I left Byron just in time to avoid 'schoolies week': a week of invasion of 18 year olds who have just finished school and who flock to the Gold Coast and Byron Bay to get hopelessly drunk. yay! I had just enough time to try bodyboarding for the first time...SO MUCH FUNNNN!! though i had so many bruises after, and i sucked at it...but it was fun nonetheless!!!
I'm now just outside a place called Uki, population of 300 people, staying with the nicest couple in the world, who have a beautiful property in the countryside. Alpacas, chickens, pythons...you name it, there's everything out here!! i'm slowly overcoming my insecto/arachno-phobias because there is no escaping them!! It's so peaceful out here! So different from anything i've ever experienced. Every day at dusk thousands of bats (and not just any bats...bats the size of big seagulls) fly over the property...there's like 15 minutes of REALLY loud cicadas and huge bats...it makes you feel like something big is about to go down...or like batman is coming! Crazy stuff...i'll have to film it and post the video because it's really impossible to describe what it's like!
During the day i work for the people i'm staying with, helping them out in the small cinema they run in Murwillumbah. It's a lot of hard work but it's awesome! the hours are long but i get to learn about projectors, film distribution, how a business is run etc... AND i get to see movies for free haha :)
It's also a great way to meet people from all walks of life. I've had a lot of interesting conversations with some of the locals and they've all told me to go climb a mountain that's near here called Mt. Warning, which was named that way to serve as an indicator for ships that the barrier reef is up ahead on the coast. ...so tomorrow i'm gonna go climb it!! Apparently there are a lot of weird/mystical stories about Mt. Warning and a lot of people have told me it has some powerful energy due to the fact that it used to be a volcano and that it emanates a lot of ...something.i'm not sure how many different versions of the same story i've heard now:
"mt. warning has a big crystal inside it which is why a lot of people come to climb it"
"mt. warning emanates a lot of masculine energy so people with feminine enrgy tend to be attracted to it...hence all the artistic people living around here"
"mt. warning is like a magnet, so once you see it you are gonna want to come back and you won't know why"
"mt. warning emanates such powerful energy that it brings out who you really are. that's why some people get scared while climbing it and have to run away because they cannot handle being themselves"
the list could go on... but i guess i'll find out if the stories are true tomorrow morning! in any case, it looks beautiful!
Anyway, that's all for now. i'm gonna go try to negotiate with the big spider that hovers around the sink so that i can brush my teeth without having a heart attack.
ciao!
