Back to Brizzy – Australian word for Brisbane – we directly took a train to the world famous Gold Coast. There we found a couchsurfer for 5 days: Joshua. He is as old as we and trains for his first marathon in L.A. which will be in May. Unfortunately exact one day before we arrive there, otherwise we could have cheered for him. He has a very strict training plan for that, why he gets up at 5am and goes for a run for 2-3h at 6am at the beach. First we thought “that’s too early” but it makes absolutely sense, as it is just too hot for running later the day. It’s even very typical for the Gold Coast that the beach is quite crowded at 6am. A lot of sportsmen like Josh and surfers who want to catch the best wave (and all the drunken people who couldn’t find home the other night and slept on the beach 😉 ) However, Joshua was relaxed and really nice, again a perfect couchsurfing experience!
These five days were mainly one thing, very, very relaxing! We spent three days at different beaches, because the Gold Coast is amazingly long. Joshua and his lovely mother (also couchsurfer by the way) live at the southern end of Gold Coast. A bit further south, there are beaches and bays which are mainly visited by the locals. Further north there is one beach after the other until you reach the world famous Surfers Paradise. The closer you get to it, the higher the hotels directly next to the beach get. By the way, maybe it’s time to describe another uniqueness of the Australians: If you go to Australia, you will often read about a superlative on the southern hemisphere. We already saw some of them, e.g. the longest jetty, the largest one-bow bridge (yes the Harbor Bridge in Sydney) and now the highest building of the southern hemisphere in Surfers Paradise (there are countless other examples). Of course that’s not really fair, since Australia is almost the only country on the southern hemisphere, which is not a country in development. The only real concurrent may be New Zealand (but the Kiwis are obviously more interested in breeding world famous rugby players) and maybe Brazil (but they have definitely other problems than that). In the case of the building in Surfer Paradise the contradiction is pretty funny. It might be the highest building in the southern hemisphere but it is, however, the TWENTY-SEVENTH highest building in the world…
One day was completely filled with rain, unfortunately, and that means the whole day without even a minute of a break. It was so rainy, that some roads had to be closed the next day, because of flooding. However, Surfer Paradise within rainfall has a very special flair as well. It is, however, a tourist hotspot, but we found it less intrusive than Airlie Beach. There are mainly stores for souvenirs, clothes and tours to one of the countless adventure parks around. Everything is very focused on holidays for families and adventurers/backpackers. Beside the walk through Surfers Paradise, we used the rainy day to plan our next days. We wanted to go to Sydney, but we had not so many ideas what to do in-between. That’s why we found it not very useful to rent a car, mainly because the main attraction Byron Bay is only 80km away. Additionally, we had a bit of time, so we decided to try our luck with hitchhiking. We chose four cities between Gold Coast and Sydney to make stopovers there in order to reduce the distances we had to do at the different days and maybe get back to the train if we get stuck. The cities were Byron Bay, Coffs Harbor, Port Macquarie (because of its Koala Hospital) and Newcastle…