byron bay

Byron Bay is a small town on the eastern-most point of Australia. Right now, the place is full of "schoolies", which is what they call the kids who just graduated from high school. It's tradition to go on vacation with your mates (friends) to celebrate - who needs prom when you can get away from the parents and hang out with your friends at the beach for a week? Walking around, especially at night, it feels sort of like frosh-week-at-university meets spring-break-in-Florida. Lots of young people, walking around in groups, checking each other out, some quite drunk. I felt underdressed, lonely, very uncool, and a bit old.

I met up with Rui, one of the girls who finished volunteering in the kitchen about two weeks after I arrived. Rui is Japanese and she's currently working as a waitress at a sushi-train restaurant. She's living in a tent in a very hippy-style backpacker hostel called The Art Factory. She pays $9 a night to camp there, although she's going to get to stay free in exchange for teaching the manager Japanese. She showed me around the town a little. In addition to the frosh week/spring break crowd, there is also the hippy/surfer/beach culture crowd - lots of busking and bongo-playing, girls in sun dresses and dreadlocks, two girls dancing while twirling sticks lit on fire. Rui wants to learn to play bongos. We went to a pub for a drink and to talk - I got carded! I guess, with all the schoolies around, many of them underage, the policy is to card pretty much everyone. And in the twilight, it's probably hard to guess how old someone is.