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.

Murwullywoolambubby-something-or-other

Four nights in Byron Bay and we were ready to head onwards. We chose to head slightly northwards and start making our way back up to Brisbane, so the next place that appealed to us was a hostel in the town of Murwillumbah (I have no idea if I spelled that correctly) at the base of Mt. Warning. Mt. Warning is the center of the largest volcanic caldera formation in the southern hemisphere, and so has excellent hiking, lots of wildlife, and as there isn’t a single beach in sight the hostel is a damn sight quieter than anywhere else on the Gold Coast. We were ready for some quiet nights and real sleep. Besides, the hostel in Murwillumbah serves free ice cream every evening at 9pm!

There wasn’t much to see or do in the town itself, but the hike up Mt. Warning was fantastic. There are three distinct zones of vegetation: sub-tropical rainforest at the bottom, temperate rainforest in the middle, and heath vegetation at the top. Plenty of wildlife roams around the walking track, mostly lizards and birds. As far as lizards went, we saw big fat skinks, various unidentifiable lizards, and a teeny little juvenile snake. Most frequently sighted are the bush turkeys. They are everywhere, males and females alike, and are excellent scavengers. We had a male follow us up the walking track for some distance, and two males were waiting for scraps at the very top of the mountain.



Ugly sucker, ain’t he?

There are also flies. I’ve become convinced that every fly around the Gold Coast decided to host a reunion on the lookout decks at the top of the mountain. The noise from the buzzing was incredible, it was as though we walked into a swarm a million flies thick, but we could only see about 20 of them at any given point in time.

The flies couldn’t compete with the views, though. They were exceptional – from the peak of Mt. Warning you can see the full caldera formation all around. It feels like you are at the top of the world, only there’s no snow and you don’t need a respirator to breathe. Provided, of course, that you don’t keel over after reaching the top. It takes about 2 hours of good, quick paced hiking to get up the mountain, and the final 100 meters is a vertical scramble aided by rough rock formations and chains. Believe me, you need the chains.




It’s really, really, really freaking steep. On the way back down, Glen decided that we needed more undignified pictures of my ass:




So I yelled at him:



Back at the hostel, we were spending our time eating ice cream, feeding water dragons (the resident hostel dragons will take bits of apple right out of your hand, and apparently one of them got so bold that it would climb onto the laps of people eating on the deck chairs), and chasing various forms of local wildlife. The highlight of this urban wildlife bits was the advent of a magnificent carpet boa that was slowly wending its way around the hostel ground, shedding it’s skin.





Isn’t it magnificent? And we were able to watch it shed its entire skin, in two pieces. Carpet boas are really lovely creatures and are quite harmless to humans. They’re great to have around houses, though, because their primary source of food is rats and mice, so they are excellent for pest control.

The Return of Neil

Okay, either Neil followed us to Byron Bay or he has sent his agents after us. Someone has gone rummaging through our LABELLED food shelf in the hostel kitchen and has stolen all our fruits and vegetables!

NEIL!!

Beach Hunting, 2nd Attempt

After getting a good night’s sleep, we struck out again in search of a hostel on those fabled Queensland beaches. This time, however, we had the people at the YHA reception desk call other YHA hostels and book our room for us. Our first attempt was Surfer’s Paradise (seriously, the town is actually called that), but they were full up due to a big NASCAR race being held there that weekend. Upon the advice of the guy at the tour desk, we booked in at Byron Bay, which is approximately 2 hours south of Brisbane, in New South Wales.

Byron Bay is the quintessential spring break/surfer town. It is very beautiful, extremely touristy, always busy, and contains more new age shops per square inch than anywhere else in the world. I defy even San Francisco to have more new age stores per yearly capita than Byron Bay.

The YHA hostel there is crowded and noisy but well laid out with a big patio, a nice pool, and a great pool deck area for lounging. This is a very, very good thing because I managed to get sick (again) on the bus ride to Byron Bay. Just about the only comfortable position I could assume that didn’t leave me nauseated beyond all reckoning was doubled over with my head on my knees and my arms clamped across my stomach. I have no idea what sort of illness it was – a small touch of stomach flu possibly – but I think I was as nauseated as I could get without actually vomiting. It didn’t let up for a minute, eating was impossible, and moving around just exacerbated it. I spend most of my time hunched over a picnic table on the deck with my book trying not to think about bile, while Glen explored the beaches.

I was laid up for about two days, unable to get comfortable, and sleeping at night was next to impossible for either of us thanks to the noisy, noisy, drunk British kids who were sharing our dorm. Our dorm had a rather odd configuration; there were two levels, the main floor had two bunk beds while the loft where we slept had a double bed. We could easily forgive a bit of noise at night – after all, it is a hostel, so we do expect more night time partying than your average holiday accommodation. This group, however, took it to a whole new level. The guys yelled at the top of their lungs whenever they opened their mouths, the girl screeched as loudly as the guys, they slammed the door as hard as possible whenever they entered or exited the room, and they spend their entire stay in various stages of crapulence.

Glen and I agree that they could have been quite entertaining to hang around with had they not been making so much noise. They were very nice kids and we chatted with them frequently, but they were so phenomenally inconsiderate when it came to piping down at night that we were very irritated by their presence. According to their conversations, which were impossible not to listen to, they had been kicked out of most hostels they stayed in and were making arrangements to find work in Byron Bay. How they expected to find work when the lot of them were on permanent hangovers was totally beyond us. They must have looked and sounded like hell at their interviews, because when they came in at night the reek of alcohol coming off their breath and their bodies was so thick that it stank up our loft area as soon as they walked through (and then proceeded to slam) the door.

Noisy hostellers aside, Byron Bay is beautiful. It is fun being in such a touristy area, and once I was well enough to eat and walk around, we had the biggest, greasiest burgers we could hope for and thoroughly enjoyed the window shopping. The beaches were lovely and the water was an ideal temperature for wading. There were quite a number of jellyfish washed up on the beach. At least I suspect that they were jellyfish. When I poked one with the toe of my boot, it was rather firm. It is entirely possible that the firm clear blobs all over the beach were silicone breast implants that one of the many boobified bathers had managed to lose when their bikinis fell off in especially hard-hitting ocean surf. Or maybe the implants simply fell out when they were sunbathing topless. There are lots of topless sunbathers in Byron Bay, and no one seems to mind or even really notice.

Oh, and there enough anorexic women in teeny, teeny, teeny bikinis to give anyone a complex. For the first time in my life I felt self-conscious in my very flattering one-piece bathing suit because I was not showing enough skin. I must have been the only female on the beach under 48 years of age who:
a) wasn’t wearing a stringy little bikini, and
b) didn’t have a cocoa-bean tan.

Then again, I was also the only girl there not to be running the risk of skin cancer and sun damage related premature wrinkling. So there!




PS: I know that I mentioned this already, but the window shopping was really good. At several points I was rather tempted to blow a couple hundred dollars picking up some really fantastic clothes. Fortunately for our budget, my willpower is stronger than any temptation thrown up by a nice, floaty, waist defining, funky-print dress!

No Room at the Inn

As our gnat-sized attention span had us tire of Maroochydore and surrounds relatively quickly, we headed back to Brisbane and moved immediately onwards to Stradbroke Island. "Straddie" is located about an hour outside of Brisbane, on a very large sandy island. It promised wonderful scenery, wildlife, forests, and stunning beaches. So we forked over entirely too much money for public transport to the ferry and then ferry transport to the island, and confidently walked to the hostel at about 7:00 pm to get our beds.

Now this is how fortune and circumstance can lead to sheer stupidity: we had been having such luck with our hostel accommodations and heard so many hostel owners say "Crowds? Nah, no crowds, not at this time of year," that we didn’t bother calling ahead to see if any beds were available. Conversation impaired by the din created by the huge throng of youth populating the hostel kitchen and common room, we inquired about beds for the night. The hostel staff on duty looked at us blankly, asked if we had a reservation, and nearly snorted as she told us that there wasn’t anything available – no point in even looking at the room rental book. Try up the road, she said, as she unceremoniously ushered us out.

Undaunted, we walked up the road to a nearby hotel. There were no signs indicating no vacancies, but there wasn’t anyone at the reception desk either. Their reception closed at 2:00 in the afternoon. We walked up further, discovering that there wasn’t so much of a town at Amity Point, just more of a collection of houses and the occasional resort splayed alongside the highway. Oh, and every single place of accommodation (and there weren’t many) was closed. The town shuts to close down between 2:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon, no exceptions.

So what does one do when stuck in a town with no room, no tent, and no where to sleep? Simple! Why, you wander over to the nearest campground, find a high school group chaperoned by several teachers, chat with them for a while, and then sleep on their campsite, of course! The teachers thought our predicament was hilarious, and welcomed us readily.



The above picture is a lie, actually. We didn’t get any sleep at all. Between the intermittent drizzle and my own paranoia about the security patrol catching on to us, I ended up awake the entire night and Glen only caught snatches of sleep here and there. After the third bout of drizzle, we went inside the campsite’s covered barbecue area, and Glen snoozed while I read my book. Security did drive past, but I believe they assumed we were part of the high school group.

One of the teachers was up early the next morning, so she took us for a walk around the beaches, which she knew quite well, and talked about the local flora and fauna. It made for a lovely morning, despite our exhaustion, as the teacher was very nice and was a good conversationalist.

At about 7:30 we left the campsite and started to walk around the town itself. Our first stop was back at the hostel, to see if they had any newly-vacant beds that night. No such luck, the place was booked solid throughout the weekend. Then we went back to the hotel that closes at 2:00 pm every day. They only had a room available for that evening (it was a Thursday), and it would be about $175 for the room. We decided not to take it because we knew full well we would spend the entire day sleeping, and would then have to leave the next day, probably without seeing much of the area or the island. The receptionist there called around to some other resorts, but there was nary a vacancy anywhere.

Finally, we went back to the reception building for the campsite where we illicitly stayed the previous night. There were no campsites - much less any cabins - available at all – in fact, there wasn’t a single campsite anywhere on the whole blasted island. We finally found out that we had managed to find our way to North Stradbroke Island on the one busy weekend outside of peak season. That weekend the island was playing host to both a surfing competition and a folk music festival, so every surfer and hippy in Queensland had invaded the island and snapped up any available space.

So we said, in the words of Eric Cartman, "Screw you guys, I’m going home."

Or, in our case, back to Brisbane. We found ourselves back at our trusty YHA where we again secured a twin room, and proceeded to fall asleep for a good 5 hours. Then we got up, had our first meal of the day (at this point it was around six o’clock in the evening), and went back to bed.

That’ll learn us not to call in advance.

Maroo-something-or-other

We only spent a couple of days in Brisbane before deciding to carry on to Maroochydore, which is further north along the Sunshine Course, and spitting distance to the Australia Zoo. We weren’t going to be in that area and not go visit the late Steve Irwin’s stomping grounds, so we got beds at the Maroochydore hostel, ate loads of the complimentary breakfast (continental, of course) that is provided for the hostellers, and took the courtesy bus to the zoo.

The zoo is lovely and a great deal of fun. It costs an arm and a leg to get it, but we weren’t about to let that deter us. The habitats are brilliant, demonstrations occur throughout the day, and the dedication to conservation is evident. Oh, and if you want gadget xyz with Steve Irwin’s madly grinning head on it, you can find it there. The gift store is a little creepy, like his ghost is watching you in the guise of spoons, t-shirts, and bobble heads. His message and his passion goes on undiluted, though, so it’s all good.

As for the rest of our time in Maroochydore, we spent it walking the beaches, which were very nice and covered in white sand and surfers. There are a few shopping centres to take a peek in, and as expected everything is wildly expensive. The same goes for the restaurants. There must be more restaurants and cafes in three blocks along those beaches than there are in Times Square. There are also water dragons everywhere.



Somewhere between the six dollar lattes and the two hundred and fifty dollar string bikinis, we succeeded in finding squishable wide-brimmed hats. As our lily-white complexions and sensitivity to heat (more on my part than on Glen’s) doesn’t exactly jive with the dominatrix that is the Australian sun, hats were necessary. All efforts to find suitable hats either in Edmonton or abroad failed miserably. This is partially due to the apparent scarcity of responsible sun wear that doesn’t make one look like a hippy, and partially due to the fact that any reasonably shaped hat had some sort of tourist patch or brand name logo on it. As Glen put it, we would not demean ourselves to being "Australia’s or Billabong’s bitches".

So up until our third day in Maroochydore, we were going about heads uncovered. No sunburns or illnesses resulted, but this is because we haven’t been going out during the worst heat of the day. Happily, we came by a hat shop that contained good, wide-brimmed sun hats that didn’t make us look like complete gits, were reasonably priced, could be crushed into a backpack friendly size and still return to its original shape, were certified by the Australian Cancer Society, and didn’t sport a single place name or brand logo. So now we have our hats, and can enjoy both greater visibility and greater protection from sunburn. Incidentally, both of us have yet to get sunburns, which says a great deal about the strength of the sunscreen cream we’ve been using.

As a side note, it appears as about a quarter of the towns along the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast bear a name that starts with “M” and ends in something completely unpronounceable. Maroochydore is relatively easy, but the tongue-tiedness carries on with name such as Mooloolaba, Murwillumbah, Mullumbimby, and so on. I’m sure I would have had the hang of these names were I a local, but trying to stutter through them is awfully embarrassing from a tourist point of view. I feel like a complete git whenever I attempt to pronounce any of them.

Brisbane, Round One

I am happy to report that our hostel in Brisbane was significantly cleaner than that in Auckland. One half of the hostel is brand spanking new, while the other half is slated for demolition in a couple of months and a new wing of the hostel, complete with rooftop pool, shall be built in its stead. The hygiene of the bathrooms in the to-be-flattened half is somewhat questionable, but no where near the disgusting factor of the YHA Montgomery’s in Hobart. The newer building is impeccably clean.

Brisbane itself is certainly bustling, and has its lovely bits. We were delighted with the discovery of the day-glow purple flowered trees that dot the city. They are not a native species, but they are awfully pretty:



The city also has a wealth of botanical gardens, which we explored quite a bit. The trees there are deadly, and I ended up getting stuck in one of them:



The shopping is excellent, especially in the CBD (that’s downtown to you North Americans) and quite a lot of street performers and buskers. So far our favourite find is the South Banks area, which is touristy, I’ll admit, but very lovely. The archway that runs along a large portion of the South Banks stretch is yet another example of the excellent modern architecture that Australia seems to take so naturally to:



There are outdoor markets and cafes galore, and some lively looking restaurants. We passed by a Turkish restaurant that has Friday and Saturday night belly dance performances, and while we were not able to take in the performance that particular night, we’re hoping to be back during an upcoming weekend night so we can get a drink and watch the dancer. From what we could see, she’s very good.

The array of wildlife within Brisbane itself seems to be comprised mainly of the regular sort of urban birds, such as various sorts of corvids, hundreds of swallows, gigantic fruit bats (I actually shrieked with delight the first evening we spotted the fruit bats flying overhead), and garbage birds ibis. There are lots of ibis. I used to think that ibis were lovely graceful birds worthy of being immortalized in Egyptian art. Upon closer inspection, they are surprisingly ugly things that are considered quite a nuisance by the locals. Why are they a nuisance? Well, let me show you.

First the ibis decides to strut around downtown, enjoying the sun and appearing innocent enough:




Next, the ibis finds a likely looking garbage can and hops on for a quick peek:




Then the ibis reaches in with that great long beak, pulls out a fast food bag (usually McDonald’s), and spreads the contents all over the street:



They are commensurate pickers and eaters of garbage and strew the stuff around everywhere. They are perpetually rummaging around garbage bins and are more effective at trashing an area than a pack of seagulls.