Gold Coast

Finally had a chance to make use of a hotel voucher we'd received as a present by going on a weekend away to the Gold Coast a few weeks ago. Considering neither of us is made of beach-goer material, it's not somewhere we'd ever thought of visiting in Australia, but given that we had the voucher and the plane tickets were cheap we thought what the hell. The flight from Sydney is only an hour and a half and our room looked out from the 19th floor onto Southbeach, one of the main beaches that make up the long strip of sand hugging resorts that adds up to Gold Coast city, just across the border in Queensland and about an hour's drive south of Brisbane. The main resort, Surfers Paradise, was about 10-minutes down the road and easily made out by its skyscrapers. We lucked out on the weather; still early enough in the summer not to be absolutely roasting. We drove up to Brisbane just to say we've been there before (seems nice enough) and then on our last morning drove to a place west of the Gold Coast called Tamborine Mountain, where we walked through the rainforest on a raised walkway and saw a Scrub Turkey which was kinda cool. Surfers Paradise happened to feature on the news the weekend after we got back though, and watching it I immediately realised we'd barely avoided a disasterous holiday and the worst time of the year to go to the Gold Coast. It turned out to be schoolies week, where recent high-school graduates go on the rampage or a vacation. All you could see were hoards and hoards of drunk teenagers thronging the beach day and night, the swarm broken only by police picking off the worst of the bunch, slamming them on the ground and whipping handcuffs on them.