I have tried to start this post about 5 different ways. I keep trying to be clever and funny, like “Today I learned that it’s really hard to get out of a hammock. I also learned that nobody wants to hear you complain about how hard it is to get out of a hammock.” Or I try to come up with some way to share how remarkable this place is, like “I saw a koala in the wild today. He was just chilling in a tree, eating some eucalyptus, and seemed really confused about why this pale monkey on the ground was jumping up and down and screeching excitedly.” But here’s the problem. Nothing does this place justice. I’m sorry, I’m probably going to get all high-flung and baroque and such, but I’m living in paradise, and it lends itself to high-flung and baroque and such.
I’m at a banana plantation in the hills outside of Mullumbimby, which is a tiny little hippy town outside of Byron Bay, which, if you remember, is a tiny little hippy town too, but more touristy, and closer to the ocean. Another girl and I (another Kate in fact, from the US) are sharing a flat underneath the farmer’s house. I could try to describe the view, but why bother? It looks like this:
We get to live here, and eat all sorts of delicious farm-fresh food, in exchange for a shockingly minimal amount of work. Don’t get me wrong, I have become a lazy city girl, so the four hours of work I put in today mulching and weeding under the just-unnecessarily-hot Australian sun knocked me on my butt, but I can still objectively say that I know I am not working hard enough to deserve this. There is a gorgeous outdoor shower in the middle of natural rainforest; even better, the water pressure is fantastic. There are huge screen doors on two walls of the flat, so we sleep with only these closed and get to hear all the crickets and birds and happy-hippy nature sounds of the day and night. The lighthouse in Byron Bay is visible enough to be awesome, but not visible enough to be sleep-disrupting. We’re going to bed around 10 and waking up to see sunrise every day (usually from the hammock, with a cup of coffee), as it creeps up over the ocean and streaks the valley below us with color. Sometimes, there’s rolling fog. Sometimes, there are sun showers. You can hate me now, I don’t blame you.
To balance it out though, allow me to say that there are spiders. Big ones, that hide in the banana plants and jump out at you when you’re not looking. There are also jumping ants that have a bite like a bee sting. And apparently there may be snakes, although I’m praying I never run into one and have to see whether common sense, which tells me to channel my inner tree and stay very still, or adrenaline, which tells me to channel Forrest Gump and run for the hills, wins. On the plus side, there are daddy long legs throughout our flat, and for the first time in my life, I don’t mind at all, because at least they aren’t fat and hairy and ginormous.
There are also magpies. I know I spend a perhaps inordinate amount of time talking about birds, but seriously, Australian birds are weird. These magpies look like crows that had a mishap with some white paint, and they sound a little bit like a scratched Devo record remixed by Skrillex. And they’re smart, you can see it in their beady little eyes. My first hour here, I was lying on the bed, reading, and the doors to the outside were open to let some air in, or something. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced up to see Mr Magpie walking through the bathroom like he owned the place, or at least like he was the estate agent thinking about putting it on the market. I think I said something super smart like, “Oh. Hi.” Mr Magpie turned, gave me a quick once over, shat on my floor, and hopped out the door. This pretty much sums up my continued interactions with these birds. Other Kate and I gave them little bits of our muesli on the first morning, and they now wait not-even-remotely-patiently outside the window for us at sunrise and hop up and down angrily on our patio table and chairs. One bit of oat, and they now think that we’re vending machines.
This obsession with the magpies speaks to a broader trend I’ve been noticing in the few days I’ve been here. Deprived of many of the standard stimuli (we have a tv, but I’m not convinced it works, and I’m avoiding the evils of the internet), I’ve started avidly watching insects and animals like I’m living in a cross between a Discovery Channel documentary and Real Housespiders of Hippyville. Other Kate and I watched this big spider that hangs out on our porch (a golden orb? I have no idea really, she’s pretty fat and funny colors) for almost an hour the other day as a male spider tried to work up the courage to mate with her. She ate him. It was awesome, and we narrated the whole thing from the spider’s perspective. I felt like David Attenborough. But I did have to wonder for a moment if I’m just living in the moment and becoming one with nature, or going a little batty. We’ve been burning a ton of incense and drinking “goon”, Australian for “boxed wine”, which I think is the only way to make boxed wine sound even less classy, so I may be losing some brain cells while I’m here.
Yet I’m ok sacrificing a few brain cells to know that a place like this still exists, where people just want to relax, and eat some good food, and take care of the earth and each other. I even went to a commune the other night. I truthfully had no idea such things were real. It was in the middle of the forest, and the people were friendly and kind and proud, and fed us homemade vegan pizzas while an uncountable amount of barefoot children cavorted around our ankles. Hippies are real; it isn’t just a fashion choice. So please bear with me if I become increasingly blissed out over the next week, I can only assume it will pass.
But for real, I saw a koala in the wild. It glared at me from its tree. If it’s still there tomorrow, I’ll name it and give it a role in my next great Mullumbimby animal soap opera.
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