Animal spotting

The major reason I came to Australia was the nature and the unique animals. I haven't got disappointed.

I already wrote about surfing with dolphins in Anqourie. Actually it's not very rare to meet these friendly mammals and I also saw some of them this week while surfing here in Newcastle. They seem to be really used to surfers and don't mind to come nearby while doing the daily fishing.

Yesterday I didn't saw any dolphins but a funny looking seal who was lurking between the waves with it's long whiskers. Yay!

Monstrous performance

I have finished my major assignments for this semester and therefore I have had more time to go surfing lately. Paddling to the waves and being in the right spot are still the hardest parts but standing up and steering(right) goes without bigger problems.

Last night they showed the Eurovision song contest on telly. The UK commentary was great with it's sarcastic comments making fun of the singers and countries. I wish we would have that kind of commentary in Finland as well. I had a fun evening watching the poor performances and playing texas hold'em in my unit. I had to answer questions like "Is pop like that in Europe?", "Do you listen to that kind of music?".

Well, luckily the monster-band Lordi from my home country made a good show and atleast the Aussies liked the costumes they were wearing. I made also some background research and managed to find a picture of Lordi without mask. It's interesting to see how many heavy bands there are in the next year's Eurovision.

Pizza

There seems to be a pizza war in Australia and I'm fully enjoying the results. For example you can use the competitors' discount coupons in both pizza hut and domino's. Well we don't need to go to domino's since the pizza hut offers delicious large pan pizza with 5aud(3 euros) when picked up. That's ridiculous because as far as I can remember the similar Pizza Hut large pizza in Finland costs over 10 euros... 8]

Shopping

Earphones which I got with the Iriver mp3-player broke so I ordered the Sennheiser CX300 in ear headphones. Sound quality is way better than with the previous ones and the amount of bass they can produce is really good. Good buy.

I also got enough of getting cold while surfing and bought a full wetsuit. Brand is peak and it is 3/2mm which means 2mm in the arms and 3mm the rest. It's also fully sealed which means that it's a little bit warmer than without proper sealing.

I went surfing yesterday to the Bar beach and got really happy with the performance of the wetsuit, even though my surfing performance wasn't anything to mention of. Result: 2 hours in the water and didn't got cold at all.

Surf trip on east coast

I'm trying to get back to the normal university life after two and half week easter break in the sweaty van which I took up North along the East coast with Matti and Stewart. I'm doing really well since I spend the whole last day studying for a test which I believed to be on this week but which is actually after two weeks. Luckily I studied with the online poker on the background so I didn't completely waste my time.

So we drove North along the beautiful, green and touristic East coast of Australia. The whole coast consists of nice sandy beaches and there is plenty of surf spots between Newcastle and Northern Sunshine coast where the great barrier reef starts to block the ridable waves. Our plan was to stop in every nice looking spot. We also got a list of must-see places from Stewart's 38year old flatmate who has been surfing for 30 years. It turned out that we completely relied on this list...

Mentionable places where we stopped included: Diamond head, Crescent head, Delicate nobby, South West rocks, Coff's harbour, Yamba, Angourie, Nimbin, Byron bay, Surfer's paradise, Noosa heads, Seal rocks and the notorious(explanation later) bar beach in Newcastle.

The whole trip was around 2600kms and we managed to survive without bigger problems. The van seems to be eating quite much oil though, but it might be that long ascends combined with high temperature, small engine and three guys just need a little bit more lubrication. If you're Finnish you can read what these ascends did to Jarkko's Honda in the desert of Mojave.

We started driving North from Newcastle after the healthy meal in Hungry jacks(burger king) and were accompanied by pouring rain. This was the only day when it rained but that's what you can expect in Australia, the place where the weather is perfect(excluding occasional category 5 cyclones). On the first day we took the van to shaky gravel roads and arrived to a place called Diamond Heads and suddenly realized that we are not the only persons who want to do camping. Locals with huge caravans and tents had conquered the camping site in this national park but luckily we found a nice spot for our van and smallish tent. I had to rub my eyes couple of times when I saw the first, quite tame, wallabies coming bouncing out from the bushes. One even had a baby peeping from it's pouch. I had only seen wallabi once before but it was a roadkill and not so exciting than these live ones. Wallabi = small, cute kangaroo.

The first surfing day didn't start very well. I got a little crack to the nose of my board when it hit the bottom after I succesfully managed to make the nose-dive maneuver while trying to catch the wave. The previous owners of the van had left lots of useful stuff in there and after a little search I found a board repair kit. The craftmanship skills which I achieved in the primary school came into use when I successfully put some resin/glue in the crack, let it dry and polished the result with sand paper. To make the day perfect I decided to step on (wallabi?) shit. The result of repair looked good though and after pretty successful surf I completely had ignored the bad mood I had before.




From Diamond Head we continued north till Crescent head. We didn't camp in the Crescent Head though but headed to gravel roads again and found a place called Delicate Nobby's. Camping site here was the most liberate with dogs and camp fires allowed(saw fireworks and exploding gas bottles as well). This fact combined with good surf resulted that we spent two days in the Delicate Nobbys on our way North and two more days on the way South. The picture shows a part of the quite nice beach in the Delicate Nobbys. We met quite interesting people in the camping area including a group of local guys who every once and then come to visit this same camping site and haven't actually been travelling outside NSW or Australia. I think this is quite common case among Ausralians, but can't blame them when living near a spot like that.

On one day the surf in Delicate Nobbys was massive extreme. The biggest waves when I have been out seemed to be raising way over 1.5meters and crashed with honourable power. Still remembering my previous experiences in the washing machine I tried to make my best effort to choose a spot where I could possible catch a wave but still avoid the crashing big waves. I didn't succeed.

I think everyone should go through the thrilling experience of laying on your board and seeing a big wave forming in front/back of you. The moment when you realize that it's going to crash on you is priceless. In this point you should do a duck-dive(short boards), turtle roll(with longer boards) or just jump out from your board and dive deep under the wave to avoid the biggest force of water. The latter is not preferable since the board can hit the other surfers. Well I tried to duck-dive my 8.6 foot mini-mal which is almost impossible since it has a very good buoyance. The result was that the wave catched the board and of course me lying on it. I don't need to describe the ride under the wave but after I got to the surface again I headed back to the beach and had a break. After the day surfing I had sea water coming out from my nose for a long time. Surfing could be used as a good alternative for this.

From Delicate Nobbys we went to Coffs Harbour. A nice town but not much going on at the moment so we only stayed for one night. Surf was ok.

From Coffs we headed to Yamba(name reminds me of the irritating tv commercials back in Finland) which only had one camping site. The surf in Yamba wasn't good at the moment so we headed 10km away to Angourie, the village where everyone surfs. In the water you could see all the family members. Small kids in the smallest waves and grandpa waiting for the big ones in the behind. Daughters, parents, dogs and others in between. Pack of dolphins came playing just next to us and the sight of them popping out from the collapsing waves was remarkable. Every jump was followed by the astonishing cheers of the surfing ladies.

Later on Stewart locked our car with keys in. We had to scratch our heads for a while since we were only wearing our surfing equipment. Stewart finally ended up going through houses with his wetsuit on and trying to phone a locksmith. Locksmith had come from Yamba to Angourie to open the doors. It took quite a long time from even this guy to get in the steal-proof Hiace. Bill 50aud.

After 9 days of intense surfing we felt like chilling out and headed towards hippy town Nimbin. The road there went through nice green and hilly landscape. The town of Nimbin was a bit like we expected but it seems that the original hippy idea has died out a bit and made way to the expanding tourism. The YHA backpacker camping-hostel was really beautiful place though just next to herding cows and horses. In the morning the sound of birds was so loud that you just had to wake up around 6 am when the loudest singing started. Well this was no problem for us since we usually went to bed around 9pm.



We headed to see the protestor waterfalls to nearby rainforest. This was the first time I had been in the real rainforest and the darkness of the place was a bit surprising. Beautiful place.

After a good rest from surfing we headed towards Byron bay and were really exciting about upcoming surf and nightlife. I have to admit that the long waves in Byron Bay were maybe the best I saw during the holiday. The major disadvantage was the crowd. So many surfers in the water that you couldn't really enjoy it a much. Catching a wave was really difficult since there was usually couple of guys(girls) usually riding the wave when you could have caught it. There's no taking off if someone is already on the wave. The strategy to stay off from the most crowded place and wait for the infrequent waves paid me off very well and I managed to catch the best wave of my long surfing history. It was a nice right hander and I managed to make a long ride. I got stoked(word used to describe the feeling riding a good wave).

On the evening we headed to see the night life of Byron Bay. I got a little bit disappointed since it was almost a sausage party and the clubs were not anything special. Well we drank _few_ beers anyway just to celebrate the ongoing holiday.

Next day we wanted to take it easy with Matti and decided to took an easy trail to Cape Byron, the most eastern point of Australia and the lighthouse. Well the trail wasn't so easy with some altitude differences and we were still feeling the previous night in our legs. Eventually we managed to get to the Cape Byron and I have to admit that it's a place worth to see. Really nice high cliffs combined with dark blue ocean and bright white lighthouse is again something that you enjoy watching.

Now it was time to go the Surfer's Paradise. The place which I had so long waited to see. We drove there through the beautiful coastline and checked out the waves in couple of really famous surf beaches along the way. The Surfer's Paradise looked a little bit like Miami(which I have seen on the TV-show Miami vice) with nice boulevards full of palm trees, long beach, high buildings and of course lots of tourists.

We were staying with our finnish friend Timo who has an 5th floor apartment 150meters from the main street and just next to the ocean with beautiful views to the sea. A quite perfect place to spend your time as an exchange student. We checked out the surf immediately but it seems that surfer's paradise isn't paradise for surfers at all. The waves were crappy whitewash the whole time we stayed in Surfer's. Luckily a little drive to the South and the famous Kirra beach had really good waves. The disadvantage was again the huge crowds which made our surfing almost impossible. But surfing wasn't the main thing we were here for since I really wanted to see the pumping nightlife of Surfer's. I was waiting similar parties that you can have in Mediterranean holiday resorts or atleast a good clubbing night out. Well we headed out on tuesday night and I have to say that the nightlife was quite lame and nothing special. The best partying is probably in the big cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Still have to check those ones out.



From Surfer's Paradise we still decided continue towards North till Noosa which is over 1000kms north from the Newcastle. I had heard that Noosa should be really laid back town with a big upper class and good surf. On the first day the surf wasn't really special and we went hiking to the trails of the national park just next to the town. We saw again some good looking beaches and had a break in one of them which was actually a deserted nudist beach.
The next day I had a really good surf and managed to get many waves. Unfortunately they weren't really long ones but it was still one of my best surfing days.

We headed back to Newcastle in three days from Noosa and wanted to end up our holiday with style, surfing. We went to Bar beach where, after little surfing, Matti ended up having a nasty cut in his arm from sharp fin of his board. I drove Matti to the hospital where we spend around one hour and Matti got seven stitches for his cut. I'm not sure about this, but getting in to a public hospital in Finland would atleast have a queuing time of five hours instead of half an hour we had here.

Our holiday had become to an end and I went back to campus to do some laundry.

Thanks to Matti for taking all the pictures during the holiday, there's some more in his picture gallery. I shot some of videos as well but I probably need half an year editing it :)