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Whilst Newcastle was effectively indistinguishable from its British counterpart in the early 1900s, Surfers Paradise is Florida slammed into the middle of Australia. One region of the Gold Coast is infact named Florida, further compounding the idea that the Australians are awful at naming their country (or at the very least lazy when it comes to naming their country).
Surfers Paradise is a small part of the Gold Coast (for the Gold Coast appears to be a number of small towns that have all expanded and merged together to form one large sunny looking vacation/retirement community) that resembles Vegas. I say this having never visited Vegas and once again considering its size am most likely comparing something akin to the space shuttle with a wind up toy, it is at the very least a Reno (the big little city). I digress. Surfers Paradise is the small "city" part of the Gold Coast and is full of a number of casinos, shows, shopping malls, high end stores such as Prada and Louis V, hotels and expensive serviced appartments, but far more importantly a great deal of bars and clubs.
The rest of the Gold Coast appears to be made up of a series of beaches and a number of theme parks. These theme parks would also be of great interest to our visit (not by half to one Lucy Groves).
Having tried and failed to book ourselves into a desirable hostel online through any useful website we had decided to wing it on our arrival and wandering into the bus station terminal came upon a useful travel desk with a number of hostels in the vicinity that not only had availability (stupid hostelworld), but courtesy buses that would be more than happy to pick us up from the bus station in 5 minutes or so. Job. Done.
10 minutes after our arrival to Surfers we were checked into the hostel and settling into our dorm room, alas made up entirely of (rather uninteresting) girls, but there was a TV (!). One of the dull and bored looking girls had a lonely planet that I took possession of whilst she was out the room and I located a budget restaurant just a few minutes walk away that served a variety of pastas and pizzas that should please both Lucy and myself and so off we went. When we arrived at its doors it looked closed. There was no one sitting inside, or outside for that matter, the door was closed and there did not appear to be a single employee visible anywhere. We were just about to turn around and leave when a girl came out of no where and assured us that it was open just deadly quiet. Since we couldn't be bothered to find anywhere else to eat we suspiciously sat ourselves down to peruse the menu and predictably I ordered a spicy pizza whilst Lucy ordered a tomato orientated pasta dish. Thankfully despite the restaurants lack of patrons the food was delicious (the lonely planet finally got one right!!) and was actually very affordable (although its specific price now eludes me - I believe it was $10). I would recommend it to any backpacker, but its name also eludes me.
After dinner we walked into town (for the hostel is just on the outskirts and as I have told you it is very small and compact) and had a look about, getting our bearings of the place and doing some window shopping or as in Billabong actual shopping since I needed a new belt to replace the one that had been stolen with my jeans in Byron (and put a stop to the constant fear of pantsing myself) and Lucy fell in love with a hat. We also came across a stall selling passes to a pubcrawl through a number of the bars and clubs in Surfers on Wednesday into which the boys were willing to throw in some free passes and some free drinks for club nights for the rest of the week and after some chatting (and rather pathetic flirting in Lucy's direction) we left having purchased one each. We got back into the hostel round 10:30ish and the girls were watching a film on the TV that was like themselves, trully uninteresting, but which we naturally sat and watched from our beds anyway before turning in and getting some rest for our day of adventure at our first theme park.
As I have previously alluded to the Gold Coast is full of theme parks - Dreamworld, Warner Brothers, Wet N Wild, Sea World and another new waterpark. There are a few others, but frankly they cannot really be considered theme parks. It had always been our intention to do Dreamworld and Wet N Wild, but they've all conglomerated and so it is significantly cheaper to do either Warner Brothers with Sea World or Wet N Wild, or Dreamworld with their own new waterpark. So we then intended to go for the second option until the woman at the travel desk at the hostel told us the new waterpark was not very good at all and there really wasn't too much of a difference in the quality of the rides between Warner Brothers and Dreamworld. Rather, Warner Brothers in addition has a number of good action shows that would keep me entertained whilst Lucy was off going on stupid rides and I was entertaining myself talking to randoms being too scared. Win win situation - we went for Warner Brothers and Wet N Wild and since the weather wasn't looking too bad we were off to Wet N Wild.
Now an important thing to consider here is our relative attitudes to the weather. It was 24 degrees, it was not raining, there was not much of a breeze to speak of, Lucy and I thought it was a nice day and not a bad one to go to a waterpark on, the Australians thought we had gone insane and were almost certain to die of pneumonia or at the very least catch a nasty cold. The park was next to empty, after leaving the changing rooms and locker areas we actually didn't bump into a single individual for a solid 3 minutes (impossible to do in any British or US theme park regardless of the weather). And when we happened upon the massive wave pool in the centre of the park swathes of families were wearing T shirts and vests, in some cases designer wet suit T shirts, these were people who had decided to "brave" the park, they would be rewarded with short lines, the men of Australia would be in awe of their familiy's heroics, whilst the women would be re-evaluating their parenting capabilities. They were all clearly insane because the weather was fine and the water wasn't even cold.
We started on the ride closest to the entrance, a large slide slid down on a large ring similar to that of any river rapids ride, but as such it wasn't particularly thrilling in anyway, we got more wet getting out of the ring than we had riding the slide. Lucy made a comment roughly suggesting that she had been on more exciting rollercoaster farts than the previous ride so we went off in search of a more exciting one.
The next ride we tried was called Black Hole in which we were sat one in front of each other on conjoined rings and slid down a much more invigorating and water involving slide in the pitch dark save a few neon flashing lights down the side of the flume. It was significantly better and much more what I had come to expect from a water park.
The following ride was similar, and nameless I think, and was essentially the same ride, except under the sun.
Having warmed myself up a bit on the lesser rides we then went to tackle one of its more adventurous ones and opted for one delightfully named 'Kamikaze" - just fills you with confidence does it not? This ride essentially comprises a steep 10m high U shaped water slide in which 2 of you sit on an inflatable bedlike contraption facing one another and take it in turns to fall backwards down it for momentum (and of course the water) send u rocketing up the other side of the U several times. The woman warned us to hold on to the hand straps and if we hadn't I've no doubt we would have fallen 10m off the back of the inflatable onto the ground and spent several minutes sliding and grating my skin off up and down the slide. Your initial backwards fall is at some ludicrous angle like 80 degrees. For this reason I strategically positioned Lucy to be the one to fall backwards from this angle, although as I pointed out not too long after that I was then the one falling backwards, but I don't think we would ever have left the launching platform had I been the one in charge of shuffling backwards. It was good and I am quite sure I screamed more than the 10 year old who went on it after us, but whatever, he was born a crazy boiling hot blooded Australian.
This ride was followed up by one named "Tornado" a slide leading into what then appears a sheer drop into a sloped funnel whilst in a 4-conjoined-tire, I was similarly holding onto the inflatable about as hard as is possible without popping the bloody thing, and Lucy similarly ended up going backwards down the drop into the funnel although this was by coincidence not by design (thankfully).
After that we decided to take a break from all the rides and do a little sunbathing now that the sun had proper picked up and it was getting pretty sunny and hot. We parked ourselves on the fake lawn fronting the wave pool (in which it is possible to watch movies in a drive in theatre type fashion during the summer) and dragged out our edible goodies that we were probably not permitted to bring and started munching through crisps and biscuits. After a good hour of (attempted) tanning we were off again. Lucy then went on the only non-waterslide that featured a surfboard going from vertical at one side of a U shaped track to vertical at the other, standard to nearly all themeparks (although more frequently pirate ships and not surfboards). Before also singly going on a ridiculously high, steep and fast flume a la Blizard Beach. More so than any other ride in the park I was like f*** THAT. Yes I'm a woose, whatever. We then went on Black Hole again and Tornado before going back to the flumes and going on a ride of flumes that twisted around each other that basically involved falling into a pool of settled water every 4m, whilst going down a flume each. Having worked up an appetite we then treated ourselves to some (obviously) excessively priced fries from a food stand before getting changed and hop footing it to the bus stop to catch the bus back into town.
Fuelled by the days activities we glammed ourselves up and headed out to the bars clutching our freely acquired specials. We began in Bedroom, medium sized, but big on ambience and scattered with a number of beds throughout for making oneself quite quite comfortable - I imagine many people have been kicked out for falling asleep. Our offer here was free entry and a free house drink every 30 minutes - sold! So we got our first free drink in right away and I bought a second to see me through to the next free one. We set ourselves up at a prime people watching table and had a browse - quite a few hotties, mid 20s, obviously attracting the pretty faced trendy young working crowd. Apparently Paris Hilton frequents the place on her annual descent upon Australia, but the VIP section, which did not appear to differ from the rest of the club in any way other than its complete emptiness, was on this occasion devoid of her hotness. We moved ourselves to a bed when one became available and there was defiantely a simulataneous acknowledgment of the space and a calm and collected movement towards the newly free bed, but Lucy and I were the closest to it and weren't afraid to run for it either, so it was to be ours. It was alas rather harder to people watch as the beds are intended to offer some privacy to those on them and indeed we were obviously the only non-couple on them at the time, whatever it was comfortable!
We got in our second and third free drinks (out of a possible 6) before moving on to Sin City next door, a club belonging more to the Geordie school of clubbing - young clubbers wearing next to nothing, bare minimum of decoration or ambience, loud dance music and cheap drinks. The offer going at this club was free entry for both of us and free drinks for Lucy since it was Ladies' Night. Yes you read that right. Free drinks until midnight she was getting! These were offset by the extortionately priced drinks for the guys, of which there were no shortage, all trying to hit on the intoxicated girls. Basically the system worked as such: you got a glass on your arrival and until 12am you could get it refilled with any spirit and mixer, wine or bubbly. Suffice to say Lucy spent very little time sitting at the table we'd occupied and we took it it turns to have the drink, tres generous, in my case watching out for the bouncer and table bar girl who was definately on to the fact that I wasn't paying for any of the drinks I was having and kept trying to get me to order one from her.
Just before 12 there was a stripper, the music was stopped and the entire club, which was pretty sizeable, gathered round the stage to watch. Even the guys were pretty keen to grab themselves a good spot. Dressed and choreographed to Indiana Jones he made good use of his whip and quickly disguarded his clothes (generally regarded as a good move by the audience) and some girls in front got some 1 on 1 action. The massive bonucers did, however, manage to block just about everyone's view at key moments in an attempt to control the crowd from (presumably) raping the stripper. It was actually quite an entertaining show, but once it was over the drinks were no longer free and the extortionate prices the guys had been previously getting charged seemed a bargain in comparison to the post-midnight prices everyone was now being charged.
I gave in to the prices, naturally, Lucy used her natural feminine charms and got the Irish boys we had run into from our hostel to buy her some drinks. Unfortunately one of them ended up getting utterly hammered and was sick all over the toilets and visably swaying and tripping up things and was swiftly thrown out of the club. We took this as our cue to move back to Bedroom, where the free drink offer had alas ended (we had had to surrender our free drinks card when we had exited the club earlier) but the drinks were both better and cheaper than Sin City and the clientelle, whilst less likely to be interested in a "root," were definately better drinkers, better looking and less skanky. We fit in another hours dancing to some largely R&B music before calling it a night around 3am and heading to the adjacent kebab shop before walking back to the hostel.
A little worse for wear the next day was to be another day of thrills at another theme park. This time - Warner Brothers. We got ourselves on the same bus as the day before and rode the bus and hangovers out to the theme park arriving at a reasonable hour of 10:30am. Lucy seguaed for the Batman ride first, the token shoot them up high and let them fall back to earth kind of ride, whilst I naturally made myself very busy having a look at various models of the batmobile and then taking some photos of Lucy on the ride. Despite the long posted waiting time, she was only gone about 10 minutes, and so we popped next door to the adjoining batman ride, one of those that have a bit of a show going on with performers, then seated with a screen, before being seated in the ride. Well it was utterly crap. Even I was not exhilarated, this was the level of crapness. So unimpressed and eager for adrenalin Lucy went off to go on the Superman ride, a ludicrously fast ride that goes almost vertical at the begining before doing a series of twists and loops and coming to a stop not long after. Meanwhile I struck up conversation with random teens and families.
Next on our little ride itinerary was their splash mountain equivalent and f*** did we get wet, like seriously. The clue should probably have been everyone going on wearing ponchos. Like splash mountain there were a number of shorter drops throughout the ride, one going backwards just to throw us off - I screamed like a girl (standard). Unlike splash mountain there was no attempt at any kind of story really other than - you are in the old gold hunting west - see look at the old western props scattered everywhere. The final drop was just as steep tho and got you a LOT more wet as you didn't only fall into a massive pool of water a la Splash Mountain, but some very strategically positioned water guns absolubtly drenched you at the same time, just on the off chance you hadn't gotten wet. When we got off the ride we were soaked through. It actually looked as if we had dived into a swimming pool, for this reason I am glad Lucy and I took the precaution of putting our cameras into her bag, otherwise I don't doubt they would have failed to work at this point.
We let ourselves dry off a bit whilst "enjoying" a particularly cardboard orientated burger and coldish fries and waiting for the batman show to start round the corner. The show was actually pretty good. They used a replica batmobile from the new movies for a start, which was pretty cool in itself, the choreographed fighting, sound and plot was also pretty top notch, taking on the scarecrow and his minions. Many photos were taken obviously and positioned outside of the stunt car show just before the gates were to open for it we thought it an opportune time to go and watch the show and dry off some more. The stunt car show started some 30 mins after we started queueing but was probably for the best given the fact the entire park appeared to have settled in to watch it. We managed to get some pretty decent seats right in the middle, 3rd row from the front or something. There was, however, a blatant handicapped individual seated in the first row and he kept trying to get involved and annoying the "director." I felt kind of bad for the guy as he obviously couldn't tell this guy to f*** off, but he just kept on trying to be involved every 5 seconds, which obviously isn't going to happen for anyone as its been highly highly choreographed, if he had a minder (and I say if because he had no aparent one) she should be fired, because he ended up getting disappointed at not being involved and the director was getting more and more notably frustrated to us in the front rows. The show was good, loosely based around the story of a director trying to make an action film on streets of an Italian persuasion, with police chases and ludicrous stunts, including one involving the car being cut in half. And one in which the car is driven entirely in reverse, altho we were disappointed to discover at the end that in fact the chasis is on backwards and so whilst it appears to be driving in reverse it is just driving normally, that was a bit of a let down. But good all the same and made some good photos. There was the expected audience participation, couple of 'cut to' audience scenes, audience sound bites etc to keep the kids happy.
Next was the Shrek 4D show (the additional D being moving chairs and bubbles and various other sensory effects) which was good, but exactly the same as the one at Universal in Florida, which I have seen at least 5 times. None the less I enjoyed it, at the very least I haven't seen it in a few years. After the show we hit the kids section, and went on a craptacular baby rollercoaster thing based (uneccessarily for it didn't really require a plot of any description) around Roadrunner. Then we hit the Scooby Doo ride which had been closed for maintenance half the day, this ride was actually ridiculous. Half haunted house half fairground ride, you first start going round through this haunted house thing, until u go in a lift (YES A LIFT!) up however high to another floor and then realise that yes you are facing a wall before hurtling backwards, spinning the right way round and then going round a track that is ridiculously bendy, with break your neck whiplash turns, my dad by this point would have actually snapped his neck. Note to Dad - do not visit said theme park.
I then stood and watched the parade featuring everyones favourite Looney Tune and DC Comic Book characters, Lucy couldn't be assed (CBA) with any of that so whilst I stood and took a selection of photos, that numerous children and frustratingly oblivious parents naturally get in the way of, she went to go on the Superman ride again, but after queuing for a ridic length of time again, the ride breaks down (rather concerned by the amount of breaking down all the rides here do frankly) and so gave up (not a woman of patience) and we rush back to the hostel to get ready for our pubcrawl.
UNFORTUNATELY we then get a text from one of the boys we got the passes off to hear that the crawl has been cancelled for the night because they didn't get enough people to go on it, the pass is non refundable and has been switched to the crawl on Saturday which definately will be on because they already have sufficient numbers (no doubt because everyone who did buy a pass for Wednesday has now been heaped into the Saturday lot) Well thats OK, except that we are leaving tomorrow and won't be here on Saturday! Still non-refundable. f***ers... We consider going out ourselves, but decide we really can't be assed and so go to the Hard Rock Cafe for some tasty (and unusally expensive for our budget) food and cocktails. I get the nachos (standard) - they are awesome - and a strawberry daiquiri (my mother's influence) before returning back to the hostel and watching the season finale of Lost (a season which I have not seen any of whatsoever, it made very very little sense at all) and end up falling asleep... Bit of an anticlimax. But, unlike the plot of Lost, at least logical.
The next morning we checked out of the hostel and went for a very early lunch in the centre at an Italian we had a voucher for (fully intending to get our moneys worth out of what became a fairly useless pubcrawl pass) and so got ourselves an authentic stonebaked pizza and small soft drink for $6.50 from a charming Italian man who was very interested in where we were from in the UK and then briefly had a small conversation revolving around football teams of which niether Lucy or I know very much at all (Lucy knowing considerably more than myself though obviously) and then wandered to the now familiar bus stop to get the bus to Australia Fair, a fairly crappy (in my opinion) shopping mall with a rather grand name and watched Terminator Salvation, which had come out that morning. It was very good, even if all the time traveling and various franchise spin-offs (such as the TV show) have me now thoroughly confused. To paraphrase Douglas Adam the problem with time travel is not with creating paradoxes in which you become your own grandfather, that is perfectly acceptable, what is not is the problem of grammer, how does one say what one is about to do in the future in the ancient past, or what one has done in the past in the far flung future, the problem with time travel is having any idea of what is going on, its the little things.
After navigating ourselves back through the shopping centre, I should point out that we had in some fashion misread the map on our entry and ended up in a far flung corner of the building at a dentist surgery next to the car park, and back to the hostel I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a hilariously funny movie, whilst Lucy dossed about on the internet, until it was time to go (just before the end of the movie obviously) and the hostel's free shuttle bus took us back to the bus station, where, inevitably, the bus was ludicriously late and the driver kicked up a storm regarding Lucy and my lack of any paper confirmation of our seat booking, despite never being asked for one before and despite the fact he had our names as clear as day in front of his face. The journey was short and uneventful. I remember reading a particularly unmemorable book with a particularly easy to forget title and before we knew it we were back in the Brisbane Transit Centre, where we had found ourselves one sleepy morning just 8 days previously wondering when the good bit of Australia was gonna start. Well it had started alright and little did we know (little did we know!!) that it was only gonna get better from here on in.
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