Tim and I step onto an empty, rainbow-hued school bus. Empty, aside from a scrawny South African who welcomes us warmly and turns up the volume on his Bob Marley-centric soundtrack.
The bus fills quickly with twenty-something backpackers. If I hadn’t come across many of my fellow North American travellers so far on my journey through Australia, here is where we would come together. The bus chugs along through the center and then the outskirts of Byron Bay—Australia’s east-coast town for surfers and hippies in New South Wales.
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