Oz part 2

After our epic two days of bus travel, we staggered off the bus in Byron Bay at 7pm on Saturday 31st, Halloween night... and also a long weekend in Oz because of the Melbourne Cup. This was bad news for us - all of the hostels were full, and the streets were full of drunken/crazy revellers. We managed to get the last two beds in a four person dorm in the biggest and potentially most expensive hostel in the town - Nomads. Beggars couldn't be choosers, but it hurt to be paying 80 oz dollars a night (46 quid each) for dorm accommodation that would have cost 4 quid a night in other parts of the world. Not a great start after our spending spree in Melbourne... and our first exposure to dorm living. After the exhausting journey and stress about budgets, it was feeling like a lot of hard work. We agreed to have a big planning session the following morning so we could try and get things back on course.

This was our first experience of dorm living and - based on the unholy menagerie we'd seen outside - were a little apprehensive about who/what we'd be sharing with. Thankfully our only room mate turned out to be a really lovely Australia girl called Erin (there was another girl there on the first night, but she seemed even more unhappy to be in a dorm and stormed out tearfully the following morning. Hope it wasn't my snoring :/) It was definitely a relief for us both to be sharing with someone nice, phew!

The next day was spent online doing the budget and scheming... but not before we took a walk along the beach to check out the surfing action.



We'd not planned anything for New Zealand and the US, and we were starting to realise we'd need to work it all out to see if we had enough cash to last us. The budget spreadsheet quickly spiralled out to epic proportions and it turned out we were well over a grand over budget already. Even if we trimmed out everything like drinking and eating out (this is supposed to be a holiday! :p) we'd still never make it. It was becoming clear we'd need to shorten the trip or we'd be running out of cash a month too soon.

So I phoned the airlines to check that we can change our flight dates - this being on the key things you get on your around the world ticket. And also as we'd travelled under our own steam between Melbourne and Sydney, we thought it would be polite to let them know we wouldn't be making it. But shockingly the lady at Quantas tells me that this will incur the dreaded "re-routing fee". (This is some bureaucratic nonsense that means we have to pay 300 US dollars for them to re-issue the ticket... which I'm sure in this day and age requires them to click a couple of mouse buttons!)

Needless to say I argued quite irately that a cancellation is clearly not a route change, we were still going exactly the same way around the world, and they'd be able to sell those seats to someone else and get paid again for them (we don't get refunds as we don't pay for the individual tickets.) But she was having none of this, and then dropped the bombshell that if we didn't a) complete the re-routing, or b) get all the way back to Melbourne at get on the flight, the rest of our tickets would be automatically cancelled. Leaving us stranded in Australia. Arrrrg!

We hadn't even thought to check this, if it wasn't for the budget rethink we'd never had called the airline and never found out about it until we tried to get our flight to New Zealand. Close call.

Anyway we had two days to complete the re-route, and come up with the new dates for the flights. This was hard enough to come up with back in London with the travel agent in front of us, let alone in the middle of Australia on the floor of a dorm with flakey wifi. We didn't want to waste the entire day, so we headed out to relax on the beach for the afternoon whilst we both contemplated what we thought we should do for the rest of the trip. The beach is really amazing, it goes on for miles and the scenery was just what we needed to relax a bit.



That night we went out to a bar on the beach and had some drinks with Erin, which was a great help to forget about the planning stress! The next day Alex went out to look around the market, which had loads of hippy clothes, cheap books and food - a lot like the stalls at a music festival back home. Byron Bay tries to cultivate that hippy, alternative therapy, artsy feeling but at the same time has given in to money a long time ago - we splashed out on breakfast to cheer ourselves up, and ended up spending a tenner on a fry up and 6 pounds on muesli with yoghurt! This was the last straw, from this point on it was supermarket food cooked in the hostel kitchens.

I was determined that we sort out every thing we could in advance, so we went on a mad frenzy of bookings. We sorted out an over night trip to Fraser Island, and a two night stop at Magnetic Island to complete our set of destinations up the east coast. Next came the bus connections for the remaining three journeys, followed by hostels at each destination... finally the plan was starting to come together, but bloody hell was it hard work. And we hadn't even sorted out the reroute, as the lady we spoke to at British Airways said they needed 24 hours to "complete a manual calculation in their back-office" in order to work out the exact charges... it was starting to get silly at this point. Manual calculation?!

It was our last night in Byron, and Erin had suggested we have a barbie in the courtyard of the hostel. I might have been moaning about how expensive it was for a dorm room, but the place was definitely well equipped. We hit the supermarket (bizarrely the local is a branch of Woolworths, who seem to be fairing a lot better than their counterpart back home) and came out with a bargain basement feast of burgers and sausages. We headed back an I did the honours on the gas BBQ:



This was my first effort on a gas barbie, and it wasn't quite the same as a proper charcoal job, but it was a great way to spend our last night and was a bargain to boot, happy days.



The following morning we were back on the dreaded Greyhound at the crack of dawn - heading north to Hervey Bay, and from there to our two day trip around Fraser Island... somehow having to find some time along the way to call British Airways and sort out the re-route, before the deadline the following morning.

Did we make it? Will we be stuck in Australia indefinitely (hardly the worst result in the world :p)? Sadly we've run out of internet time right now so we'll have to tell the rest of the tale next time...