found a footpath that, within a few hundred feet, took us to  a ramp which hang gliders were launching from. It was a wooden platform that extended from the path and sloped down towards a sea of trees a very long way down. One of the local hang-gliding  companies was there with a small group of thrill seekers. One by one a guide and tourist would hitch themselves together to a glider and hurl themselves off the edge. It’s a little trippy to watch two grown men chuck themselves off a cliff. A little crazy, but totally sweet.   

~It really is a sight to behold. We stood for a while, mesmerized by a pair of fliers in the sky, two people in sacks that looked like narrow sleeping bags hanging from a nylon strap to a kite, humans with wings soaring on the breezes. The launch platform led straight out to the sea which rolled a dizzying distance below even the path under our feet, much further for the hang gliders overhead. We stood and watched and rejoiced in the flight, and realized why people would hang glide. Then we watched a guy strap himself in to a set of flimsy wings with wheels on the bottom and totter to the top of the domed ramp with two men on either side fighting against the winds trying to pick him up and pitch him off the end unready, and hearts in our throats we remembered why we’re NOT hang gliding. Eventually, through design or accident, the tottering man jumped, or fell. Either way, he dropped like a brick, and then was suddenly airborne. As he soared up onto the higher winds, a pair of enormous raptors, some kind of eagle we think, took to the air from the trees atop the rainforest and joined the fliers, making graceful arcing circles, scanning the surf and sea below for their prey. It was a sight to see.

*At length, we decided to see what lay further down the trail. It was a beautiful forest path that sloped up and down several hills, through myriads of tropical palms.

~The path was muddy and the vines and the boles of the trees were wet with the day’s rain, but the sun dappled through the palm fronds and tree leaves overhead. Wooden slats made steep stairs in the path where it curved and sloped dramatically, and the littoral rainforest extended to either side. Beyond, there were occasional glimpses of the sea and bay glittering in the hot afternoon light. In the cool of the rainforest, all was peaceful. We trekked through, seeing fronds and ferns and mushrooms, looking for swamp wallabies and thinking of dinosaurs roaming and spotting and hearing Australian birds all around. The path wound around the land mass that peaks by the lighthouse and continued to descend. Just as it began to flatten out, we came to a trail map. We’d made nearly a full circuit, and exited the forest by the parking lot over The Pass, a surf break at the end of Clark’s beach, only a few blocks from our house. We walked down to the beach and watched the sun and sea and surfers for a moment, then turned our steps toward home and dinner and more writing. Which is where we were when we were waylaid by hot chips.

*So there was this great eatery we had been meaning to go to for a while… yes, this does happen to us a lot. Anywho, this time it was the local club. Clubs are interesting in Australia. Pretty much all of the more built up communities have one. They all have a bar, a restaurant, and pokeys (what the Aussies call slot machines). Our club is no more than a block or so from our house and every time we pass by the big windows we have seen people eating fried potato wedges from big paper cones.

~We presented ourselves at the front counter, signed in, went to the café area, and described the paper cone in question. The woman behind the counter smiled and nodded, and handed us a beeper thing. We took a table, and explored the wonderful kiosk of Australian condiments. I’ve never been in a place that does condiments so well. The tomato sauce is fruity and divine. The barbeque sauce is a revelation. This club also had a mint jelly that was AMAZING, two kinds of mustard, one of which was horseradishy enough to bring tears to the eyes of the unwary, and a kind of vinegar I didn’t recognize. After an interval of time passed in which we can only assume they were making our hot chips to order, our beeper buzzed. A tray appeared at the counter, metal rungs making a stand for not one but TWO enormous paper cones of chips. We’d died and gone to potato heaven. It came with a condiment described as “sour cream.” Sour cream in the States is certainly sour, and was at some point cream. This smooth white delicious stuff had probably seen the inside of a cow earlier today, and was hardly sour, but totally cream.

*After finishing what I’m pretty sure was three or four potatoes, we went back home where one of our housemates informed us that in two minutes, Earth Awareness Hour was going to begin. Apparently it is an annual event where people all over the world turn off their power for an hour. We were just about to start cooking, but what hey, save the earth, protect the whales. These are good goals. Postponing dinner, we sat down to engage in chess by candlelight.

~Earth Awareness Hour is definitely going on my annual calendar. It was very cool to sit in darkness by candlelight in solidarity with people all over switching off their electricity. I don’t know if there are enough participants (yet) to show up on the powergrid, but it’s a gesture, and wonderful. Also, this time at chess I very nearly gave Ben a run for his money. The hour passed in the locking of mental horns, and by the time it had ticked over we were ready to turn our groceries into dinner. We started with a plan. It turned into purple goulash, but was surprisingly delicious all the same. 

The Highlight Reel

Friday 16/3: We earned our Nerd Frood Stamps, and had an Aussie BBQ complete with beets

We busted out our new snorkel masks, and explored The Wreck, two off-shore shipwrecks that can be swum from the beach. The boats are pretty destroyed by this point, in many pieces, and home to schools of silver fishes. We came back in from the beach, showered off, and headed out to the library to Get Our Library Cards. We attempted to do this a few weeks ago, and were sadly told that we needed some kind of proof of residency, in the form of valid ID and ANYTHING – a lease agreement, rent receipt, anything. Having paid our first rent at the Westpac, we walked up to the library and presented ourselves at the library desk and announced that we had a permanent address and would like library cards, please. At which point the very nice librarians regretfully told us that the receipt lacked our address, which we needed. I looked at the wall clock behind her head, saw it was twenty to five (the library closes at five, and we live a twelve minute walk away), and sighed, and said, “All right, we’ll come back in the morning.” Then I looked at Ben, who glanced at the clock and at the door with a grin. Damn. I know that face. We agreed to run for it. We sprinted to our house in flipflops, raced in through the back door, grabbed our lease agreement, and sprinted back to the library. It was a hot afternoon, and we’d been swimming all morning. We showed up dripping with sweat, panting and clutching our lease agreement in triumph. The librarians saw us come in through the door and pulled out forms and our new cards before even looking at the paper (which, admittedly, only had our address hand-written in to a fill-in-the-blank spot in the paperwork generated by the leasing agency for a whole group of housing). They kept the library open for us five minutes late to let us check out our books. Five minutes later, still dripping with sweat, Ben carrying a novel and me carrying a book on the Great Barrier Reef and an update of Origin of the Species, we headed out and across the street to L’Ultime, the local French patisserie and chocolaterie, to buy fresh bread for our beach barbeque. We went back home, dropped off our books, picked up our condiments and a spatula, and went to the Green Grocer for a beet (Aussies put beets on their burgers. We were determined to find out why.),  salad greens, and an orange. Over the block between our house and the grocer, we saw the biggest, brightest, most perfectly arched, most complete rainbow either of us have ever seen. It had the full ROYGBIV, and ended beyond the lighthouse in one direction and into the sea in the other. Given a boat or a plane, we actually could have followed the rainbow. We took our supplies back to the house, Ben made some home-made orange-ade with fresh fruit, and we headed back to the beach, stopping by Woolies on our way to pick up the Australian Beef Patties we’d been eyeing earlier, and had ourselves a barbeque. It was tasty.

This weekend the fruit of the banana trees between our house and the neighbors has begun to ripen. The temptation of fresh bananas right off the vine, creamy and flavorful and delicious, is too much to resist. Having stolen a banana (or three – they were over-ripening and about to fall off anyway! I told myself…) I stopped next door to introduce myself to the neighbor. He turned out to be a very nice elderly  Australian gentleman named Peter, who told me that he’d planted the trees in his yard ages ago and they’d run wild and colonized. Anything on our side, he said, we were welcome to pick, and “have a feed, love.” And so there was a banana cream pie. I tried to take him a slice, but he wasn’t home. We we, and our roommates, ate it all. Then there was a banana oat custard tart, first for breakfast, then later chilled with white chocolate. Happily, Peter did indeed get a slice of this before it vanished. Then there was oatmeal banana breakfast, and banana white chocolate pancakes (YUM) for breakfast, and leftovers for dessert still in the fridge. That’s pretty much done it for the first bunch, between us and all three of our roommates eating the bakeables and snacking off the tree. Three more bunches wait out there, still green on the vine.  Again, Yum.

This weekend was St. Pattys Day. We ran through a tropical rainstorm to procure bottles of beer after I got off work late at night, and puddle stomped our way home to toast with Australian beer.

Sunday was a rainy morning, so we hung out and read our new library books all morning. It cleared up at night, and we hiked ourselves out to Cooks Lookout. There was a huge storm swell coming in this week, and massive waves broke over the rocks under the stars. Which was beautiful, and completely arresting, until we got hungry, and hiked ourselves back home for Italian home cooking for dinner and Cool Runnings, which may be the best movie ever made.

Tuesday we learned to surf! On ten foot long foam boards, in a three hour lesson (which went a lot like a tutorial, followed by being pushed out onto a few waves – the surfing equivalent of training wheels- then pointed to the good waves and told to go for it!) we both managed to stand a few times. It was a huge feeling! There is more surfing in my future. That night, after having an early dinner of pizza leftovers and a later dinner of chocolate and forest berry sorbet from Bella Rosa Gelateria, we found ourselves hanging out at the Beach Front Hotel, hanging out with a guy we’d met last week at Buddha Bar’s open mic and two Dutch girls. It was another of Byron’s open mic events, Gary sang and played his guitar again, and the music all night was good. We finally stumbled our sleepy selves back home, and watched the end of an episode of Top Gear before crashing off to sleep.

This morning it’s a rainy Thursday, so we’re catching up with the internet and the world at the Why Not Café. Ben had a croissant with vanilla cream and fruit, I had the sweet special – profiteroles with dark chocolate and macademia nut ice cream, and an LSD (Soy Dandelion Latte, and my favorite local drink). We’re just about out of here, though, off to do a bit more surf-board hunting, then go for a swim (hey, it might be raining, but we’ll be wet anyway), and pick up our free burgers from the Byron Corner Store, a deli that rewards customers for booking the surf lesson. The board of ingredients looks promising. 

Buddha Bar

*Our very favorite place for frothy drinkables.

~Yessir, home of the $3 Schooner of Byron Bay Premium Ale Happy Hour from 4-6 pm every day, and host of the Wednesday Open Mic Nights.

*The Buddha Bar is a large indoor/outdoor bar attached to a very nice hostel/resort/brewery/theater/spa/backpacker tent city called the Arts factory. Right from the entrance you know the place is going to be cool. Walking in from Skinners Shoot Rd

~Over the grassy, disused railroad tracks behind the Woolies

* you come to tan-brick path and follow it past  massive twelve foot tall pillars of stone , beyond a mass of well kept but still pleasantly wild vegetation, and right into the inner bar.

~The entrance to the bar lies just beyond doorways which lead to the spa and cinema. Up three steps, and promisingly nestled just behind the indoor tables are huge steely cisterns of local brew. Through the interior, which is booth seating and very nice, but why on earth would you sit inside when the stone patio out back beckons, you walk by a double door to the left which leads to a very cool stage show room. The bar passes on your right, and of course you stop for a schooner of happy hour, frothy foam at its finest, and head out backHuge statues and carvings of various Buddhas are nestled into the slightly tiered rock patio, tall bar tables and stools liberally scattered among picnic tables, a huge tree festooned with a string of multicolored track lights, cavernous tin roofing that covers part of the patio closest to the building, the few steps descend to a stage. . It’s wild out there. Literally. While waiting for the open mic to start last week, a girl was having dinner at one of the round bar tables when a kookaburra the size of her head divebombed her plate, stole her steak with its beak, and flew off to the leafy canopy of the enveloping trees to happily dine on her dinner. The bar patrons, after ensuring for a moment that the very skinny girl who had leapt from her seat was all right, cheered the bird. Wildlife dinner theater at its finest. This lasts until dark, at which point the tables are turned. Literally. For in the leafy canopy that hangs over the Buddha Bar, a huge colony of fruit bats come to roost. Flying Foxes, as these fruit bats are, are ENORMOUS, red furred heads and necks (that do indeed look quite foxy) give way to black leathery five-foot-wingspans. They land in the trees by the dozens and begin a very messy meal indeed. Ben and I decided, sitting under a rain of damp green boluses, that it was definitely bits of fruit they’d bitten off and begun to chew that had been stolen away by gravity and brought down upon our heads, and definitely not bat guano. This decision was arrived at not so much through certainty, although it is probable, but because the disgustingness of the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. Luckily we’d finished our beers by this point, and repurposed the cardboard coasters for brushing off the table every few minutes, and the chess went on.

*Recently we have made a weekly habit of coming for the happy hour and playing chess until the open mic starts at eight.  The stage they have set is wondrous. It is wooden stage with a matching overhang and is surrounded by the branches of nearby trees which stretch over and around it. Hanging from it ceiling are three round flower-like lamps which change color at a sedate pace and glow with deep blues, purples, and forest greens. The actual music which takes place on the stage is equally grand. Everything from harp music, to blues, to pop, to mandolins. It’s all there and the music loving crowd cheers for them all.     

~It does indeed draw quite the cast of musical characters. Given the nature of Byron Bay, the entire eclectic crowd are top-notch performers, ranging from amateur-good to professional, and no two acts are alike. There’s a fair sprinkling of hippie classics, performed by classic hippies. One of the first acts we saw was by a tall, lean woman wearing panel-striped corduroy pants with a pleasantly husky voice, strong guitar skills, who did a number, and then leaned into the microphone and said, “And this is my anti-war song.” She sang about being a woman, and how peace began with her. Utterly authentic and talented, it was an original number that sang the song of an entire generation. Last night, a Latin American woman (who cried when Ben sang “The Impossible Dream” from “the Man of La Mancha”) got up and wrapped her body around her guitar and said fiercely that her song went out to all those who’d been in prison, because yeah, she was a jailbird herself. She sang the blues, and it was how the blues were meant to be sung. She sang her own blues, defiant and hopeful and strong. As a performer, she was arresting. After she finished her set, she stood up laughing, betraying nerves that hadn’t shown even in shadow a moment before. She brought the house down.

*They were all amazing. I think my favorite act was the final one in yesterday’s performance. It was a little Argentinian guy playing the mandolin and he had a great sound. It was not big or powerful but was completely his and just a joy to listen to. Another chap I would be remiss not to mention is the master of ceremonies. He is a local named Mario and absolutely the right pick for the job. At the beginning of each night he gets introduces the open mic night, collects names of the people who wish to perform, and does a couple of numbers to warm up the crowd before the first singers go on.  And the itself crowd is phenomenal. They are so much fun to sing for. Made of other performers and bar patrons they are incredibly supportive and appreciative of whatever people decide to do.  These last couple of weeks I have been performing show tunes from White Christmas and Man of La Mancha and have had a grand old time doing it.

~And he’s been AMAZING. You should hear the hush that falls over the bar after the first few bars of acapella in Ben’s showstopping voice hits the air. Almost everyone who plays at open mic uses a guitar, although there’s a smattering of other instruments. No one else does acapella. And while (almost) all of the performers are stellar quality, Ben’s voice is something special. And these music-lovers know it. The first night he sang, Mario took the microphone and gave one of the highest complements Byron Bay knows how; “Wow! How different was that? Let’s give him a big hand, Ben from Maryland, everyone!” The second night Ben sang, last night, a guy up to him after, and introduced himself as a local musician. He said he comes to play every week and listens for pitch quality, and that performances as pitch-perfect as Ben’s last night “are just scary.” He told us to stick around, since Ben was very likely to be one of the night’s prize-money winners. As his sister, I’m very proud. As just me, going to The Arts Factory weekly for the cheap beer and great music, it’s just good listening. My little bro’ done great.

*Mario has a certain amount of glee when it comes to his weekly role of giving out the prize money. A great musician himself, he takes seems to take pleasure in acknowledging other performers. And I got my first Australian paycheck!  There is something special about the Arts Factory. It is set in a beautiful tropical forest and the people who go there are special breed of travelers and adventurers. I am already looking forward to next week.      

~Ditto! I have to beat this kid at chess. We’re zero and… um, well, who’s counting, anyway? 

The Next Week

MONDAY 3.15.12

Today was awesome.

Last night, after only a brief mention, my boss looked at the schedule and realized I was on too many hours and days in a row. He took me off the early Monday morning shift and told me to get some rest, have some fun, come back bright.

I went to the beach after getting off at eleven thirty pm, took off my shoes, had a slice of potato pesto pizza and watched the moon and the sea and walked in the sand and surf and felt my feet and legs return to a normal healthy state.

I walked home and stopped at the bakery to celebrate my first paycheck with a French Breast – like an éclair, with strawberry jam, then got home and wrote a message and fell into blissful sleep, with an alarm set to get up early, have breakfast, and make the morning dive boat.

Morning dawned gray and cloudy, but I plucked up and ate the last apple, finished making and tying in the braided blue yarn strings that suffice as curtain holders for our floor-length roll-up bamboo slat window shades, braided my hair and stretched and went to the dive boat none the less.

The morning was less than successful. I felt like I was constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t know what to do; disappointing, since the last time I was there I really felt like one of the crew. We got out onto the water, and everything began to get better. I got into the water, and life was perfect again. I’d  fitted my mask in the shop, and spit into it correctly so it didn’t fog up and barely leaked. The suit was comfortable.

 The wildlife was amazing.

There was a sea turtle, and then another, in a school of puffer fish leading to a manta ray. There was a woebegone shark larger than a person, and a leopard shark the size of a person. There was a cloud of fish brilliant and bright and shimmering, and I remembered why I’d come, what I love, why I’m here. A school of gray silver fish hung just below the breaking surface of the water, the colorful fish glittered in the light, and I was utterly happy. The waves crashed, the rocks were tangibly close, the birds loud and white. There in the trench leading up to "the cheese grater" - a narrowing gap in the rocks that often harbors sea turtles and causes a bubbling, foaming current where the gap narrows and waves smash through, causing clouds of bubbles  and a current that rises and falls with the swells in the trench- were two more turtles, one smaller and quickly disappearing into the bubbly foam of the high tide waters breaking through the cheese grater. The other, larger, swam below. I followed him from just above, and saw two silver clips on the outsides of his front flippers. Scattered throughout were amazing fishes, one a triangular/diamond shape with black outlines and brilliant thin blue, white and black stripes, angelfish, damselfish, fish of many colors, fish schooling in brightness and in patchwork, a sea turtle followed along the ocean floor, starfish tucked among the rocks. I had no one to keep tabs on, only myself and the other divers and the sea to explore. The current was moving but not frightening, the waters surface was fairly calm, and I was feeling strong and at the ready – the ocean was my oyster, and I explored it’s surface and rocky depths, at least as far as my ears and nose and mask could go.

It was amazing. I was filled with happiness and calm. I realize now people here, at least in that dive subculture, talk and compare notes fairly little. There's very little "WOW that was awesome, what did YOU see?" after. A little, sometimes, but mostly it's just, "yeah, it was pretty good." Everyone just keeps coming back, and that’s all that needs to be said.

On the boat on the way back, I knew what to do. I knew where I ought to be, I was able to do it quickly and well, I needed little direction and was a capable, though still fresh, part of the crew. I was welcomingly invited out again, but satiated and wanting to rejoin with Ben as per the plan, I happily declined for the day and made my soggy way home, hungry for pizza and broccoli lunch. I had a slice at the table with one of our roommates and chatted, then went outside for a few minutes before washing my damp clothes and jumping into a deliciously hot shower.

Cleaned and all my motivation peacefully washed off, I dressed back into pajamas and Ben and I watched Finding Nemo, a highly thematically appropriate choice that continued to bring up scenes that looked so immediately familiar that  felt as though I was seeing parts of the film anew, and enjoyed its heartwarming delight to an almost embarrassing degree.

Post film, we went back into town to the post office, as Ben had been advised by our longest-term roommate to arrange safe mail delivery there for anything important, as our“mail box” is a rilled metal tube under a large red number, scenic but not secure. On the way, we were waylaid by a dim-sum yum-cha refridgerator case, a split a red bean cha siew paow. Yum. Business at the post office concluded, apparently you just have it addressed to you care of the post office with the branch address,  we went to Woolies for barbeque sauce and green apple shampoo, then on to the hardware store for rope to string the hammock.  

The very helpful woman at the hardware store directed us to an inexpensive length of orange outdoor rope of an appropriate weight and to the thirty foot specification we’d guess-measured earlier. We also picked up a Greek basil plant in a great little purple plastic bucket that looks incredibly healthy and smells amazing. I’ve been wanting a basil plant, Ben felt he could go either way, and I was willing to wait. We tossed a fifty cent piece, and it came up heads. Our basil plant is now living on the deck, making me happy. Nothing to make a girl feel at home like having fresh herbs growing outside.

With some degree of effort, a series of half-hitches, two camp knives, the assistance of the Book of Knots to tie a bowline with an anchor, a stick for giant spider removal, a few scratches and ant and mosquito bites, a deck chair for access to high places, one tree climb, two knives, half a box of matches (thank you, George!) for welding the cut ends of the rope back together, one tree climb later, we had the hammock secured between to palm trees with two orange ropes nicely tied up with loops on either end for the caribbeaners. Then one of the beaners broke. The metal actually bent out of the loop, and Ben went crashing to the ground. Thus, a few little bites and scratches, one minor molten plastic burn, and one beaner-breaking abrasion later, we have the hammock ropes completey up and ready to go. All we need now for the actual hammock are real beaners.

While taking stock, I realized that the slight ‘abrasion’ on my knee from earlier in the day had faded to a rose color, and is I am fairly nearly certain my first jellyfish sting. There were quite a few small jellies out by the rocks today, and I thought while swimming I might’ve kicked one, but then chalked the red knee scratch looking thing to an accidental kick of the boat or mats or truck or something. Retrospectively, to my delight, I’m pretty sure it was aquatic.

Hammock roping up accomplished, we came back in and went to dinner. The Aquarius Hostel hosts a backpacker dinner.

It is awesome.

The beef is juicy and tender. The fries (or hot chips, here) are hot, crispy, perfectly oiled, and excellent. The tomato sauce is saucy and fruity and sweet. The salad, though tiny, was populated with excellent mesculin and crispy sticks of carrot and other garden yumminess. The water was free, clean and cold and in clear glasses. It is a highly prudent feature of this country, in this town of serious physical activity and little food and lots of beer, that water is freely available nearly everywhere, in bars and restaurants and outdoor drinking fountains.

Anyway, the patio was excellent, the music clubb-ish but entertaining, and the dinner to die for. I nearly died of happiness and satisfaction, in fact, burger juices running over my palm. I’d make a terrible vegetarian these days.

After Aquarius, we happily walked to La Playa, the local balcony tapas bar with highly appealing and charming outdoor track lighting on their balcony surrounded by palm trees, open to the stars, and dressed with a white table umbrella and white sign. It was still live piano music, being played by a New Yorker. We went in, ordered exciting Spanish wines (and accidentally switched glasses – Ben had an intensely described but lightly colored desserty wine, and I enjoyed the heck out of an Orange wine, a recipe apparently guarded by Andalusians since the middle ages called something Naranja from a place with an abbreviation I assume stands for Navarra. It was dark, complicated, sweet, and delicious). We sat at the railing of the balcony under the palms and the stars and listened to a black man from New York sing and play the piano, and quickly realized we were in the lucky and Monday-night-small audience of a very talented musician indeed. He sang, he played, he was spell binding. In that moment, in that place, I was no where else but there, sipping wine and listening to the music and being, in that piano bar.

We stayed far longer than we’d planned, and he sang and played.

When at last the set came to an end, we went to the bar to pay our tab. The piano man was just coming around the bar, so we happily were afforded the opportunity to tell him how amazing he was, and he was very friendly and engaging and seemed glad to hail fellow Americans. Apparently he calls New York home, right up until the cold weather hits, and then he high-tails it to sing in warmer climes, and recently had been living in Sydney until making a contact in Byron and returning to perform for a few weeks at a time.

We went on to Cheeky Monkeys to play pool, and made it under the wire for free cover by just minutes, only to find that the table was being waited for, there was a twenty dollar deposit for the cues, and it was three dollars a game, a one and a two dollar coin (different sizes, the two being smaller), just to be annoying. We repaired back to Aquarius, where we weren't carded at the door, the cues were out and available (although they were shorter and lighter, but this bothered me not at all, especially given the proximity of a few of the pillars to angle shots), the game was still three dollars but all in the same size coin, and apparently it’s possible to play ping-pong there as well.

We played two games, and I have begun to play reasonably well. At least, much better. I’ve now won one fifth of our Australian games, and I’m improving. Some shots are beautiful, some are lucky, and many make an excellent sound.

We returned home, another beautiful walk on a warm night with the moon and clouds in the tropical evening blowing a constantly changing sky, painted under the palm trees. Upon reaching the house, I went outside to bring in the mostly dry  laundry I need for work in the morning, and greeted our roommate, just home from work cooking at Aquarius. He told me to come see something, turned out the light in his room, and pointed out the base of his bonsai tree, a soil space now shared by a glowing mushroom he found in the yard bicycling home.

The mushroom, whose cap he handled with great abandon though it was glowing and sticky, appeared to have perfectly healthy intact rills and seemed to be bioluminescing away with great ferocity- though the fungus was no larger than the size of a quarter, it glowed brightly enough to actually cast a little light.

We’ll see what sort of dreams the roommate has tonight.

This is a great country. And it was an excellent day.

TUESDAY 3.13.12

Tuesday morning dawned gray and rainy. Luckily I’d brought my work shirt in off the laundry line last night, in case of drizzle, and so it was nice and dry. We were out of apples, had yet to buy sugar, and were out of milk. This would’ve put a bit of a cramp in my fruit and coffee and granola for breakfast plan, but we live one block from The Green Grocer, rapidly becoming my favorite store in the world. I got up, put on jeans and shoes and grabbed my excellent new four-dollar-on-closeout-special-plaid-tartan-umbrella, which I actually didn’t need as the sun came out during my five-minute shopping trip. Armed with apples, a little bag of raw sugar, and a carton of fresh milk, I returned to our little yellow and white ancient-painted kitchen, prepped my breakfast, and ate at the little wood-slat dining table in the breakfast area/sunroom looking out the glass door at the backyard. Ben sleepily joined me, and we chatted for a minute.

I went to work, and had a great day. I’m starting to really feel like I know and have a place in the rhythm of the pizza-making machine there, and the more I get to know the ingredients and processes and methods and people, the more I become convinced it’s pizza worth making. It’s Slow Food. Something I’d promised myself I’d ‘get into some day’ while listening to podcasts and reading websites and cookbooks in the states after one very inspiring breakfast at the Tupelo Honey Café and the scintillating read of Gluten Free Girl and the Chef, as well as listening to podcasts on long training runs from KCRW’s Good Food. And here I am, in Byron Bay, and in the process of looking for any paycheck at all that would allow me to stay, I stumbled into Good Food, and Slow Food. How lucky am I?

I came back home, washed a spot of pizza sauce out of my shirt and hung it on the line, changed into a swim suit, and was leaving Ben a voicemail message telling him where I’d be on the beach when he got home. We snacked and decided today was The Day to Buy Snorkel Gear. We called Sundive, and the woman on the phone told us she’d be open for as long as it took her to write her last email, so we ought to come on down. We went. We bought snorkel masks. She heard us say we were planning to go out immediately, and squeezed some white paste stuff into the masks for us, and told us to rub it about and rinse it out at the tap around the back of the shop to remove the manufacturer’s filmy stuff, then take our masks to the water, spit and rinse (according to the guys at the dive shop where I’ve been volunteering to go out on snorkel trips, the spit makes a film over the glass and the salt water dries it, so the goggles don’t fog up. I don’t know why it works, really, but boy does it work. It’s gotta be a good spit though. None of those girly little ‘ptooey’ spits.), and snorkel away.

It was low tide, so we walked out on the sandbar to The Wreck, a popular local snorkeling site and surf break. It was nearly sunset, and the waves were small, so the surfers had packed it in for the day and there was much less risk of decapitation than during our last attempt.

The submerged wreck, the bits of it that remain, is utterly one with the sea, and home to schools of silvery fishes with black and white bits on their tails and fins, and one guy we’re calling The BAF – The Big A*& Fish.

The sun sunk below the mountains as we explored the wrecks in the white and turquoise sea. Dogs played with their humans on the beach, the lorikeets flocked and protested the ending of the day, and at last the light fell in the water and we headed to Woolies to answer the call of dinner.

Chicken schnitzel patties on special is good, good stuff. Add to it a pan fried zucchini each, one huge beautifully orange carrot, a BBQ sauce and pizza crust appetizer for me and a side of penne regatta (mixed dubiously with Vegemite and butter) for Ben, and dinner is served. A smashing success. 

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. 

Banana Sunday

~Yesterday, Ben and I were at the Why Not Cafe, the very first place we stopped in Byron Bay our first day. Today we were using their excellent wireless to post photos to Facebook while working on our novel. At that moment in the progression of our story, Martin and Rosie, the principal characters, were discussing their very great need for pancakes.

*It was at a that moment that we realized that we had a very great need for pancakes. And so, shortly thereafter, we found ourselves at the Wooly's comparing the various ingredients and prices of instant pancakes (we were not feeling terribly patient).

~And so, armed with a just-add-water shake-n-pour pancake mix, a bunch of bananas, the store brand Nutella - this took some real discussion and research, as off-brand Nutella is often very unsatisfying indeed, but this one had the EXACT same ingredients list with equal percentages of chocolate makings and hazelnut content, and the Woolies...

*there is some dissension between us regarding the correct spelling of the abbreviation of "Woolworths"

~ clearly, I'm right. Anyway, the Woolies brand has often proved itself, we took a risk which paid off, and went for their chocolate-hazelnut spread. With the addition of a small canister of cinnamon, all that was left was to wait for breakfast time. 

*Because we were feeling very noble and exceedingly motivated, we decided to go for a run before brekkers. 

~Also, because we thought there was a decent chance we wouldn't be able to move that fast after banana-nutella pancakes.

*That too. Anyway, we had a lovely run down the road, across the beach, and through a bit of rainforest. Feeling that our heart rates had been sufficiently elevated for one day, we returned to the hostel for a deliciously artery clogging breakfast.  

~We acquired the water. We played the maracas with the shake-batter jug. We sliced bananas. We washed a skillet. We were ready. 

* I poured, she bananaed, and we ate 'em hot.

~Now, some people say the only civilized way to eat is sitting down, at a table, with cutlery. Place settings aside, we've actually been pretty good about gathering all the necessary implements and sauces and sitting down together somewhere for our comestibles, but I say, sir, letting pancakes get cold is a crime. Besides, then they don't properly melt your chocolate-hazelnut spread. So we cooked 'em up and split them down the middle and ate our banana pancakes right over the stove while the next one cooked. It was perfect.

*Yumm, chocolatey, bananay, gooey goodness. After eating as many pancakes as we deemed prudent (by which I mean as many as possible) we departed for the Sunday market. 

~Held in the park area just beyond the train tracks, down Skinners Shoot road (and on our walking route to happy hour at the Buddha Bar), the first Sunday of the Month Market in Byron is locally famous. 

*And for good reason. The crafts are awesome, the food is delectable, the music is great (American folk country today), and there are more delicious samples than you can shake a stick at.

~As with seemingly everything retail-ended in Byron, the food was massively expensive, but impressive. Happily, there were items at today's produce stalls reasonably priced enough that we are now in avocado and ladyfinger bananas, and not passion fruit only because Ben didn't think he could eat half a kilogram of them by himself. We'd sampled passion fruit at the last Thursday market, and while I found the flavor impressive, and maybe I'd cook with it, it's not a fruit I'd ever deliberately eat in it's entirety. 

*I love the flavor of passionfruit but it has more seeds and more tang than just about anything else I have eaten. The prospect of being responsible for the consumption of more than one or two was a bit more than I thought I could manage. 

~And so we wandered through a sea of tents of artisans and food purveyors and entertainment, stopping again at Pure Melt Chocolate, whose chocolates, made purely of coco butter, powder, and vanilla, are unreal. The spit of rain from early in the morning had completely passed, and the sun grew hot to the point where I was sweating under my very fashionable straw hat, thrilled with the heat. We parted ways for the afternoon, Ben to town and I to the beach, and subsequently reconvened in the hostel kitchen, to blog and recharge Plucky and gnosh on lady-finger banana.