Sunday 7th January – Relaxing in Byron and attack of the blue bottles!

We took it easy this morning to give the hangovers time to pass before heading to the beach. On the way we stopped at the VC and booked into surf school for tomorrow morning at 815am with ‘Stoked’. Well, if you’re going to try learning to surf anywhere then there can’t be many better places than Byron.

It was breezy at the beach but not as bad as at it had been at Surfers.  There was another issue – blue stingers, or blue-bottle jellyfish.  There were hundreds of the small things, all along the high tide line, washed up.  I went for a dip any way, no problem and a lovely temperature.  Then I decided to take a walk along the beach.  It was then that a really long tentacle from one of the jellyfish caught around my right ankle and I realised I’d been stung.  It was by no means excruciating, just irritating, like multiple nettle stings that didn’t stop stinging for about an hour. The lifeguards on duty were telling people with young children to stay out of the water completely as they’d be affected by the stings worse and they’d already had 50 people stung today, before me.

We don’t seem to be doing well on beaches at the moment! My story put Simon off the sea altogether, so we agreed to head back to the caravan park which had a pool.  We enjoyed a couple of hours relaxing before freshening up and taking ‘the Punk’ for a drive to Byron Bay lighthouse (right) for sunset and to see the easternmost point of Australia’s mainland.  It was a bun-fight to get parked up there, but we managed in the end.  

The view back to the mainland showing beaches on both sides of the peninsula

There'a a sign so it's official!

We didn’t want to repeat last night’s antics before an early start tomorrow and I always believe that you can’t recreate a good night out on purpose, they happen by chance.