Byron Bay is Wicked and Finding Nemo
Being a science student at Edinburgh has meant I’ve never had reading week off so ‘mid-semester’, or ‘spring-break’ as all the American’s call it has been an amazing novelty to me! I did two trips; Firstly a road-trip to Byron Bay in ‘Wicked Campers’ and then a marine biology field trip to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef.
Six of us hired two ‘Wicked Campers’ www.wickedcampers.com.au for five days and drove down to Byron Bay, a cool hippy town on the coast a few hours south of Brisbane. It really was everything we expected; a totally chilled out town with beautiful beaches and national parks. It was my friends 21st birthday which was the main reason behind hiring the vans and everything about it was epic!
The Wicked Vans fit three people in the front when you’re driving and the back has a table and seating during the day and turns into a massive bed at night. They’re pimped out, covered in graffiti and each one has a totally different design; we had ‘BB King’ :
which was sooooo random but the design was really cool haha! We bought Walkie Talkies to communicate between vans which came in really useful when we were navigating our way around and to play games between vans on the freeway.
The road trip itself was so much fun and we arrived at night and ended up camping on a cliff-face looking out onto the bay on the first night. We pretty much chilled out on the amazing beaches all day, went surfing, cooked on the beachside BBQs (a brilliant feature of Aussie beaches), and then drank and socialised round our cooking-stove-fire at night. We stayed in a campsite for two nights so we could get hot water and other than that parked on the cliff-face under the stars. The whole trip was amazing … it was really cool to cook for ourselves and have the freedom of having a car. The novelty provided endless amusement and luckily they were really easy to drive. There was a surprising amount of space in the back but it got so incredibly hot in the mornings and forced us to wake up at 8am everyday due to the immense heat inside the vans!
I can’t really get over how much fun we had … it was really cheap too. It cost about £70 per person for 5 days in the vans and then about another £40 for petrol, food and campsites. Staying in hostels would have been at least £10-£15 a night and then we would have had to pay quite a bit to get there and wouldn’t have been able to get to the good beaches without a car. Here's a picture of our favourite beach where we spent most of our time:
The comedy the vans provided made it money well spent without a doubt- I can’t wait for the next roadtrip!
The second part of my mid-semester was a 5 day field-trip to ‘Heron Island’, a tiny island on the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. The island is soooo small, you can walk round the circumference in 20 minutes! It was really stunning – the water was crystal clear, a hundred shades of blue with white sands. There’s only a research centre and a 5-star resort on the island so it’s really empty and it really felt like we were on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, especially because there was no mobile phone reception! This is me jumping about:
Luckily we didn’t have to do that much research, the course is a bit of a joke to be honest – it’s full of International Students who want to do this field trip. There’s not even one Australian in the class. We did a project on damsel fish and their behavioural responses when we placed a mirror in front of their coral home. We were trying to see if they attacked their reflection in the mirror (indicating strong territorial behaviour) or whether they didn’t care at all. It was pretty fun snorkelling around and duck diving to record data, especially since some of the fish went mental and repeatedly attacked the mirror.
Apart from that, we had a lot of free time to chill out on our deserted island and snorkel. The research station organised boats to take us out to some great reef areas and we snorkelled with sharks, stingrays, masssssssive turtles and thousands of fish. I was pretty happy because I found Nemo living in his anemone with his dad. There were some really impressive coral formations and really beautiful fish. We saw lots of sharks – white tips, black tips, reef sharks, carpet sharks and one of the groups snorkelled above a tiger shark, the most aggressive shark predator! Our tutors said they’d never seen one before so they were really lucky/unlucky depending on the way you look at it! It was pretty crazy because I started craving shark sightings by the end of it!
They arranged a night snorkel for us too which was really incredible. We went out in groups of 8 with torches. It was like a rave out in the ocean because we all had glow sticks attached to our snorkels so they could keep track of us! The water wasn’t that cold and it was amazing being under the stars – which were out of this world by the way. It was pretty scary at night and we saw a carpet shark camouflaged against a boat wreck which was terrifying because it eyes glowed and you could see it’s hooked teeth! We saw some absolutely huge turtles too which were amazing. On the last day I got up at 5am for the sunrise and went for an early morning snorkel which was the most incredible one of the week. The water was totally still and there were only five of us in the water so the fish were really chilled out and there were loads of them swimming about. When the light hit the water the colours were amazing and it was gorgeous.
The evenings were fun-filled with loads of beach parties and drinking games. It was cool to meet new people from all over the world and I made some really good friends. The middle of the island was one big tropical forest so we would go for late night walks on the trails and get freaked out by the immense numbers of birds around the place.
All in all, the past 10 days have really been immense. This country has so much to offer, it’s great to explore without time constraints. Despite having the best time, it was really nice to come back to college – I was starting to miss everyone! This week filled with far to much work – I have two assignments and one exam. Better get started!
