Two types of beach and yet another city

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As you can see, I am now in Brisbane having followed exactly the same tourist trail as everyone else (specifically Sydney- Byron Bay- Surfers Paradise- Brisbane) and getting a little bit tired of meeting other English people on fairly nice beaches. I mean, I could go to Spain for that for peanuts. I'm currently looking for obscure yet interesting places on my path so I can get a slightly better taste of Oz. Any suggestions?

Anyway, location by location:

Byron Bay ('The Laid Back Beach')- Known as a centre of alternative culture (ie lots of hippies) and mellow waves. It also happens to be the most easterly town in mainland Australia. Isn't that interesting?

What I did in Byron
- Learned to surf (a bit). It's not my talent. I kept falling on my bum.
- Walked up yet another hill. This time through some bush to Cape Byron and watched the sunset. How lovely.
- Got broke booking trips further along.
- Drank cheap wine with my roomates.

At this point Byron Bay bored me, so I decided to move on.

Gold Coast/ Surfers Paradise ('The Cheesy Party Beach')

There are three main activities in Surfers Pradise: go to the beach, go to theme parks and get drunk. Since I'd run out of money in Byron Bay and was existing on my emergency travellers cheques for the time being I had to give most of the money grabbing activities a miss and just hung around town for a while. Oh well. Boredom set in quickly.

Now I'm in Brisbane and I've just gone and seen some cute (Wombats! Koalas! Wallbies!) and less cute (Bats! Crocs! Snakes!) Aussie animals at a sanctuary outside town which was pretty cool. Other than that I've been doing my usual city fallbacks (art galleries, people watching) and I'm going to go up north to the Sunshine Coast then Fraser Island (a big sand island which had better be good because it almost bankrupted me). Anyway, see ya!

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