The green and gold

Thirty-five degree heat and humidity is not great when you are rushing to make a flight at Canberra airport, which then lands late into Sydney leaving you little time to find your connecting flight which is not even down on the Departure screen which means you have to go to the check in desk again and disturb the ditzy Qantas girl from her chat and ask what gate your plane which leaves in ten minutes is departing before having to take shoes off to go through security and running, laces still untied to Gate number 9. All this on the sustenance of a few crackers and cheese as you haven’t had time to eat anything decent. And so it was I made it to the Gold Coast!

The journey wasn’t quite over at Coolangatta airport, where I picked up a nice hire car (Toyota Camry) and proceeded to drive with the handbrake still on for 5kms (what’s that burning smell?!) and had to pull over the once to check WHERE THE BLOODY HELL AM I?!! I actually wasn’t that far from my hotel, just a u-turn and set of lights away on the Gold Coast Highway. Now, what I needed was a lovely receptive hotel… what I got was a closed check in desk, a woman on the after hours phone who didn’t seem to have my booking, a key to a door which was nigh on impossible to open and an empty minibar (not even free biscuits with the tea) to settle my rumbling stomach!

So, the buffet breakfast in the morning should’ve been a blissful return to food heaven but in truth it wasn’t. Not terrible, just nowhere near everything I was hoping for and more. Look at me, whinging Pom! Let’s get on with the good things…


Well, Burleigh Heads has a typical Aussie strip of sand n surf, which I walked on first thing…can’t complain at that. I then drove to a delightful spot called Currimbin on a little sandy-Mangrovy-bushy creek. I was there for work, but it wasn’t a bad place to do it. I then managed to get lost again as houses don’t seem to have numbers and finding number 82 of 302 of a road which stretched for 5km is a tricky proposition. But I got a nice home made crème caramel for my efforts. Next up was the town of Nerang, which actually seems a nice little place, set away from the coast but at the foot of semi tropical rainforest and bush clad hills. I managed to squeeze in a little time to walk in one of the forests there. The glamorous life in the day of a researcher on the road ended with some fish and chips at a roadside diner before the journey back along names like Sunrise Boulevard to my hotel.

So more work took me up to a place called Southport in the morning and then onto Surfers Paradise…think of Miami down under – a strip of sparkling towers and apartments between an endless stretch of sand on one side and numerous inlets and waterways on the other. Due to the incredibly hard work that I had put in (and I always do of course), I was able to finish at about 3pm, so I had 3 hours or so, just me and the car I was starting to like more and more, to see the sights. So what do you do on the Gold Coast? Well, go to the beach, sunbathe and test the warmest waters I have been into so far in Australia wasn’t a bad start. This is the slightly surreal sight of the towers of Surfers which seem to get higher the closer they get to the beach, casting a shadow on sunbathers in the hot afternoons (how considerate).



After that, I trundled down the Gold Coast Highway to a more natural setting of Burleigh Heads National Park. Now you think of National Parks as big great open expanses of wilderness, but this is really just a headland between two beaches. It was a beautiful little walk though, through semi-tropical bush and with views both to the north and south. This is looking south towards Palm Beach, Coolangatta and south of the border, down New South Wales way.



There seemed to be lots of birds that looked like small turkeys rustling about in the park - nothing like a few rustles in the wilderness to give you a fright – as well as this lizard basking on a rock.

The trail looped back along the coast and to the south end of Burleigh Beach, where, seemingly, like dude, there is some radical tube from the like swell hitting the southerly current thing man on the north facing curve of the bay and the breaker has like you know churned on the westie.

And so, as people of all shapes and sizes and hair types rushed to hit the Friday evening waves, I drove the final few kilometres back to the airport to drop off the car, and back onto public transport for a bus and then train to Brisbane (a 2 hour journey all for about 5 quid). Arriving in Brizzy I could see the lights of the Gabba where England had just almost ever so slightly beaten the Aussies…but still lost. Oh well, Banana Benders, what do they know?!