Day 32, Sunday, March 7 2010
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We all met around 7 ‘o clock at the reception and then were all rather shocked to hear that there was a slim chance that we might not be able to get out of Rainbow Beach. The normal route out of Rainbow Beach went straight to Gympie and then further on south and this route was totally flooded by the heavy rain falls in the last couple of days. Rainbow Beach actually had 60mm of rain just during the night, added with the other couple of hundred millimetres while we were on Fraser Island, it was too much for the roads and land to cope with.
The only chance we had, was to go back up north to Maryborough where we then would take another road to Gympie and thus be able to get onto the freeway which would take us down to Byron Bay. This was a 160km round trip adding nearly two hours to our already long drive. To make sure we didn’t get stuck, Beaver decided to have another bus driver, which was driving a big touring bus drive in front of us, which we would follow and thus use the wake created by the bus to allows to pass any bodies of water to deep for us, but not too deep for the other bus. This sounded very adventourous, some of the people on the bus made big eyes but I just thought: We did book ATA (Adventure Travel Australia) so let us just go for it and see how it goes…
Thankfully everything went quite well, we did get some really cool pictures of the big bus and us going through some quite deep water, but we didn’t get stuck and were soon in Gympie. Because of this round trip we arrived in Byron Bay around four in the afternoon which was a bit late to enjoy Byron at it’s fullest but I still managed to get a bike from the hostel we were staying at and then went for a bit of a drive along Byrons roads. Byron Bay is quite small, but very enjoyable. I loved the sand and I had to give it a name; squeeky beach. Somehow the sand kept make a squeeky noise under my feet and I first thought it was the soles of my feet, but even when I brushed the top of my feet over the sand it made the noise which I have never heard before at a beach.
In the evening we had dinner at The Rail which was really nice. I had a marinated tofu burger and thouroughly enjoyed it. The local beer, called Stone Wall, was very good as well and I enjoyed a couple of them. The night was ended with a couple of us walking along the beach and enjoying the sound of the waves, the squeeky sand and the light of the light house.
Back at the hostel we went to bed, I couldn’t really sleep and was even woken late some time by a girl moaning! I finally figured that on the bed next to us on the top bed, there were two having sex. Well I just listened and smiled to myself.