Surfer's Paradise is a Lie!

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OK, we have loads to write up at this point, so it might take a couple of sessions to get it done, but we'll do as much as we can before we get booted out of this library at closing time.

Thursday 29th May - Charlotte's Birthday

Thursday morning saw us waking pretty early, I had quite a bit planned and Charlotte was just generally excited. As she was showering, I threw my clothes on and set off down to the supermarket for some supplies for the day. I was dressed for the heat but was greeted by a miserable rainy day and as a result, spent the entire trip to and from the supermarket seconds away from killing myself, my flip flops getting no traction whatsoever on the increasingly wet kerb tiles. I checked our e-mails on the way down as well, finding a reply from the previous camper company regarding our complaint. They apologised and had refunded our account with 4 full days hire and $60 towards fuel expenses, which came to just shy of $300, which was a good result. I dropped them a reply thanking them for their quick response and resolution and headed on into town.

Charlotte was dressed and waiting when I returned and we headed straight down to the kitchen for breakfast. I cooked us some american pancakes, topped with bacon, cooked in fresh australian honey and a fried egg. I know that sounds a bit gross but it was lovely, honestly. Heavily laden we cleared up and set off into town, looking for Queen Street bus station. This was as far as Charlotte knew we were going thus far.

After heading the wrong way down Queen Street, we realised and turned around, with 2 minutes to go until the bus was set to leave. Running down the stairs to the underground bus station we made it in the nick of time and appended ourselves to the back of the queue. As I paid, I asked the bus driver to let us know when we reached Lone Pine, to which she replied, in full earshot of Charlotte, "you won't need me to tell you, just wait till we drive under the big sign saying 'Koala Sanctuary', it's the last stop". Thanks. The cat was out of the bag, however we weren't far away now anyway so I guess it didn't matter all that much.

As we reached the Koala Park, Charlotte was rather giddy and was bounding around all over the show as we queued for entry. We were given a map / guide leaflet and a show itinerary, which I handed to Charlotte and just said I'd follow her. Heading through the birds to start with there were some really interesting ones there, all of which were native and found in various parts of the country, all of which were also quite spectacular. As we approached a cage containing some yellow crested white cockatoos, there appearehd to be two of them, one at either end facing the path. Nearing the first one, it turned to face us and clear as day said 'Hello' a couple of times, until we passed it and then it sat in silence. We stood around laughing for a moment before walking towards the other one, which disappointingly said nothing. We shrugged and continued on, leaving the cages. As we passed the end of the cockatoo cage, we heard a clear and shrill 'Bye Bye' from the cockatoo at the other end. This was really funny (at the time...) and we figured they must have learned it from hundreds of kids walking past, gretting them as they went.

After strolling around some of the koala huts for a while, we stopped for dinner at the cafe, sharing a fish platter and some chicken nuggets between us which was surprisingly tasty and reasonably priced. Now full again, we aimed for the kangaroo areas, but not before picking up a couple of bags of roo food from the shop. We'd expected to be feeding them through a hole in a fence or something, instead we were faced with a couple of gates and a big open field. The vast piece of land was covered in wallabies and grey kangaroos, roaming free alongside the visitors and well aware what you had in the little brown paper bags. I mostly stood taking pictures as Charlotte ran around the groups of roos, and as they ran around her until she'd completely ran out of food. As it happened, I'd saved almost all of mine and handed it over as she set off again, feeding the ones she hadn't yet made it over to.

The whole feeding lasted well over an hour, but a lot of this was down to the little wallabies, who were much more shy than their bigger fieldmates, but who Charlotte insisted on getting to feed and with great patience, she managed to achieve this. Exiting the field from a completely different side we found ourselves in the farmyard enclosure, but this wasn't that interesting as most of them were normal english animals so we didn't hang around. We couldn't feed anything in this area either, as the bird of prey display was on and apparently they swoop at movement.

We made our way through the koala treetop walk and back round to the cafe, where Charlotte joined the queue to hug a koala. She was smiling for hours afterwards, as we returned to the kangaroo fields for another round. The rain had ceased at this point and the sun was beaming down, so it seemed a lot more pleasant an activity. We realised just how tame the roos were after lying around with them and posing for some photos, as well as being able to sit with a nursing mother and stroke her, as her joey popped out of the pouch occasionally to see what was going on.

We left the park at closing time and huddled under a small shelter from the again torrential rain, waiting for the bus to get us back into Brisbane. Walking from the bus station we called into Woolworths for dinner; Kangaroo Pitta Pockets. Charlotte wasn't all to happy about this for some time, but by the time it came to shopping, she was game, after all as I pointed out, it couldn't be meat from the cute kangaroos; it wasn't even the same colour as them.

Dinner was lovely and another round of pancakes and honey for dessert left us feeling pretty lethargic. After a small rest however, we made it onto the balcony to join in the usual merryment that was going on. As usual most people were already pretty drunk, but we found a few more than usual to talk to and stayed out for a good few hours. We met a guy called Bryon from NZ who works as a diving instructor in Melbourne; he gave us contact info for his dive centre and told us about a submarine wreck we could dive there, said he'd try and hook us up with a good price for it. We're going to get in touch when we get a little closer and see how much it will cost.

We made it to bed, surprisingly sober and pretty worn out, by around 11pm or so.

Friday 30th May - Brisbane, Main Beach, Surfers Paradise, Miami Beach

Friday morning was another slow one as despite not having drank too much, we knew we had a lot to get done today and hadn't slept all that well as a result. We packed our stuff after a speedy breakfast and gave the room a last check before heading down to reception to check out. We ditched our bags in the luggage room to save carting them around with us and made our way to central station. The camper company had changed depots recently and instead of picking it up in town, we now had to go 50km east to get it. The train to Ferny Grove station was remarkably cheap mind, and the transfer bus was sat waiting for us as we pulled in. The transfer had been added on as a new cost of $25 though, which was rather annoying.

The 'depot' was in fact a middle aged couple's house out in the sticks, with a few old campers in the front yard (quite some yard though...) and a cleaner looking one in the carport. It took a while for the lady running the show to work out what she was meant to be doing, and a while longer for her to figure out how to make a card payment go through, but we got there in the end. The van was really nice in the back, fairly newly fitted out, plenty of space and endless amounts of storage. The rest of it wasn't quite so appealing though. The van that the camper is built into is as old as the hills, 400,000km on the clock with shuddering brakes and an interior that makes the inside of my '89 Orion look modern. I suppose this was to be expected as we'd picked it almost entirely on price, costing about half that of the NZ van. Also we weren't planning on driving about as much as we were going to spend time places, so it was OK.

The van was a manual which, after 4,500km in an automatic, took some readjustment to drive as we headed back into Brisbane for our gear. Muddling our way into the city we eventually found 'The Palace' and shuddered to a halt outside, blocking a bus stop. Charlotte ran in for the gear but there was too much to handle so I ran in also. As I got there, the guy had disappeared from the luggage room leaving it locked and leaving me to join the big daft queue at reception once again to retrieve our belongings. By the time I limped outside, with 5 bags attached to me, Charlotte was panicking as a whole stream of buses had turned up and made it quite clear that we shouldn't be stopped there. We loaded the van and made a swift exit, aiming for the Gold Coast.

It was another grim day and plodding through the drizzle it took us around an hour to hit the Gold Coast. I imagine that normally the place would be really lively, but today it was wet and windy, the surf was just a stormy mess and most of the shopkeepers had given up.

It's worth mentioning at this point that when we arrived in Australia, the east coast was in the middle of one of the worst droughts in recent years, with level 6 water restrictions, meaning swimming pools, carwashes and all other businesses using water were closed, showers were restricted to 4 minutes by law (not sure how they enforce this mind you...) and each house had a daily water usage allowance, after which there were heavy fines in place. It began to rain on Charlotte's Birthday and as I write this, there's been over a years worth of water come down, Brisbane has been 3ft deep in floods, the dams are all over flowing and almost all the water resrictions have been completely revoked.

It's also still raining.

Anyway back to the story... The first major place we stopped along the gold coast was main beach, as the rain had abated and we thought it would be a good time to make some lunch. Despite the rain having stopped though, it was still cold and lunch consisted of noodles in the back of the van before heading off again, into the resuming rain. I was eager to get to Surfer's Paradise to see what all the fuss was about, but by the time we were in sight of the place I was starting to feel a bit let down. Approaching surfers was like driving across a field with London on the horizon. The skyline of the place was a mess of skyscraping hotels and apartment complexes and as we enetered it's streets it was even worse. I don't think I've ever seen such a mess of over-commercialisation and hurried expansion in my life. Cheap souvenir shops littered the streets, the place was dark as all the natural light was blocked out by the mess of tower blocks and I didn't see an actual surf shop the entire time. The beach was no better than any other on the coast and after around 20 minutes of being there we'd firmly made our minds up that there was no way we wanted to spend the night here. It was like a cross between Blackpool, Magaluf and a bucketload of steroids. I don't think we even felt that safe there to be honest.

We didn't really look back as we left "Surfer's Paradise", but at least the rain had stopped. We followed the coast for about another hour and to be honest it wasn't that appealing. As I say it was muggy and quiet which wouldn't have helped, but the Gold Coast in general wasn't quite what I'd expected. Eventually we stopped in Miami Beach as the day was drawing to an end and we'd found a nice looking campsite to spend the night on. The guy in reception took great pride in telling us that the site had the cleanest amenities in Australia, which was a little unsettling to be honest. Everything here was locked, with a keycode to drive in, a keycode to use the loos, a keycode to get out, a keycode...

After pitching up and sorting ourselves out, we went to check out the beach before it went dark. The beach itself was rather nice, cliffs to one side and stretching white sands to the other. Unfortunately, the view was horribly scarred by the massive expanse of Tower Block Paradise jutting out from the coastline towards the sea, back in the direction we'd come from. That said, it wasn't too visible through the haze of fog and rain, and we weren't going to be staying on the beach long enough to care, as within about 10 minutes we were cold through and hurriedly making our way back into the site.

We wrapped up and barbecued (not a real barbecue, in fact an outdoor, stainless steel, electric hotplate, but it does the job) our dinner outside, hot dogs and piles of veg were the order of the day. After dinner, as we sat listening to some music and having a beer, we got chatting to an Irish couple who were staying there also. I'm not even sure we asked their names but if we did, we certainly didn't remember them. That said, we spoke to them for quite a while, they were sat drinking some home brew 'vodka' which oddly enough tasted exactly like some potato moonshine 'firewater' my dad had been given in france when we went over playing rugby. They were leaving and said they had loads of stuff we could have, however we never saw them in the morning to make good on that as we left before they got up.


We're going to have to leave it here as we've ran out of time, but theres bucketloads left to say; on to Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Port Stephens, down to Sydney and now on across towards Canberra. We'll try and get another entry down tomorrow, though we might not.

As for now, I guess it's goodbye from us!

-Jamie & Charlotte

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Photos

Another Sleepy One
Apparently they only wake up to eat a little, sleeping for around 90% of their lives...