Thursday, April 12, 2007

How to use your vacation to prove Murphy's law

Our Easter trip to Brisbane and Surfers Paradise was excellent proof of Murphy's law: "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong".

It started the morning of our day of departure from Melbourne. I thought everything that needed to be planned, was planned to perfection, but I checked our options for getting from Brisbane airport to Surfers Paradise and our hostel anyways. We thought that the trip would be a few easy minutes, either by train or bus. The sad reality was that our hostel was a good 90 minutes with a train that didn't go anywhere after 8:00 pm, and the bus needed to be booked in advance. Ok, maybe we would need to take a cab to Brisbane, and then a bus or a train to our hostel, no biggie... HA! Since we would arrive in the middle of the night at our hostel in Surfers Paradise, it couldn't hurt to let them know. We then got a wonderful response back, that the hostel closes its reception at 10:00 pm, and after that we wouldn't be able to check in.
So there we are, 5 hours before we had to get moving to the airport with no place to stay, and no way to get there.



Soooo, this is where we ended up, at the floor on the airport, underneath an escalator. To be honest, it was pretty cool, and something that you remember much more vividly than a night at an hostel. It sucks to pay for an empty room though. After some red wine, I fell asleep, and early next morning we decided to head of to Steve Irwin's zoo since it was only an hour by train and bus away.



It was a pretty scenic ride to the zoo, lots of weird mountains and red soil.

And then there was the park. Oh my god, it blew away all our expectations. There are kangaroos running free and you can buy bags of food to give them. It took a while before we found a kangaroo that wasn't already about to explode from all the feeding that was going on, but I at least shot this video of one that wasn't completely full



And here's one with a bit more action, and even MORE Norwegians at the end :)



And there were elephants. Asian elephants I believe..?



And who could forget "Extreme zoo speed-tour", the amount of g-forces was unbelievable. It was a shuttle that drove you around the zoo, to wherever you wanted to go.



And here's just a bunch of pictures from the zoo, and then we're moving on to Wet'n Wild (its a waterworld, nothing nasty:).















When the park closed we were supposed to catch the same buses and trains back to Brisbane and then onward down to Surfers Paradise. But instead, we jumped on this tour-bus where the driver said he could drive us straight to our hostel, Aquarius Backpackers. 45 bucks and on we go.

The driver dropped us off at the Hotel Aquarius, and half way up to the hotel we realize that this...



..looks nothing like this, where we were supposed to stay:



So we get the very nice lady at the reception to call up Aquarius Backpackers, and this guy comes over and picks us up. We also got a free chocolate Easter egg from the manager at the Hotel we were dropped off at, weee!
We grabbed a Doner Kebab (sweet, sweet memories of Berlin), and collapsed on our beds until the next morning.




There's this collection of cool theme-parks 20 minutes from our hostel and the first one we visited was Wet'n Wild, a waterpark. I haven't got many photos from that one, since we had to lock up all our stuff, but it was an awesome park!





And with our luck, it started raining. But we were pretty tired so it didn't matter much.




After a short rest we were ready for our first night out in Surfers Paradise, Yay!
But a recurring problem with all of us, is lack of cold hard cash, so we needed to conjure up a smart way to get drunk, since the hostel didn't allow anything except water in the rooms.
The saviour was this excellent but very shabby and small Chinese B.Y.O restaurant over the street from where we slept. So first we headed off to our local bottleshop, which actually was a drive-through bottleshop :)



We brought our cheap wine to the restaurant and had an excellent and *almost* free meal. And this included a vorspiel, oh the luck!



That was actually a pretty good picture to introduce everyone. Moving clockwise from the guy with the biggest head, that's me, then Margrethe, Benedikte, Camilla, Linn Therese and Kristoffer.

The bar at the hostel was our next stop, and then a place called "The Beachhouse". Then this is still me blogging, and as usual I can't say that I remember much from thereon out, except some of us taking a very long and spontaneous bath in the ocean.
I also retrieved this video, showing me being very uncertain about where to eat :)



"Were gonna diiiee! I'm gonna staaarve!"


Suddenly it's morning, and we need to get moving if we are to catch Warner Brothers Movie World, and all of the rides before it closed at 5:00 pm. This park surpasses Wet'n Wild in "awesomeness", and we barely have time to try all the cool rides.
Even Margrethe that started out with a "I think i'm gonna stand over here and take pictures while you're in the rides..."-attitude, did absolutely everything, including the Superman Escape, which goes from 0-100 kph in 2 seconds and then straight up a 90 degree slope, and then down another.



I don't think there are words in existence that can describe the way that that ride messes up your body. And it's also fun.





We ate Nachos at the Dirty Harry Nacho Bar, which were delicious.



But when did Dirty Harry have something to do with mex food?!?






Below here is a very consistent version of a ride we have in Norway, that we call "Tømmerrenna". It has you thinking it's just a ride up the hill and then down again while getting wet, but actually it sends you backwards down a hill inside that mountain, in complete darkness. It also takes you through several mines, and a ghost town at the top. Very nice, and as I said; very, very consistent to the western theme.



And this is how we looked on the other side of that ride :)



Amongst these photos is also a Batman spaceshot kinda ride, and the Police Academy stunt-show. The stunt show had a big explosion that managed to scorch our faces from 50 metres away, it must really suck to be close to that kind of explosions in a movie!


Some of us went out again that night, but it didn't feature much more than me spending 32$ on one(1) gin&tonic and getting pissed off at an annoying Irish guy.


The next morning we headed of to the Main Beach at Surfers Paradise, and that's a pretty cool beach. Beats St.Kilda beach in Melbourne by heaps! (Even though St.Kilda's a pretty nice place too!)



Waves came crashing in that were twice the size of the one you see below, very fun and a little painful! Lifeguards had closed of the entire beach, except this little section between two flags where you were allowed to dip yourself into.

Going..


Gone!


These guys started off building a "fire-breathing dragon" out of sand at the end of the day.
2$ to take a picture of the thing. Lets call this one a freebie.




And then things started going south again, real fast. We logged in to my mail on a internet cafe at the beach, just to check what options we had to travel to the airport the next morning. It turned out that our flight didn't leave at 9:00 am as I had believed, but instead at 6:15 am, leaving us with no time to get to the airport the next morning. So we checked out from our hostel and headed to Brisbane with the train to have a look at the city.
We were quite tired, so we didn't get to see much more than this open-air mall. But in return that was a pretty nice place!



At "The Beachhouse" (again) we ate a mediocre steak, went to the airport, and yes, you guessed right, ended up here again:



Paying for another night at the hostel, while sleeping at the airport, we came full circle and our Easter trip to Surfers Paradise was over. While it should have and could have been a longer vacation, the 3 full days and nights we had on our 5-day trip at least exceeded my expectations of the place, and has become a great memory.
And one hell of a long Blog post, that took me over 3 hours to write :P

2 comments:

Andrew said...

hehey... total missunnelse fra min side :) ser ut så dokk koste dokk gysla :) hehe, det e gode ting.. har sendt nokke greia t dokkar.. som e der vell snart:) det kosta flest sende litt tyngde til australia.. sku trodd det var på andre siden av jorden :D hehehe*ler*

Vegard said...

oi oi oi! sende ting å greie! faen da bli bra, får senda ein boomerang eller nåke skit tilbake dao :)