This weekend was the best few days since I’ve been here. A group of nine of the people I am living with took a bus up to Lancelin (a little less than 2 hours north of the city) to get some surfing lessons. It was something I knew I wanted to do while I was here, and now it something that I definitely want to continue doing.

We left at 6 a.m. Saturday morning and hopped in an old beat up van for the drive up. Along the way we passed a pack of kangaroos on the side of the road and a lot of Australian-looking plants and trees. When we arrived our head instructor, Phil, hooked us up with boards, rashers, and some zinc oxide then we took about a 15 minute walk to where the best waves were. It took me a couple of wipe outs before I got the hang of it but I was able to get standing up pretty quickly and spent most of the day in the water.

In the afternoon we took a break for a barbie lunch then we hopped back in the vans for a quick trip to some nearby sand dunes. There we went sandboarding, kind of like snowboarding except without the chairlifts. It was a lot of fun and the sites from the top of the dunes were amazing.

A shot of me trying out the sandboard.

Hanging out at night was one of the best parts of the trip. My friends from school made up about half of the group and the rest were backpackers and travelers from all over the world. I was sitting at dinner with an American, a Chilean, an Irish girl, a German, and two Swiss girls. There were a few other people from Ireland and also a few from Liverpool along with us. One of the Irish girls had even been to the Sir Walter Raleigh, a hotel owned by my father’s family in County Cork. We stayed up until a little past midnight drinking and talking but everyone was pretty worn down from the long day and quickly fell asleep.

We slept outside under the stars in swags. Swags are basically a big canvas sack that you slip a sleeping bag in and lie down inside of. Bushmen who worked as traveling farmhands were often known as swaggers because that is where they slept. There were more stars in the sky there than I could have ever imagined so it was nice sleeping outside.

The second day was more surfing and more fun. The only problem is that all the fun comes with a price. I was pretty sore from being tossed around the day before and my hands were bleeding from blistered that had opened up after the first day, they are still pretty raw a few days later. But after a few minutes of getting back into the rhythm I was catching waves again. The weekend on the whole was a blast and I can’t wait to meet up with some of the friend I made and go surfing again.

Stopped off for a quick photo shoot on the way back to camp after a day of surfing.