Surfers' Paradise.

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Hop, skip and a jump over to Surfers' Paradise!

I arrive, take a little walk to my hostel, check in, dump my stuff in the room and in walks Leanne.

We ask the typical first backpacker questions "where are you from?"

"How long have you been in Australia?" etc etc and then Maria and Sylvia walk in and after 20 minutes of chat, we finally find out each other's names!

I spend most of the afternoon chatting with my roomies and then went for a wander around the city which was much, much bigger than I expected it to be. It kind of gives this impression of what I expect an Australian Dubai to look like with all its high-rise buildings.

Every night, the hostel organised trips to bars and nightclubs and tonight, we were off to 'Vanity'. It was a pretty nice club and the music wasn't too bad. The bartenders were all women dressed only in their corsets and underwear which was a little odd but not a problem for the boys especially as I don't think ugly girls were allowed to work there.

We met two really lovely brothers (Darren and Kieran) from our hostel and spent most of the night talking with them . We were also lucky enough to meet the Danish Simon, Simon and Simon (Simon no. 3 was actually called Emil but I thought Simon was better for him) who were pretty cool , obviously, all being called Simon makes them the coolest.


The next day was beach time! And I actually sunbathed! At around 2:30pm, Maria was like 'it's getting dark, maybe we should go back.' And good job we did - about 30 seconds after getting to our room, a massive thunder storm began . Loud thunder, lots of lightening and torrential rain! Why does this keep happening? So most of the afternoon was spent in the hostel watching movies.

Later, when the rain stopped, we followed the hostel people over to the Beer Garden, grabbed our free drinks and left shortly after. We'd been given "VIP" tickets to 'Sin City' with free entry and free unlimited drinks all night which unsurprisingly resulted in a pretty fun night.

Sylvia and I left at about 1:30am and get back to find Darren sitting on the steps waiting for Kieran. So sat down with him for a bit and was lucky enough to see a shooting star which was bright and pretty so I made myself yet another wish.

The next day was my journey up to Brisbane and I watched hard out of the window for the town of 'Underwood' which we were apparently supposed to drive through but was utterly disappointed by its no-show. Arrived in Brizzy about about an hour later and pretty much just crashed out.

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