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My stay in Byron Bay is a very pleasant experience. I am awoken every morning by my neighbours on the lake island - sometimes that's birds singing, on other occasions it's a chav bellowing some kind of bollocks like 'Come on Steve, let's get by that fucking pool!'

I do little of any great note while I'm here other than enjoy the surroundings, eat lots of nice food and read books. Oh I may have had the odd cheeky beer or two as well.

Byron is near the border with Queensland and roughly 750km north of Sydney. It's still in New South Wales, but this is a very different part of Australia to the sprawling suburbs of the state capital.

On Thursday I hired a car and drove up the coast a bit further. Some of the beaches are jaw droppingly gorgeous. It's funny in a way, I was sightly worried the sight of another stunning stretch of golden sand might start to wear off after a bit. It is true that these sights do mean more when you're on a two week holiday, when you can sense how the moment is only temporary and how good it feels to contrast it with the banality of home. But I'm still loving it...

I also drive up to Brisbane, Australia's third largest city with a population of 1.5 million. I don't know if it was the fact this place has a suburb called Ipswich that put me off, or just that cities are cities at the end of the day, but I effectively get there and then go again. I'm sure it has a lot to offer, a lot to see and all the rest of it, but to me it just seems like a scaled down version of Sydney as a drive through. Sydneysiders are also very down on Brisbane as a place, although mind you they are down on every other major Australian city in comparison to their own.

Part of the reason for my attitude is that I don't have much time to spare there, another is that I arrive in a bit of a funny mood. I didn't really meet anybody in Byron to have a drink with etc, and a few days of not having conversations with anybody other than to buy stuff can send you a bit loopy.

Although Byron is very much an archetypal traveller town, there is a different atmosphere here to what I have experienced in similar places in Asia. For example, when I was in Goa last year it was almost a physical impossibility to go out and not have someone strike up a conversation and invite you to join them for a drink. There does not appear to be much of that in Byron. Just lots of locals and my fellow countrymen getting very drunk, and saying over and over again how very drunk they are. And how very drunk they were last night.

There is still an extremely relaxed and friendly vibe oozing through the place, however, and I can see myself coming back here again.