byron bay weekend--sunday

this is the continuation from ystd. haha. still very tired, probably haven't slept enough yet. i need to start slping at like 10 pm every day because i feel like i can't think at work.

Tings I forgot to add to yesterday, at the national park, wayne first found a leech on his finger, and I saw a leech for the first time, it was still skinny and crawling like a caterpillar on his hand, because it hadn’t bitten into him yet and started sucking his blood. And I was like trying so hard to take a picture and my stupid camera REFUSED to cooperate and he was like saying to me ‘if it bites into me I will kill u’ cos the last time he was bitten by a leech he took hell of a long time to stop bleeding. So I ended up only getting a few blur pictures of that stupid leech. And after that I was a little paranoid and I kept looking all over myself and guess what. I DID find a leech. On my shoe. And this one was a little fatter than the other one, probably already sucked on some poor victim for a bit already before getting pulled out. and when we got back to the car, I was still feeling paranoid, and was like poking around my sock/shoe area, and tah dah, another one crawled onto my finger. I was like freaking out, trying to shake the gross thing off but that thing just held on to me tight and refused to let go and just kept crawling and crawling. I was so worried that it would chomp on me. Wayne helped me get that one off my finger, and we went into the car. And he was like ‘okay this place is a leech free zone.’ And we were like driving for like 1 minute.. when I saw ANOTHER leech on my shoe. I don’t know why they are so attracted to me. So we pulled over and he got the leech off my shoe. And from the national park, I got hell lots of mosquito bites, which are still itching today. And sunburnt ears which turn really red at times and the red fades away at other times. Very strange.

anw..throughout the night.. i don't know why but i kept waking up..didn't slp very well. perhaps the room smelt musty or i don't know why. and wayne said the fan above us looked like it would drop on us any minute and oh that was a comforting thought.. lol. and it was only in the morning where i started going into a deep sleep, but that's when we had to wake up =/ zhujun told me that in the middle of the night i put my hand on her face lol. i don't know what i was doing.

we had a muffin and coffee at a nice idyllic cafe place that was a bar at night...and then headed down to the beach and it was really pretty, feeling the breeze and seeing the waves come in and looking at happy dogs frolicking along the sand in the shallow wave-water. and if not for wayne pointing it out to use, i would not have noticed people sunbathing nude lol. he says that that's the culture of this place, very laid back, relaxed, people just go out on the beach nude.

we headed down to the byron bay markets next, these markets only happen once a month, on the first sunday of the month. the things sold there gave me the impression of being very hippie-ish. and we watched this family band play, it was really interesting, cos there was this boy using a violin bow to play a saw, and the different notes came out by him bending it, and the other instruments were a banjo, a double bass, a ukelele (i think) and a washing board!!! lol. the washing board was the other interesting thing. and then we walked further in and we saw this aboriginal guy play a didgeridoo. i didn't know the name of that instrument until wayne told us. it looked really hard on the lungs to play. we managed to find a sugar cane juice stall there too! made the same way as in singapore, with those juicing machines that just flattens the sugar cane. in the whole of QLD/NSW, this area is probably the only area u can find sugar cane juice cause there's lots of sugar cane fields/plantations close by, and we drove past that the day before (i can't remb if i mentioned in the prev entry lol.)

after that, we went down to the lighthouse. it was a trek up from the bottom, with many staircases. but the view along the way was well worth the trek up, looking at the waves crashing into huge rocks, and people surfing, and the coast far out. we also passed the eastern most point of australia, and we saw many schools of dolphins out riding the wave too! and sea turtles coming up to the water for air, which seemed like round specks from so high up. it was really cool, in california, i saw a school of seals, and here i managed to see schools of dolphins.

our last stop at byron was a small little bakery, where i bought an eclair which had such yummy chocolate cream inside and was like cold and nice which complemented with the hot day. all of us were burnt by the end of the day.. i think i got the worst burns. i didn't even know my ears were like really burnt and red until 3 people discovered it today. my forehead and scalp were burnt too. that's the result of being slipshod with sunblock. haha.

we left about 4 nsw time i think ..and then i thought we would be going home already, but wayne told us he'd be taking some detours along the way, instead of taking the usual highway. and like there were a few points where he just decided to anyhow drive, like just take random turns that he'd never turned before and drive on unknown roads and technically get lost. haha. but well roads always lead somewhere, and it was quite interesting, not knowing what to expect, knowing that the one driving the car doesn't where it leads to either...went past coolangatta, carbarita beach, currumbin beach, kingscliff, and ended up at burleigh heads.

we bought fresh and piping hot fish and chips from a fish and chips shop there, and settled down on a grass patch that was facing the sea and could see surfer's paradise on the coast in the distance. so as we sat there eating our fish and chips.. we watched the sun set and the sky grow dark over the coast, and the lights slowly going on in the skyscraper buildings at surfers. the setting of our dinner together with my really yummy and fresh fish and chips, made it one of the best dinners i'd ever had. the only comic relief was that the moment we sat down, all the seagulls started swooping down and cornering us. they were staring at us so intently you could almost hear them go 'mine mine mine mine mine' haha.

somehow, u associate certain songs with certain times. in california, the song i'd link to UCLA would be 'bruises'. the song i'd link to pacific highway and the beautiful scenery i saw when aunt linda brought us out, as i mentioned in my live journal, would be 'fernando'. this weekend too, left me with a song i'd always associate with australia if i ever listened to it in the future:

Forever Young
Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while
Heaven can wait we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power, but we never say never
Sitting in a sand-pit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men.

Can you imagine when this race is run
Turn our golden faces into the sun
Praising our leaders, we're getting in tune
The music's played by the mad men

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever, forever?
Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever, forever?

Some are like water, some are like the heat
Some are a melody, some are the beat
Sooner or later they all be gone
Why don't they stay young?

It's so hard to get old without a cause
I don't want to perish like a fading horse
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
and diamonds are forever

So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs that we forgot to play
So many dreams swinging out of the blue
We let them come true

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever, forever?
Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever, forever?

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever, forever?

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever, forever?