So I finally have found time to write another blog post and looking at where my last one finished I realize i probably need to do them more often to keep them shorter. Well, my time in Brisbane was fairly short lived. The "labor job" I landed turned out to be scrubbing ash off a fire damaged warehouse about an hour outside the city. The whole time the job was implied to be cash in hand, but at the end of the first day the boss gave me papers which I did not have the proper visa for so that fell through. Probably my biggest regret of the trip so far has been not spending $500 a working holiday visa as I have seen lots of work opportunities to stay a few weeks in one place, but was unable to act upon it. Anyways, the ash scrubbing job wasn't the greatest anyway. Brisbane was a pretty average city in my opinion. It had a nice river running along the downtown area, cool live music scene in the Valley, a lot of modern buildings and a nice free museum. I enjoyed my time there, but after about four days I decided it was time to take the bus down to Byron Bay. Unfortunately, my first days in Byron Bay were very stressful. When I got there, I was thrilled to find out that somehow one of the transactions I made had a virus that tried to hack into my bank account and Bank of America decided to cancel all my cards, leaving me with $60 dollars cash to figure it out. Thankfully after two days of phone calls my Parents were able to wire me $100 in which I was able to use my last $3 to log onto the Internet to get the Western Union code(Thanks Mom and Dad). Finally two days later BOA was able to wire me more money to my Australian Bank account and I am now waiting for my card to be delivered to me here in Melbourne. After all that stress I was finally able to settle in and enjoy Byron Bay. Byron is a quiet little surf town that has an awesome beach and had done a good job at fighting off developers licking at their chops to build resorts there. I stayed at a hostel that had free surfboards to use and although the surf was pretty flat, got a good three days out in the water. It was a pleasant change to the freezing waters I am accustomed to in Westport, WA. Byron also had a really good group of travellers that were staying there and was a really fun place to sit out on picnic tables drinking goon (cheap boxed wine) or making bonfires out on the beach with somebody playing sing along songs on the guitar; also while drinking goon. While in the area I had to make the 1.5 hour bus ride to Nimbin. Nimbin was the site of a hippy Aquarius festival in the early 70's out in the middle of the the countryside. So many people liked it so much that they just decided to stay and thus Nimbin was born. Now it is not as authentic as I imagined as the main street (i.e. the whole town) is mostly catered towards tourism, but it was defiantely and interesting day trip. Leaving Byron, which I admit was really hard to do, I took the bus back to Brisbane and made the flight to Melbourne to wait for my card and to enjoy my last stop in Australia before heading to SE Asia. Melbourne I can already tell is my kind of city. Even the airport was way more comfortable to sleep in. I'm not going to elaborate too much because this is only my second day here, but I really like the sports focus and faster pace of the city. Will post about it soon and give my final thoughts on my time in Australia as I have realized I have left a lot out. Also, I'll try to get some pictures up soon.
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