Soooooo I am back in civilization. I did have a brief stop in Sydey, but other than that, it has been the woods, beaches, mountains, highways, and backroads for the past 5 days: I have been sleeping in my car in beach parking lots, on top of cliffs, in random neighborhoods, and somewhere in the mountains.
I was in Brisbane until Tuesday, when I finally got my car (’93 Ford Falcon Wagon), and took off. I got down to Surfer’s Paradise on Tuesday evening, and had a look around before parking on a dead end road with a beach access and going to sleep in my car. Wednesday morning I was up for a beautiful Gold Coast sunrise, then went down to Burleigh Heads, the famous right point break, to check the surf. It was pumping 8-12 foot faces with bigger sets. As soon as the surf shop opened at 7 am, I grabbed a used surfboard (6’3” Bourton squash thruster for medium-sized surf, if you really want to know), drove back to Burleigh, and walked out to paddle out from the rocks. I didn’t have a string to connect my leash to my board, so I ripped the collar out of an old white t-shirt I had and used that instead (this is important later).
I spent Wednesday night in the car outside some apartments near Snapper Rocks, the head of superbank, one of the longest waves in the world. I found that if I park facing uphill, the back seat makes a pretty comfortable little “v” to lie down in.
On Thursday I paddled out before sunrise to the longest and probably some of the biggest waves I’ve ever surfed. On my second wave, that cheap move I had pulled by using a t-shirt collar to attach my leash came back to bite me. I broke my leash dropping into a double-overhead set right by the rocks, where the wave breaks extremely hard. I got thrashed around like a rag doll by the wave I wiped out on, and the next five waves as well. I found myself washed a couple hundred feet inside of where I had started, but it was still about a hundred-fifty yard paddle to reach my board where it washed up on shore (luckily, not on the rocky part of shore). I found a new piece of string, put my leash back on the board, and paddled back out. The water there was perfectly blue and pretty clear. I caught some waves that ran from Snapper Rocks all the way through Rainbow Bay to the next point break, Greenmount, with rides of about 35-45 seconds, and after each one it was a six-minute walk back up the beach to where I started off.
By the time I left Snapper, I counted between 160 and 170 people in the water. They just kept coming. My last wave I couldn’t even carve on. I just had to weave my way through the crowd. I wasn’t surprised at the number of people I saw with banged-up boards from hitting other people while surfing.
I got in the falcon and drove south for a while to Byron Bay, and then to Lennox Head, another right point break, where I again had some of the best waves I’d ever surfed, or at least some of the heaviest. The swell was building that afternoon, but the wind made the waves a little choppy. The wave breaks a really long way, extremely close to the rocky shoreline (Trey and Dad, think Punta Roca with sets of double-overhead plus and that’s about what it was like). I sliced myself pretty badly on the rocks getting out of the water, but at least my board is all right…
I met my first American friend in Australia there, a Rhode Islander named Cliff. When I drove south that afternoon, he came down to the next surf spot… Angourie.
I think I found heaven. Angourie is definitely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. The pictures I took don’t do it justice at all, but they do give a little idea. A little rocky headland juts out into the ocean, with beautiful sandy beaches on either side connecting it to the mainland, soft grass growing all over it, and a staggeringly gorgeous coastline both North and South. The parking lot sits on the cliff a couple hundred feet above, and from it you can see the right point-break on the north side of the headland, the left point-break on the south side, a beachbreak just down from the left, and right around the corner there is a freshwater pool with some rocks to jump off of. The sunset over the hills of the North Coast on Thursday night was absolutely amazing.
Cliff was sleeping in his car as well, so we hung out at Angourie that night, watching a light show: The stars were incredible. It’s way out in the middle of nowhere, overlooking a national park (I should add that I almost hit a wallaby while driving there that evening), so the milky way stretched all the way across the sky. Out offshore a iolent thunderstorm raged, so the lightning and the stars alternated capturing our attention.
I think I’ve had a couple of adventures before, but aside from that accident in October, I’ve never had an adrenaline rush like I had for the 2 ½ hours I surfed on Friday morning. To paddle out at Angourie, you either have to go from the beach and duck-dive the waves (which were past double overhead, even on the inside), or you go down and jump off a rock and paddle a few yards over to the break. I elected for the second option after watching one local paddle out there. Then the local guy in front of me timed the jump wrong, got caught by a wave, and washed over the rock slab and into the boulders below where I stood, slicing his leg and punching a hole in his board. I began to second-guess myself, but the surf was too good to resist. A flat spell came and the guy started yelling at me to go if I was going to, so I waded out into the water as fast as I could, jumped off the rock slab (which is about waist deep), and paddled like I’ve never paddled before.
The first goal is to get around the first set of rocks (about 6 feet to the left of where you jump) before the first wave hits you. If you don’t make it, you’re pretty much screwed. No other way to put it. I made it around this first set, but then was confronted by the next goal: to make it out before a set came and washed me into the rest of the boulders, which were about 30 feet inside of me. If a set wave had come, I don’t know what would have happened once I was off the slab. There was no going back. I ducked under the waves that were still crashing onto the rocks beside me (during the lull, there were only 8-foot faces. Not even faces, really, but heaving barrels onto the rocks) and gunned it for the outside. With my adrenaline pumping, I made it out just before a set with 20-foot faces crashed down the point, starting off with a heaving barrel on the rock slab I had jumped off of and then peeling down the point.
When you’re surfing waves that big and heavy, you just have to make a decision, paddle as hard as you can, and go for it. There is no backing out at the last second unless you want to get sucked over with the wave onto the rocks. So you just have to put the rocks and wipe-outs out of your mind and don’t look back. I caught a couple of the smaller sets, which were about double-overhead, before working my way up to the big ones. I think each progressive wave I surfed for the first hour was the most scared I’ve ever been (besides during my car accident). Even after the paddle out, my adrenaline started going harder as I free-fell down the biggest waves I’ve ever surfed, making some drops that I’d guess were triple overhead and very steep.
Big swells move so fast that by the time you get to the bottom of the wave, you have already traveled about 50 yards. After just two carves on a wave, I was looking at about a 150-yard paddle back to the peak. The swell peaked early in the morning with some set waves that the locals described as “10-footers”, meaning a wave face of over 20 feet. I think I caught a couple that big…
Cliff had come out too, though he came pretty close to getting washed onto the rocks. Eventually we were the only two out as the locals all left for work or got caught inside by a set and elected not to paddle back out. Cliff got out of the water and I caught another big wave in to the beach. By the time we got out, the swell was starting to back off quite a bit, but there were still some solid waves. We went and jumped off the rocks into the freshwater pool for a swim before heading our separate ways. He drove north back to his school on the Gold Coast, and I headed south along the Pacific highway toward Sydney.
The countryside was incredible. I drove down a side-road about two hours north of Sydney and surfed a spot called seal rocks. It was small, only a little overhead, but the waves were perfect and the water was so clear that I could see fish on the bottom 10 feet below just like they were right beneath my fingertips. Friday night I drove down to Newcastle, hung out around the town for a while, called my parents, and then drove about halfway to Sydney, finding a (rather sketchy) neighborhood, setting up my towels and surfboard in the car to block out the streetlights, and falling asleep.
Saturday morning I woke at 6 to rain pattering on the roof of the falcon. I drove through the rain to Sydney, finding myself lost on the crazy roads through the city before finding my way down to park somewhat close to the opera house. I took some pictures, and explored a little of the botanical gardens and the government house. I felt a little crowded around all of the tourists, so I got in my car and found my way down to the highway that headed southwest, toward Melbourne.
I was pretty broken up after Dad told me about Jessica Pety the night before. I cried a lot as I drove. I kept thinking about sitting in the front row at the church in travelers rest three weeks ago and watching her talk about her vision with World Harvest Mission. I’m very thankful that I got to spend some time with her when I went to see Carolyn last month. Even though I didn’t get to see her that often, it was a blessing just to know such a gracious, godly young lady. I was so tired and in shock when Dad told me on Friday night that I guess it didn’t even really hit me until I was alone on the road with my thoughts on Saturday. I’ll be praying for you guys at Furman, and Carolyn, I’m really sorry I’m not at home so I can call and talk to you. I wish I could. I’ll definitely try soon.
I drove all through the middle of the day, through lots of rain and eventually found the sun mid-afternoon in the highlands north of Mt. Kosciusko. I drove down the freeway without a plan until I saw a sign for the Snowy Mountain Highway, so I randomly decided to check it out. After all, I didn’t have to be in Melbourne yet.
The highway became a 2-lane road barely wide enough for two vehicles, so it’s lucky that there wasn’t much traffic (I think I saw about 10 cars in an hour). There were a couple fun little one-way bridges over rushing streams. The speed limit (not on the bridges) was 100 km/h, which meant that passing a vehicle going in the opposite direction was a little scary because the lanes were so tight.
The road wound up into the mountains, through passes, past fields where cows and sheep grazed, above vineyards, between farms. In a couple of the fields there were huge flocks of large white wild cockatoos. I went to a town called Tumbarumba just because the name is sooooo cool. I bought some groceries, meaning a can of pineapple, strawberry jelly, and water, and kept driving down the long road. When evening fell I was starting to scope out places to spend the night. I saw a sign for a lookout and drove 2 kms up a dirt road to the top of a hill as it grew dark. I saw my first kangaroo right before the turnoff, which made me happy because I had been seeing kangaroo crossing signs for the past 4 hours.
At the top of the hill was a field, and in a little clearing beside the field stood a shelter with three walls, a concrete floor, and a fireplace. I pulled out my flashlight and gathered some wood, finding a couple of good thick logs to burn. I started a fire, and used the can from the pineapple to boil water so I could eat some of the instant noodles I had bought back on the Gold Coast. I was proud of my warm fire, especially as temperatures dropped down into the low 40’s Fahrenheit in the darkness. I had a hot dinner, waited till the fire had all but died, looked up into the crystal-clear sky at the stars twinkling above (more stars than I have seen in a long time, because I was so far from any town), and climbed into the car to sleep. I have always had quite an imagination, so sleeping alone in the woods 70 kms from the closest town made me imagine some funny sounds. But I slept all right.
It got so cold in the night that even though I was sleeping in my sweatshirt, I had to put my extra jacket, pants, and shoes and socks back on. I pulled a beanie over my head, but even so I woke at 5 a.m. shivering uncontrollably. The towels were not much help, since I had packed thin ones to keep down my backpack’s weight.
So I got up and searched around in the dark for a little more firewood. I found some grass and a couple logs, and I managed to start up a fire from the embers of the one that had gone out 7 hours before, not even having to use my lighter. That’s survival skills right there. It started getting light and I cooked myself some toast on the fire, then watched one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen over the peaks to the east.
I drove to Melbourne, and found Monash University, and now I actually have a bed to sleep in. But the adventures are far from over. I’ve only been in Australia for 12 days.
