We got in late to our old campsite on a Saturday night and were amazed to find the place was packed with about 100 people! Australians really do use their own parks! Luckily we found a spot and got up early to get out of there. Unfortunately for Sam but luckily for me the swell was very small. The point at Seal Rocks was not breaking, but the beach was perfect for pushing me into tiny waves. I had a great time actually getting some waves without getting pummeled or exhausted and finally even stood up for a few seconds. Yes, I have to shamefacedly admit that up until this point I hadn't even managed that particular feat.
When we got out of the water, I saw a van with blue markings all over it that said RBT on the back. That's funny, I thought, another RBT van - wait a minute! That's our van! And somebody taped over the titties! Sure enough, it was. The person who had rented it after us had been embarrassed enough to tape over all the boobs with blue masking tape. Surprisingly, it was a single guy, Jen, from Maui. He had actually rented a different van which had broken down 10 km from the Wicked lot (gotta love Wicked vans) so they gave him the booby van. He was in Australia for 2 months so you couldn't really blame him for taping over the titties. Anyway Jen was super nice and we hung out with him for the rest of our stay at Seal Rocks. It turned out we weren't the only ones who recognized the van; there were some crazy dudes from Byron Bay there who gave poor Jen a lot of crap for taping over the boobs.
We spent the next few days just hanging out on the beach, occasionally driving into town to get ice or shop, surfing, cooking, surfing again...it was very relaxing. By Sunday noon the place had emptied out completely, and we had the campsite virtually to ourselves again, with only a few other campers arriving late on Sunday night. There was a really spectacular lightning storm that night, with pretty much continuous lightning and thunder. On Monday we made steaks with Jen and this time I successfully defended them from both kookaberras and monitor lizards. There were a lot of monitor lizards at the campground and since they made Sam scream like a little girl, it was up to me to protect the steaks.
Over the next few days I got lots of surf practice, and we hung out with some crazy older ladies surfing in kayaks (again, those Australians!) The only trouble was twice a day one of two different surf camp buses would appear. These were packed full of tourists with huge foam boards learning to surf and would completely take over a spot on the beach. They were nice though and mainly kept to themselves, not taking up too much of the waves, except on one day when there were really no waves to be had. We quickly learned to all get out of the water at 10am and 2pm so that they would think there were no waves and keep moving. Really they weren't too bad, though clearly they had irritated the locals in the past, because painted on a telephone pole on the road into town, in huge letters, was "Surf Camp Sucks" and on the other side "Really Sucks."
We would have liked to stay in Seal Rocks forever, but we really didn't get a lot of sympathy that we had to leave, since our next stop was New Zealand. So we headed back into Sydney where we stayed for one day and went to the zoo to finally see some koalas. The koalas were every bit as cute as people make them out to be, and sleep just as much too. We also got to see more kangaroos - in Australian zoos they don't even fence them off; they just stick them in a revolving door-bird-like enclosure with some of the other natives! Fortunately all the native highly poisonous snakes were in separate cages.
We had one last nice dinner with Roy, Kimberley, and Jenny. Then Sam dropped me off at the airport with all the surfboards and luggage. He returned the Wicked Van and caught the train back in no time, and we were off to New Zealand!
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