This meant we got to Surfers Paradise rather late - 6.30pm instead of 3pm! The hostel was probably one of the worst we have stayed in - very cramped and no room to put bags at all! We decided to go straight out so we spent as little time there as possible! We wandered into the centre of Surfers Paradise, which with its huge skyscrapers and slighty 'Las Vegas' feel was not at all like either of us imagined but was very fun!
On the way we found a mini-golf centre and I challenged James to a game. Although he beat me on the first round by one shot it took him a full 10minutes to admit I beat him by 3 shots on the second round and therefore won overall!
After the trauma of the mini golf James needed dinner so we stopped at a pub with a food deal on and had a really nice bit of steak with mashed potato for $10 which we were pretty impressed with! After that James noticed the pub had a 'Pokie' room downstairs and so we headed to that.
Pokies are basically very low value fruit machines, where you bet a minimum of 1cent a go. They entertained us for a good couple of hours and in the end we were only about 2 dollars down so it was a good cheap way to spend the evening - much more fun than real fruit machines because you never lose more than a few pence!
We crawled into bed quite late and settled down to sleep. However the guy on the bottom bunk of James bed randomly got up in the middle of the night, crawled out of his bunk, sat on the floor for a minute and then went outside and started peeing off the balcony with the dorm room door open! Now this might not have been quite so strange if it wasn't for the fact that the drom room had an ensuite and so it was actually further to pee off the balcony than to go to the toilet. All we can say is that we hope he was sleep walking....but we didn't really like to ask!
Saturday 19th - Today we headed off to Wet 'n' Wild, a massive water park just outside Surfers paradise and one of about 6 theme parks in the local area. It was a cloudy day which actually turned out to be pretty lucky for us as it meant that it wasn't as busy as it might have been otherwise!
We had a really good time, the rides were all pretty fun and just when we thought we had done everything we found another bit of the park we had missed! It was also movie night when they have float in movie - you float in the big wave pool and watch a film on the big screen! We left halfway through the film, partly because we were cold, and partly because it was Hannah Montana: The Movie! We then had a bit of a problem as we found out there were no buses running until after the movie, which was completely contradictory to what the people at our hostel told us! We ended up having to wait for about an hour and so we got back to the hostel really late.
We had been planning to do the backpackers pub crawl that happens every saturday night and we got back literally just as it was leaving. We decided to go anyway, but as we hadn't eaten and were still both grumpy about having to wait over an hour for a bus because we were given the wrong information we only made it to the second bar before we decided it was time for bed!
Sunday 20th - In the morning we walked into town again to get some supplies and whilst we were there it absolutely poured it down! We decided that since the weather was so bad we would go for a nice breakfast and ended up eating smoked salmon and poached eggs whilst watching the rain which was lovely. We got a few bits from the suprmarket for dinner and also stopped at a bakers and got two loaves of beautiful fresh bread.
The bus picked us up at 3pm to take us to Byron Bay and we arrived there about 6pm, (its actually only 2 hours away bus as Bryon Bay is in New South Wales and Surfers Paradise is in Queensland there is a 1 hour time change as Queensland don't have daylight savings and NSW do!
We arrived at Byron and checked into our hostel called the Arts Factory. It was infinitely better than the one in Surfers Paradise and also apparently the coolest hostel in town! They have their own cafe there, and a cinema and bar just across the car park! We bumped into one of our friends from Airlie beach when we arrived who was on his last night there and we hung out for a bit before decided to go see a film 'The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus' which turned out to be rather strange! The cinema was very cool though, with Cow print sofas!
Monday 21st - We were up early for our day tour to Nimbin. We thought it would be nice to have a good breakfast before we went so James went off to make eggs on toast while I had a quick shower, at which point our day went dramatically downhill as he realised that some mean horrible idiot person had stolen the bread out of our cool bags in the kitchen - both of the loaves we had bought from the bakery the previous day, and which were supposed to make up a substantial part of the rest of our meals in Byron......ggrrrrrrrr!
Still fuming from the discovery we had to miss breakfast because we had no bread and get on the bus hungry - double grrrrr! The tour to Nimbin was pretty cool, although not the most exciting part of our trip in my opinion. We drove through beautiful countryside that reminded us of Yorkshire and finally reached the town of Nimbin.
Nimbin is famous for being a hippy town, with perhaps an appropriate nickname being 'little amsterdam'. It is definitely a strange little town and very different from anything else we have seen! In the afternoon we also stopped at the house of a very strange man and got to see how he lives and hear some of his rather perculiar world views. All in all the whole day was a foray into a different world!
On the way back from Nimbin we stopped at a pretty spectacular waterfall where there was a lokout right at the top.
Tuesday 22nd - This morning we went for our first surf lesson! We both had so much fun, James of course was standing up almost straight away and looked like he'd had weeks of practice, but the miracle was that I managed to stand up! Yes ok, I was rather wobbly and there was a look of terror on my face every time I was standing but we did both manage to stand several times! In the later part of the morning the waves picked up and we were both gettting battered and 'wiping out' frequently as we couldn't cope with the size of the waves. It was completely exhausting and I could barely lift my surfboard at the end of it but we were both glad we would get to have another go at it the following day!
In the afternoon we both had a long nap - we were shattered! We then got up and got ready for a night out as we had arranged to meet up with our friends from the OZ bus as we were nearly all going to be in Byron this evening. We headed to a bar called Cheeky Monkeys for what became a very late night! In Cheeky Monkeys the tables are the 'dance stages' which probably tells you something about the quality of the bar - it is well and truly aimed at Backpackers! There were lots of games and I accidentally entered for one without asking what it was. Lets just say it involved a straw, a bra, a cup and a can of whipped cream and leave it at that! In fact I actually won and ended up winning two trapeze classes! We crawled home about 3, stopping for a kebab on the way, and moaning about the fact that we had to be up in just 4 hours!
Wednesday 23rd - Today the bus picked us up (very hungover) to take us to Spot X surf camp which is about 4 hours away from Byron. We arrived at lunchtime and had to go pretty much straight to our surf lesson once we had sorted out our dorms for the night. We were able to share a room with some of our friends which was a welcome change from sharing a room with 6 strangers!
The waves at Spot X weren't as good today, they were less consistent and 6 huge waves could be followed by a lull of about 10 minutes of nothing! There were also more people than there had been at our lesson in Byron, 30 instead of 18, and this meant that since we couldn't turn properly it was a constant battle not to run someone over with a surfboard! We did get to learn a couple of extra things though as we had already had a lesson, and the instructor did show us how to turn, which James just about grasped while I struggled to remember how to stand up!
In the evening we chilled out in the TV room as we were shattered after the previous late night and all the surfing! We headed off to bed early to find a huge and very scary spider had made a web across the window of the dorm. Not only that but the sheets were, well, a little less than clean - we consoled ourselves with thoughts that it was our last night in a dorm for the trip and tried to sleep without dreaming about huge spiders!
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