Thursday 24th July to Wednesday 30th July – Surfers’ Paradise
On the Thursday we got a bus from Byron to Surfers’ and arrived at a beautiful seaside location but in torrential rain. After stopping at a fish and chip place for a very large portion of chips with cheese and gravy we decided to hail a cab to our hostel. The place itself was actually quite cool but was a little way out of town. Having checked in we headed in the opposite direction of the main strip and went and had dinner.
The following day we went to Warner Brothers’ Movie World, a film related theme park. Fortunately as the school holidays had just finished the place was almost empty and we hardly had to queue for any rides. The best rides in my opinion were:
Lethal Weapon – A hanging rollercoaster with several loops and a corkscrew. You seriously needed to fix your head on this one though to avoid the inevitable ear bashing.
Scooby-Doo spoooky coaster – I’m not saying much about this one as I will seriously spoil it but put it this way, it wasn’t what a lot of the people who got on it were expecting.
Superman Escape – A rollercoaster which propels you from 0-100 kmph in just two seconds. Although it must be said after that the rest of the ride was something of an anti-climax.
There were other fun rides too although I thought that the Batwing Spaceshot (a tower ride which shoots you up rather than dropping you down) was a bit of a let down.
On the Saturday we headed to Wet and Wild, a water ride based amusement park. The weather had imroved by this point and it was just about warm enough to walk round wet for several hours. The place was great fun but, rather sadly, I think my favourite bit may have been the super hot jacuzzis. Actually there were some great flume ride which were a lot of fun. In the evening we had some goon (cask wine) and accompanied the Irish girls from the room next to ours into town. We spent the first part of the evening with them in an Irish pub and then headed to a pub/club just off the main strip. It was a great evening which ended in what felt like a long walk home as there were no taxis available.
The following day Matt spent a lot of time in bed recovering and I went for a wander into town. When I came back I played tennis at the hostel, doubles first and then singles with two different people. I was actually playing for about four hours and realised how much I miss tennis from home. Having said that my calves didn’t thank me for it for about the next two days.
Having played tennis the day before I decided it a good plan to mess about with a basketball the following day in order to make any parts of my legs which weren’t suffering feel the pain they had missed! We also went into town and down to the beach.
On Tuesday we headed to the main strip of Surfers’ and went to “Time Zone” an indoor amusement arcade where for the bargain price of $20 USD (about ten quid) you got 12 ticket games and umlimited other arcade games for one hour and then you could do laser skirmish, dodgems and mini golf for another hour. It was awesome fun but I got a bit miffed in the laser game as my gun didn’t work properly for a while (admittedly initially as I had my hand in the wrong place) and the guy had to come and fix it and reset it twice. I’m not sure if it was this, feeling hot or my general intolerance but I didn’t have much time for the mini golf afterwards. Actually, I think the main reason for this was the fact that I had put up with Matt ribbing me all darn day and had finally had enough. When we got back to the hostel, after another “La Porchetta” we played computer games on Matt’s Mac (really cool SNES emulator ones like “Wheel of Fortune”) and then watched “The Castle”. “The Castle” is a film centred around the story of a Bogan (think “Chav” in England or “trailer trash” in the U.S.) family and was endearing and hilarious in equal measure. It sure beat the likes of “Think Tank” which we had watched on his Mac previously!
On the Thursday morning Matt headed off to catch a flight back to Melbourne and I headed to the bus station to go further North. I booked a combination of accommodation and bus tickets and also a 4×4 self-drive tour of Fraser Island and got a bus headed to Noosa Heads.