More beaches, more surfers, more shopping

That is essentially what Gold Coast is. After our break-from-noise in Murwullimba, we went about half an hour north to Coolangatta. The YHA hostel there promised free breakfast, and we are not ones to turn down free food, so there we went.

In addition to the free breakfast, the other advantage of Coolangatta is that the city runs into Tweeds Heads, and Surfer’s Paradise, and every other little party suburb that populates the Gold Coast. It is beach after beach after beach after beach. Glen and I aren’t exactly interested in beaches. There are also markets after markets after markets. Glen and I do like markets quite a bit.

The first market we hit was the Surfer’s Paradise night market. It involved a half-hour ride on their excellent public transportation to get from Coolangatta to Surfer’s Paradise, and it was worth the trip. What little we saw of the beach lived up to its name – the waves looked like a surfer’s dream come true. The night market had plenty of random artisan tents, and some of the items were quite lovely:



After we strolled up and down the market purchasing absolutely nothing at all (as usual – although I still think we should have gotten a basket of those really fragrant strawberries), it started to rain quite heavily. We dived into one of the many pubs that lined the open air mall behind the night market. We nursed a beer for about an hour while waiting for the rain to stop, and had an uproarious conversation with a Scottish ex-pat who was feeling chatty.

The next morning we headed to the Carrara open-air markets. Advertisements and fliers for the market were all over the hostel and it declared itself to be smashing good family fun, so we figured it would be worth checking out.

To say that it was a flea market would be polite. To say that it was a flea-bitten, Chinese knock-off filled, crap strewn thieves den would be more accurate. It was grody, there were knock offs of every conceivable super hero, and most memorably a kid’s toy cell phone shaped recording device titled something to the effect of "Uninteresting Girl". I believe that the original toy name was completely different but the meaning got lost in translation. After about half an hour we gave the place up as a bad job and headed back to the city.

We didn’t to much the following day, as it was pouring rain all afternoon. That night there was a massive thunderstorm that woke up the entire hostel, fried some of the hostel lights, and blew out the nearby traffic control lights. It sounded like a cannon was being shot off the hostel roof.

Three days in Coolangatta were enough for us. It is a great place if you are into surfing and did a great deal of visiting with some really nice hostellers, but there wasn’t much else to do. Had we been 18, full of booze, and eager for the bar scene we may have stayed longer, but we decided we would rather spend the remainder of our time in Australia back in Brisbane.