Sorry for the Group Email

Here’s the surprising thing about Australia: the south east is exactly like the Loiré Valley. Well, not exactly the same. Australia has fewer baguettes and you drive on the left, but Australian scenery is stunning. Route one winds its way through green hills amid sweeping bends, and as we worked our way up 400 kilometres of coastline, I was struck with the following thought: Australia has some stunning bridges.

Every few kilometers we would soar over a wide creek or river, across the finest steelwork I’ve ever seen. It’s as if the Sydney Harbour Bridge had a million children and sent them to give motorists a hand all over Australia’s exceedingly handsome countryside.

And it really is handsome. I had imagined that Australia would be all dusty outhouses (dunnies, if you will) and thousand-mile stretches of red, uninhabited highway. The reality was rolling hills and persistent light traffic. If your car broke down out here it seemed more likely that we’d be offered a bottle of water and the use of a mobile phone to call a repair crew than a lingering, lonely, dusty death.

Either that or you’d be crushed by a giant, fibreglass replica of something. Australians, it seems, love big things. They’re scattered up the main highways, and the exact subject of gigantic proportions doesn’t seem to matter much, as long as it’s outsized. We stopped, for instance, at the Big Banana, which is a not-incredibly-big-but-still-larger-than-a-hatchback reproduction. Incredibly, it was full of people, most of whom were behaving as if this was the highlight of their holiday. I don’t know, maybe it was. There was a museum attached dedicated, yes, to the history of bananas, and if you walked through the Big Banana itself – I know! – you could read little factoids about the fruit. Then, when you were nearly finished, you could stop in the restaurant and actually eat one of the things. We opted for a frozen, chocolate-covered ‘nana, of which there are no pictures because it was almost impossibly phallic. Certainly, it was hard to eat with a straight face. It was also disgusting.

A few hundred kilometers later we saw a giant shrimp preening atop a restaurant and stopped diligently. I have to confess I don’t really understand. Sure, it was a Big Shrimp and I’m sure the fibreglass artist who sculpted it is proud, but what really is the point? As we pulled out of the carpark I felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Since that morning we’d been on the road for five hours and passed two signs to Aboriginal museums along the side of the road, but instead of drinking in Australia’s long and tragic native civilisation, we’d stopped to look at a giant curved fruit and an antennae-sporting sea bug.

We arrived in Byron Bay as the light was fading, passing a parade of shops selling tourist and hippy nick-nacks and pulled into a beautiful campsite. At $30 a night it was on Byron’s cheaper side – we were quoted $45 by another, surprisingly run-down place across town – but it was beautiful. The lawns were almost manicured and we had the tent up under a tree in no time.

Camping in Australia is almost endlessly civilized. That’s because Australians and backpackers do an awful lot of it, and so the owners of campsite take care of their temporary charges. It’s very unusual for a campsite not to have a fully gassed-up kitchen, generally with a gas burner and a hot-plate barbecue. Australians, true to stereotype, love barbecues. Give an Australian camper the option of barbecuing a steak and saving, I don’t know, his mother, and there’ll be a lot of blinking and deliberation before he whips out the tenderiser.

This came as a pleasant surprise to me. I spent my childhood in a succession of campsites across the south of England, and at times it seemed there was a kind of competition to see who could provide the worst experience for the highest price. The holidays themselves, I should stress, were bliss in themselves, but there was always a pang of regret as we reached the end of torturing our parents for the day and headed back to the campsite. Cookers are never provided, which means my mum would cater for all five of us using a single gas cooker.

But even by Australia’s high standards, Glen Villas in Byron Bay was a beaut. Fridges, a TV and wireless internet capped the manicured lawns. It also had our dopplegangers: Chris and Lisa were staying in Byron Bay for the evening, having travelled through the US and South America and northern Australia. After that they were heading to south-east Asia. It was basically our trip in reverse: they even had a blog, the link to which I’ve rather embarrassingly lost.

Besides the beach, there isn’t much to actually do in Byron Bay, besides wander about and poke around the shops, which specialised in hippy accoutrements: beads, necklaces and the such. We sat around, read our books, and began to recover from a full three months of actually working.

After two nights we were done: it’s 2,500km from Sydney to Cairns and we needed to get moving. We headed to Brisbane. We could have visited Surfers Paradise, but I couldn’t face using [sic] every time I wrote it. There should an apostrophe in there, surely?

Dave is rested.