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2004 Journey Australia Erik's Travels

The End of my Australia adventure…

The last week of my time in Australia was spent in Byron Bay attending the Blues and Roots Music Festival over Easter weekend. It was a five day music festival with bands starting around noon and ending around 1am every day except for the last night which ended about 11pm.

My new camera broke during my Fraser Island excursion. The lens got bent somehow, I think during one of the big bumps we had in the car. Anywho, I took it back to K-Mart as I had only bought it three weeks previous. The guy there looked at it and told me the lens was broken and that they could send it in to get it fixed. I told him that I was leaving the country next week and he said that it takes two weeks to four months to get them fixed and it would probably cost me around A$200-300. I asked him if he could just swap me for a new one because I had barley used it and I needed to get it fixed before I left. He was kind of a asshole and said that all he could do was send it in and it would take two weeks to four months. He said that they could only swap items if they were for under A$100 or purchased in the last two weeks. As he was saying this I noticed that the camera was now on sale for A$300, and I had paid A$320 for it. So I kindly asked him if he could at least refund me the A$20 and I would deal with fixing the camera on my own. He called his manager and asked her and she said ok. Since I paid for it via credit card they had to refund it and then charge me for a new one at the new price and when it was all said and done I had a receipt saying that I had bought a camera that day.

So the next morning I went to a different K-Mart and I got a really nice lady and I asked her to take a look at my camera because I had just bought it and could not figure out how to make it work correctly. She took one look at it and could tell that it wasn´t working properly. They were all out of that camera at that store so she apologized and said all she could do was refund my money. I said I could live with that, got refunded and had my mom buy me the same camera at home for US$180 and send it over to me with Thomas. So it all worked out good in the end, except I didn´t get any photos of the Blues Fest.

I camped with Pete and his childhood friend from ND Drew and his girlfriend. The camping was ok but it turns out that the “official campground” was on the other side of town from the concert and it was A$25 a night each so in retrospect I think we would have been better off (and dryer) staying in a hostel in town. But it was fun anyways. The artist I wanted to see the most was Xavier Rudd who played two nights and ended up joining other bands on stage quite a few times. He is an Australian musician I discovered after arriving in Australia and he plays the didgeridoo, guitar and a few other instruments.

After the concert was over we drove straight through to Sydney getting in around 11pm. It was Pete´s 25th birthday so he and I went out to the Emperor Pub in King’s Cross near where we were staying and had a few beers. Then Pete & company left insanely early the next morning (which for some reason the wake up involved Pete getting water thrown on him) and I left the hostel around 10am and had to get straight to the airport so I never got a chance to check out Sydney.

When I got to Los Angeles I had to wait the whole day for my flight to Santiago and when I went to check in I found out that the flight was canceled due to mechanical problems and I would have to wait until the next day. But the airline put me up in the Embassy Suites hotel so I got a chance to rest up and do my laundry so it turned out ok.