April Adventures
Phew! My time here has absolutely flown by. My semester break was over two months ago now – I was away from Newcastle for almost the entire month of April. When I got back, I was immediately slammed with uni again, and before I knew it, the rest of the semester had flown by. This post is going to be a summary of all my April adventures – I’ll add a few highlight photos here & there, but to see full photo collections from each adventure, head over to the Photolog & Album pages.
April started out with the most challenging physical activity I’ve done in a long time (maybe ever) – the Mountaineering Club’s Bikepacking Trip. I’d been missing my bike a lot since arriving, and when I saw that the club was going to do a bikepacking trip (think backpacking, but on a mountain bike), I was immediately interested. The club was supposed to get a set of bikes for all members to use, but when that fell through, I had to find a mountain bike. Luckily, the club is massive (it’s the biggest club at the university with about 300 members!) and full of really nice people, and someone offered to let me borrow their bike for the weekend.
We rode 100 km split over two days – we started at the university and rode 50km south to Freeman’s Campground/Birdie Beach on the first day. I’ve ridden long distances on a road bike before, but never on a mountain bike, and to be honest it was way harder than I thought it would be. It also poured rain for the last hour or two of our ride and we were all pretty cold by the time we finally made it. We camped for the night and headed back the way we came the next day. The first hour of day two was straight uphill as we rode out of the valley we had camped in, which was an absolute struggle after being in the saddle for 5+ hours the day before. Luckily, this ended up being the hardest part of our day – if it hadn’t been, I seriously may have had to bail and somehow find a ride back. But, I pushed through, and we ended up making really good time on the way back. We even beat the rain clouds that seemed to be following us all day.
As grueling as this ride was, I’m super grateful that I did it. I’ve had a mountain bike at home for over a year now, but I hadn’t ridden on any off-road trails yet because I didn’t have anyone to show me the ropes, and I didn’t want to hit trails without some kind of instruction. My dad & little brother both had pretty major mountain biking accidents in the last few years so I’ll admit I was a bit scared. This trip was the perfect way to start learning – surrounded by people who have experience mountain biking, able to watch them and learn simply from observation, ask them questions, and get some experience riding on trails. I felt so much more confident on a mountain bike after the trip and am really excited to take my new skills home with me. Here are a few highlight photos – check out the rest in the Bikepacking Photolog.
On Sunday, April 9, a week later, I headed to Sydney for the first leg of my semester break adventures – Surf Camp! I spent the night in Sydney before the bus picked us up outside a hostel on Monday morning. There were way more people than I expected. 60 of us filled a big, Greyhound sized tour bus and drove about two hours south to Seven Mile Beach in Gerroa, NSW. The camp is called Surf Camp Australia. They’ve been running for around 25 years and have permanent cabins about a 5 minute walk from Seven Mile Beach. This beach is ideal for learning to surf because the waves break pretty far out and then roll in as whitewash for quite a long ways, so you can learn to surf the whitewash without having to worry about getting smashed by big waves breaking. They offer a 3-day, 5-day, and 7-day camp. I signed up for the 7-day, which is the 5-day camp + an overnight bus to Byron Bay & one night accomodation there. It’s an all inclusive camp – eat, surf, sleep, repeat! It felt like being at summer camp as a kid, complete with there being barely any service at camphich meant a lot of quality, phone-less time with fellow campers). Each day we got up, had breakfast, went for a surf lesson, came back for lunch, went for another surf lesson, then returned to camp for the night. The staff cooked all our meals and set them up buffet style, and every night after dinner we all sat around talking and playing card games. I met a lot of really cool people from all over the world, and overall had the absolute best time. We were all very sad to leave by the end! I’m certainly no expert surfer, but I can confidently stand up on a foam board and surf a bit of whitewash, and most of all, I had a ton of fun learning! Below are some of the photos of me surfing (please ignore my terrible form), taken by camp staff. The rest of the photos that I took throughout the week (mostly of the breathtaking sunrise we caught one morning before breakfast), are posted in the Surf Camp Photolog.
On Friday, after one final surf lesson, all the remaining campers loaded on a bus back to Sydney. By this time, I had met the other campers who had signed up for the 7-day camp. Three girls – Emily & Zoe who were both from the UK, and Astrid who was from Sweden. Our other friend Jackie, who is from New Hampshire, was also heading up to Byron Bay, but she hadn’t booked the 7-day camp, so she took a different bus there. We all got kebabs in Sydney and boarded the coach around 7 pm. From there, we rode for about 14 hours up the coast to Byron Bay. Being as tall as I am, I couldn’t really lay down in the two seats I had to myself, and it’s hard to get comfy on a bumpy bus ride anyway. We all barely slept (luckily that is the only overnight bus ride I’ll be taking in AUS) and arrived in Byron Bay around 8:30 am the following morning. From there, we took a 15-minute shuttle to Wake Up! Byron Bay hostel (the shuttle was courtesy of the hostel – since the hostel is a bit out of town, they run a free shuttle into town every hour until 9 pm every night). We couldn’t check in quite yet, so we put our bags in the luggage room and headed next door to Treehouse, an adorable restaurant practically attached to the hostel. After some much-needed coffee, we all headed to the beach across the street. It was much warmer in Byron Bay than it had been at surf camp, so we all soaked in the sun for several hours before we were able to check in to our room around 2 pm.
Part of the 7-day surf camp package was that boards would be provided for us to use at the hostel, so after lunch, we took some boards out to test out our new skills. We didn’t have much luck – the waves were tiny, and I had a pretty bad scrape on my ankle from standing up on the rough foam board surfaces all week long. Zoe got up on her board a few times, but I gave up after a while and decided I needed to give my ankle time to heal before trying to surf again. I haven’t been on a board since, but I have high hopes to live by the ocean again at some point in my life and get more into surfing!
That night, we somehow mustered up the energy to go out on the town. We took the shuttle into town and walked through a local pop-up market that was set up in the park next to where the shuttle dropped us off. I bought a woven anklet and a gold-filled necklace that will hold up in the ocean – the salt water had already tarnished several pieces of my jewelry, so I’d been on the lookout and was not disappointed in what this market had to offer! After that, we headed to Wake Up! Byron Bay’s sister hostel, The Surf House, where we cashed in on our free pizza coupons that were included in our 7-day surf camp package. Then we grabbed some drinks from the bottle shop and sat by the ocean for a while before hitting a few bars. We even ran into my friend Filip on the street, who was visiting for a few days over break. I’ll never forget our walk home at the end of the night – we could clearly see the Milky Way above us. It was crazy. I can’t remember ever having seen the Milky Way with the naked eye before. Below are a few snaps from our first day – more photos can be found in the Byron Bay Album!
On Sunday, I slept in, which was much needed after a mostly sleepless night on the bus there, and then had a bit of a rest day. I signed up for Monday’s sunrise walk (managed to get the very last slot!), hung out at the hostel for a while, then went into town with my camera. I had the best tacos and street corn I have had in my entire life at this hole-in-the-wall taco shop called Costa Taco, explored and took photos for a while, watched the sunset on the beach (where I ran into Filip randomly again), and grabbed some groceries before heading back to the hostel.
On Monday morning, all five of us woke up before dawn and hopped on the shuttle for the sunrise walk. We spent the next few hours meandering back to the hostel while the sun came up. More details & photos from the walk can be found in the Byron Bay Sunrise Walk Photolog. When we arrived back at the hostel, Jackie & I made breakfast and chilled out for a while before heading to the Crystal Castle. The best thing about meeting Jackie (besides making a new friend of course) was discovering that we would be in Byron Bay together and that we shared similar interests. Because of this, we ended up booking everything each other had planned and doing all of our activities together, which was honestly so refreshing since I’ve done a lot of solo adventuring here. The Crystal Castle & Shambhala Gardens are located about 45 minutes inland from Byron Bay. I had always planned to go there after hearing about it from Anna long before I ever came to Australia. It is home to the largest crystals in the world! To get there, we booked a shuttle through Trip Advisor that drove us to the gardens and picked us back up three hours later. We walked around every part of the gardens, participated in a guided meditation complete with singing bowls, and of course, I took tons of photos. These can be found in the Crystal Castle Album.
On Tuesday, we headed to town for a Dolphin Kayaking tour that Jackie had planned. We paddled out past the waves and into the bay in sea kayaks. I didn’t expect to see more than a few dolphins from a distance.. but we ended up being able to call an entire pod of them right to our little pod of kayaks. We were instructed to stay close – apparently, dolphins stay close together unless they are hunting, so we had to make sure to keep all the kayaks close together so the dolphins wouldn’t think we were hunting them. I spotted the first dolphin a ways off, and then we whistled and made a bunch of high-pitched noises to call them to us. They got so close!! Below is the video & some photos I took on the water. You might want to watch it without sound due to all the whistling and noise we were making to call the dolphins.
I spent the rest of Tuesday hanging around the hostel, editing photos, and later playing cards with friends (this had become a daily activity after surf camp).
On Wednesday, Jackie & I took an Uber to Mullumbimby for a guided e-bike tour to Univorn Falls and Mount Jerusalem National Park that I had planned. I’d only been on one e-bike before – when I bought my mountain bike at home, the shop I ordered it from only had the e-bike version in the store, so I got to ride it around the parking lot. The bikes we used for our tour were mountain bikes and used pedaling assitance technology, which was very cool. I’d never understood the appeal of an e-bike before this tour. For me, if I’m getting on a bike, I enjoy the workout of pedaling and always thought an e-bike was a bit of a cop out. Boy has my mind changed! My bikepacking trip showed me how grueling the hills can be on a mountain bike. Going uphill on pavement is hard enough, and even harder on off-road terrain. With the e-bike, going uphill was an absolute breeze. I still put in the work and kept my pedal-assistance level low so that I still got a workout in, but it was really rewarding to be able to go up hills without getting too exhausted, and when the hills are easy to go up, you get rewarded with more downhill riding which is the fun part of mountain biking! Below are a few highlight photos – details about the tour & more photos can be found in the Unicorn Falls Bike Tour Photolog.
Wednesday was my last day in Byron Bay – after the bike tour, we headed into town for more Costa Taco and to do a bit of shopping. I’d come across a brand online called Ottoway the Label, and we had walked past their physical store a couple days before. We went there and I picked up a pair of pants that I had been eyeing online (possibly my favorite pants ever, handmade, cute, & comfy). We went a few other places as well and I picked up a little dreamcatcher that is now hanging in my room, a cowrie shell anklet, and a couple other things. That night was wine & cheese night at the hostel, so we headed back, made dinner, and then enjoyed free wine & cheese and of course, played more card games.
On Thursday, I hopped on a shuttle up to the Gold Coast airport and flew home to Newcastle. I had about 24 hours to unpack, do laundry, and repack for my the Mountaineering ‘Mega Trip’ that would run from Friday to Tuesday.. but I’ll go into that in my next post because this one is entirely too long already. Cheers!
