I headed up to Mooloolaba on Queensland’s sunshine coast for my friends’ wedding. It seemed like bad timing, because there was a hurricane a couple of days before, so the beaches were closed at first, and the weather was grim. I was worried for a while that my flight would be cancelled – some guests who were arriving earlier suffered this fate.
My friends must have accrued some good karma or something, because after days of climate suspense their wedding was heralded by a perfect blue-sky afternoon.
The wedding was actually in Alexandra Headland, just north of Mooloolaba, where they’d hired a magazine-worthy house for the ceremony and reception. The views were sensational, while the possoms descending from the power lines kept guests amused at dusk.
I can see why so many people move to the Sunshine Coast. The surf is excellent, the food is good, the lush tropical environment is enchanting. Really, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. It was awesome.
My friend thought it would be entertaining to take me to a Norwegian nude beach. This was a bit of a misleading plan, because it was not much of a beach, and there were not many nudes. There were more surf life savers and bicycles than bathers, but that was okay by me.
Here I made the mistake of buying liquorice, despite my friend’s warnings. Unlike our soft and sweet liquorice, liquorice sold at Norwegian nudist beaches (and elsewhere in the country I’m told) is hard and salty. An acquired taste. I think of it as Scandinavian vegemite.
Ian and I deliberated over whether to relax on the Spanish coast, or make the effort to travel across the sea to Morocco. Morocco was ahead until it became clear that Tangier is considered an absolute mess, so if we were going to make the effort, we’d want to get down to Fez. This added a lot of extra travel time, so in the end we decided to make the most of the last of the Spanish sun and relax on the beach, rather than spend our days off in transit, with the odd awesome Moroccan experience as punctuation. I was also a bit worried about getting sick and missing the start of my flamenco dancing course the following Monday.
We ended up going all-out lazy tourist, staying in a resort on a beach near La Barrosa, just past Cadiz. We spent days mooching happily around our cardboard-cut-out apartment, travelling to a charming town called Conil de la Frontera when we craved Spanish culture. The resort-ville where we stayed, with a multitude of roundabouts and wide roads designed for cars not horses, made us realise we’re going to miss the closeness of Spanish life when we go back to Australia.
The beach, reputedly one of the best in Spain, also reminded me of Australia. Flanked by sand dunes marked for conservation, the beach stretched to the horizon, white sand nearly as soft as flour. Small, crisp waves rolled in. We bodysurfed contentedly. I could have been at home.
Biarritz has an amazing assortment of beaches. There’s the little swimming beach, tucked amongst columns and salt-sprayed restaurants. There’s the Grand Plage (pictured), indeed grand with its sweeping promenade, framed by a lighthouse and viewing platform. Then there’s the surf beach, where hundreds of longboarders descend to appreciate the vast lines of waves, rolling in one after the other like a conveyor belt.
I ached to surf, but given we only had an afternoon we settled on bodysurfing. This resulted in Ian getting his head surfed over in his determination to catch a particularly good wave that some surfers were also eyeing off, but after a year in Cambridge he can afford to lose a few brain cells.
Surf is of course variable, so perhaps we just caught the Biarritz surf beach on particularly good days. But I suspect the crisp, glassy curls that seem to fondle the surfers as they tiptoe towards the front of their boards are characteristic waves for Biarritz. For me, this is ideal surf.
I thought fondly of my South African longboard that sits neglected in my mum’s shed at home, too long to fit in cars for most surf trips in these days of fuel efficiency worries. I bought it from an English guy who was trading to a shortboard halfway through his round the world trip, who brought it into the surf shop I worked in as a teenager. Since then it’s had some traumatic experiences like being whipped in a Glenelg storm that landed it in board hospital, and being the subject of a custody battle with my ex boyfriend.
I vowed that, if I win the lottery (or perhaps get a good enough paying job down the track), I will buy a place in Biarritz and take my longboard there, where it can live amongst its kind and serve me well on my annual trips to France.
We arrived in Biarritz after an uneventful night in Bordeaux. The air smelt fresh like the sea. In comparison with the Cote d’Azur, I found le Pays Basque more laid back and less pretentious.
Biarritz is my kind of place. It’s a combination of the European sophistication I love about France, and Australia’s ‘life is good, why waste it inside?’ attitude. I feel at home here. I grew up by the beach, immersed in Australia’s surf culture, so Biarritz merges my positive memories of growing up with my fondness for European ideals.
We felt even more at home because France is hosting la coupe du monde de rugby, which by some twist of fate I worked as a reporter for in Australia in 2005. This means I have a passing interest in the sport, as opposed to the others played exclusively by guys, which I find more tedious than dealing with accountants.
There was some cultural mishmashing. I get all worked up about the UK’s disregard for the Pacific, so I found myself in a French bar eating Spanish Tapas, going for the Tongans versus the English. The UK has been good to me, but the Tongans are more worthy of support from Australia.
Perhaps it was because of the rugby or perhaps it’s just a welcoming region of France, but in Biarritz the locals were chatty. I asked a man to take a photo of Ian and I overlooking the bay, which led to a conversation that finished with our French photographer saying he was sorry to say it would be a final between France and England but he felt for us in our looming loss. He said this with a wincing, empathetic expression and his hand on his heart. I graciously thanked him for the photo and his condolences.
It was great to see another part of England. Great Yarmouth is one of the most deprived areas in the UK, despite (or perhaps caused by) having a vast beach and heavily developed foreshore, with gaming machines and fried food outlets galore. I thought Glenelg’s old Magic Mountain was hideous – that had nothing on the moulded foam monstrosities at Yarmouth.
Entrance to a club was included with our tournament pass, so we went clubbing on Saturday night – the place was huge despite the town’s small population – no doubt a relic from the time when Great Yarmouth was one of the UK’s posh beach destinations, before the advent of Ryanair made holidaying further afield accessible for the English masses.
Yarmouth has problems with crime, so when we left the club there were police everywhere, keeping an eye on the groups of youths waiting to get into places on the warm summer night. It was a contrast to Cambridge, where the biggest problems are bikes getting stolen and people trying to scale old buildings in ball gowns.
Despite Yarmouth’s problems, wandering away from the glittery promenade towards our camping ground there’s a spectacular, vacant beach flanked by sand dunes.
Though the beach is empty the ocean is not – about a dozen wind turbines spin in the sea. My main concern about wind farms is the noise, but offshore the swishing is muted by the lapping of the water on the sand. It was quite beautiful.
