The Oz Report: Byron Day 2

So here I am, lying on the couch, on my first sick day in Australia, and I really don't have any excuse not to blog.

After our night in the apartment, we dragged ourselves out of bed/sofa/floor etc. some enthusiastically, and some (like me) reluctantly. Simon's idea of surfing at 0600 did not go ahead, partly due to the reluctance, and partly due to having to be out of the apartment by 1000. Considering that we woke at 0800, I thought the best idea was to pack up before going to the beach. This took about half an hour to decide before we actually did anything...

The beach was wet, obviously, but then, so was the sea, so that was okay. There wasn't any swell, so we just swam for half an hour, and cheered on all these old people who were migrating north for the winter. At first, I thought I saw a shark, and almost freaked myself straight out of the water, but on a second look, realised it was just a swimmer. And then another swimmer. And another. All quite ancient of days, and all heading in the same direction. We cheered and applauded and wondered loudly whether they knew something that we didn't...

And then we went for breakfast.

Ah, breakfast! We had to wait an extra half hour as a storm hit almost exactly as we reached the cars, so we had to wait it out. I'm sure I made the whole of Byron jealous of my almost-ankle-length standard-issue plastic raincoat that I've had in my wardrobe since I got my uniform. Really, I'd prefer to drown than be seen out in public, in uniform, wearing that monstrosity. It worked in Byron though.

Marnix had pancakes, Steve and myself had the big breakfast (although I sent mine back because they put egg on my toast and that's just RUDE) and Simon had eggs benedict with gluten-free toast. Except apparently once you take the gluten out of bread, the loaf is about 1/3 of the size of a normal loaf so he was quite disappointed. This meant that he spent the second half of the meal stealing food from other people, and eating it in quite disgusting conglomerations. For instance, he stole a beef sausage, 2 eggs, baked beans and a large quantity of raspberry jam from me - and mixed it all up together. From Steve he got another sausage and a hash brown, and stirred that up with some berries and marscapone cheese from Marnix... wow.

After breakfast, we walked through Byron for a couple of hours, visiting many surf shops and just generally browsing. I didn't buy anything! - so proud of myself :)

After buying large quantities of food for lunch (loaf of bread, brie, nutella, 4 avocados, 12 eggs, large pot of olives), we headed off to Simon's farm.

Simon's farm isn't really Simon's farm. He works 4 hours a day and in return gets free accommodation (which doesn't involve a toilet) and food. It's a 200 acre farm with millions of fruit trees, of which I took copious photos.

Firstly, we passed a large plot of Kaffir limes. Just squeezing the leaves gave out such an awesomely limey smell, it was incredible.

The Kaffir lime fruit was incredibly knobbly. It wasn't yet ripe, so we didn't eat any, but we did pick some leaves for our Thai curry (yes, ANOTHER meal)

Here we have the 3 boys, traipsing along...

View of the maaaany Kaffir lime trees.

Lemons!

Me, picking An Lemon

Black bamboo, which lined most of the paths.

Frangipani flower.

Oranges!

A mango tree - unfortunately very unripe, but I did pick one that is out on the veranda hopefully ripening.

A star-fruit tree. I ate a ripe one, which was obviously not green like this photo, but I ate it, so I wasn't able to photograph it afterwards. Sorry.