Byron Bay and its surrondings....

Tonight is our last day here in Byron Bay, we leave tomorrow after a full week in this beautiful, small, surfer/hippie paradise. I think of all the spots we have visited so far on our little journey this place has won a special place in our hearts! I will just let the pictures speak for itself below. I just realized I never took any pictures of the town center itself, but weeell it would not have shown any justice anyway! Just imagine many cozy (apparently my favorite word throughout this blog) cafés and restaurants, musicians on the streets, cute stores and just a general a relaxed beach vibe.

So far I have seen 1289 different bird speeches I have never seen before, wallabies, a koala, and weird stuff crawling around on the ground. We ended up in a night club were the theme was “paint party” (jesus, hello 2008) where the girls were topless (to Erik’s and the other guys in our company’s delight.) We rented a car with three other people that we met at our first hostel here and we drove to Nimbin (which everyone talks about here). In my opinion a superoverrated town (or in other words, just one street in the middle of nowhere) which is nicknamed the small Amsterdam in Australia. Well, living in Amsterdam it rather reminds me more of the creepy, small backstreet of Amsterdam. 5 ladies offered us their special cookies and one particular charming gentleman asked if we were interested in speed or maybe some LSD. After that very short-lived visit we drove through the gorgeous countryside and went for a hike to a waterfall. I can honestly say I am NOT a hiker, I get at least 4 blitsers on my feet after just walking, in proper Nike-shoes, for one hour. And this shit was not a normal hike, we honestly had to climb over major fallen rocks which was a particular hard challenge for me and the other girl since we almost are of hobbit height. Well it was worth it in the end, stunning. The guys jumped in the water and afterward witnessed that their balls had shrunk to grape-size because it was so cold so I did not feel bad that I didn’t jump in.

So has one might have guessed, Byron Bay was just the ideal place to celebrate my birthday. When I woke up in the morning Erik was already gone, and I had got a super cute video from my family where they sang to me (family tradition honored-check!). Then Erik told me to come outside (our new hostel is one of the best we ever stayed at, just by the beach and with a big back garden) and there he has prepared a breakfast with some of my favorite things in the world- egg and avocado! The rest of the day we just lay on the beach and played around with the big waves. In the evening we went to a restaurant (never do it otherwise) and had some Greek food. They had the BYO policy which many restaurants in Australia has, it stands for “Bring Your Own”. We could just buy a bottle of wine for five dollars in a liquor shop and bring the bottle to the restaurant. Such an amazing idea that I wish the rest of the world could adopt! Afterwards (with very many glasses of wines in our bodies) we went skinny dipping in the moonlit ocean, also something that was on my to-do-in-life-list. Just an amazing day in other words!

Tomorrow we fly back to Sydney where we will spend three more days, then on Saturday we fly up to Bangkok and then our South Asian adventure begins! It is low season there now, which means that the temperature during the day can rise up to +39 degrees and the air can get extremely humid. This will be a challenge in itself and will probably take a while to adjust to. But we are so looking forward to it! Only in one week from now we will be on the 8-hour bus from Bangkok to Siem Riep in Cambodia. But I think we will return to Australia one day, pff…how will we be able to get back to the normal office life in Europe after this trip is a question that remains…