I was recently invited to visit Byron Bay for a little over a week in exchange for dog and plant-sitting duties. I arrived on Monday 28th November. The pace of life in Byron is, well, much, much slower. Locals seem pretty chilled out and while there is some debate over whether Byron itself has become too commercialised it is not hard to see the beauty of the area and feel the difference between them and the tourists.

I am finding it a bit hard to fit into a groove, I feel like there’s something I should be doing, that there’s something I’ve forgotten to do, but hopefully I’ll settle in before I have to go home.

Today I went adventuring; the person whose house I am currently occupying is out of town (obviously) and I don’t really have any other contacts here so I wandered around on my own.

As an aside I should mention that it is currently the height of Schoolies, that period of time directly after the last year 12 exams when all the just 18 kids go on boozie holidays, so the town is heavily populated with sunburnt kids wheeling trolleys filled with slabs of one or more types of cheap alcohol, sausages, white bread and serviettes (you absolutely need the serviettes according to the loud conversation between two mostly unclothed girls in Woolies). Apparently if you’re 18 and here to get tanned then get tanked wearing your bikini/boardies and no shirt around town all day is perfectly acceptable.

But back to adverturing! I took my trusty point and shoot camera with me and I got some cool shots:

This is a lovely random man who was playing his guitar on the foreshore – I have a lot of respect for people who play when no one is listening, it’s like they’re performing just for themselves. I particularly like the partial sea view you get looking past him to the beach.

This shot felt like a gateway to another world, I was stepping out of the shadows into the blinding light of the sun beyond, it was like there was no one else in the world but me to take in this view. It’s unfortunate that the two plastic bags on the right kind of spoil the utopian feeling but maybe that makes it more real – all this beauty around me but there is still that taint of stupid human beings that threaten to ruin it.

In this shot I particularly liked the striping of the colours; the green grass, the white sand, the blue sea. It was like the world had turned into a Rothko painting.

This one was actually taken on Monday. It was overcast and coming up to dusk and this guy was making sand art. There weren’t many people watching so I have to assume he was doing it for himself, like the guitarist from earlier. From here I could here the drums coming from further up the beach. It was amazing, I can’t wait to hear the drums at Confest!

This last picture I thought was some pretty excellent graf art. It’s on one of those outdoor showers on the foreshore. I don’t know what else to say about this except I really like the green/blue speckling they’ve done!

So I had a pretty fabulous day wandering around snapping pictures. I have another group of shots of a piece of sculpture that I will save for another day.