Byron Bay

So.  After paying a visit to the hostel I'd been staying in without Frenchie to pick up the driving license I'd left there (oops!), we climbed into our new home for five days, and started driving down the Pacific Highway, some of which was very pretty, and some of which looked... y'know... like motorway.  I did some pretty awesome driving, and we arrived in Byron Bay, the town Frenchie lived, surfed and picked peaches in a long, long time ago when he was still young (a long time ago).

Here are some photos of the scene we were greeted with at our campsite to make you sick with jealousy (sorry, but it has to be done):

So the evening of Australian Roadtrip Day 1 (ARD1) was spent walking romantically on the beach, bickering romantically about whether we had driven too far to the nearest supermarket, being romantically misdirected by the GPS to the nearest supermarket and driving down scary roads in the dark, sharing a romantic barbecue meal and stargazing romantically on the beach before bedtime.  Quite romantic.

After all that romance crap got boring, I remembered that I had an agenda for this trip, which is basically a list of all of the most expensive things you can do in Australia, like diving the Great Barrier Reef for a million, trillion dollars.  One of them was to go whale watching, which I thought I could do further south, but apparently Eden in NSW is so two months ago for humpback whales, and they're now hanging out in Byron Bay.  How convenient, as we were planning to stay there for two nights!

Frenchie hates anything that makes him feel like a tourist, and if he'd had his way, he would have built his own raft from driftwood, learnt to communicate with dolphins, befriended them and asked them to tow him out to where the whales were taking part in their annual 'Breach near a Beach' festival, with the most spectacular jumps of the whole season on display for just Frenchie and I.  Frenchie would also have packed chocolate mousse, long island ice teas and candlelight and kidnapped a young, blonde Australian cocktail barman, just a little less good looking than him to surf behind the raft and accompany us to serve us all evening.

The French normally look this unimpressed, right?

Alas, we had to do things my way which involved fluorescent jackets that said TOURIST on the back, lots of money, and someone organising us and informing us how to embark and disembark a small dinghy.  He was far from impressed.

However, this didn't last long, as he was delighted to discover that I get quite seasick, and this kept him greatly amused for the majority of the trip.  He was actually very sweet to me, but his spirits did perk up suddenly when I was directed to the back of the boat by the captain and handed a bright yellow bucket.

In spite of my sea sickness, I was the first to spot a whale spray and shouted and pointed excitedly, remembered myself, cleared my throat and tried to look cool (still clasping the yellow bucket) and then said, 'I mean - I think I may have seen something over there.'

Turns out there was something, but it was shy, and it disappeared quite quickly, so we raced around to a few other spots until I was getting a bit worried, especially when the thing that caught Frenchie's attention was a container ship on the horizon, which was owned by a French-Lebanese company, and may or may not have been holding his recent shipment of crocodile BORING.

Luckily, though, the whales thought the container ship was quite interesting as well, so we whizzed over, with our resident Seagull Woman squawking 'there's one!  There's one!' and Frenchie rolling his eyes at each of her simpleton tourist outbursts.  Once we got there the whales were very, very awesome and not only did they wave their tails at us, and get super close to the boat and swim underneath and around, and smack their fins on the surface, they also breached (jumped really far out of the water like on David Attenburgh) ten to twelve times, which was super, super, super cool and even Frenchie had to admit that it was incredible, especially when they hit the water again and go kashploom!smack! like that.  Cool.  Have some photos that we've just discovered Frenchie did manage to take before his camera battery declared it was 'exhausted'.

Wow.