Part 1 - Brisbane & Gold Coast
March 7 - 11, 2008
Friday, March 7th and Saturday, March 8th: Leaving Atlanta
Julie and I lugged our stuff to the airport on Friday afternoon. Each of us had a big suitcase, a small suitcase (loosely packed to allow room to bring back souvenirs), and a backpack. I brought my MacBook along as well. That's a lot of stuff, but it's pretty hard to travel light when you're going away for three weeks. I only took about a week's worth of clothes, but the variability in the weather made it necessary to bring everything from shorts to jeans, t-shirts to sweatshirts, and a fleece for good measure. Add in a pair of hiking boots and some other hiking paraphernalia, travel guides and notes, and various electronic devices and accessories, and the bags start filling up pretty quick.
Our flight was scheduled to leave Atlanta at 7:15, but was a little late departing because our plane was a little late arriving. The flight to LA was pretty rough for me - after getting up early to go to work, working hard to get things caught up pre-vacation, and going through the usual airport hassles, I was exhausted, but couldn't really relax knowing that there was still a bunch of airport stuff ahead before the long flight to Brisbane. It didn't seem like a good sign that I was homesick and longing for my bed before I'd even made it to LA. Plus, my tooth was hurting.
Now, it's probably worth establishing the basics of my tooth situation here early, because it's going to come up quite a bit over the course of the trip. I had a molar that had been cracked for about 10 years that my dentist was monitoring, and about a week before I left for this trip, it was finally causing enough of a problem that he decided to put a crown on it. The tooth continued to hurt with the crown, so the dentist adjusted the bite on it the day before I left, told me to take a whole bunch of Advil, and gave me prescriptions for Vicodin and penicillin to take with me in case things went south (no pun intended) during the trip. So I was dealing with a tooth that, at this point, was ranging from mildly painful to annoyingly painful. And because I tend to obsess over things, I had constant anxiety that the tooth was going to suddenly get a lot worse in the middle of the trip. (Said anxiety was not, as it turns out, unwarranted...)
I'm really learning to hate the Los Angeles airport. Baggage claim was a mess - we had to wait nearly an hour for our bags to arrive, and had to deal with lots of pushy morons with no sense of personal space around the carousel. Then we had to walk a couple of terminals over to check in for Brisbane. When we flew to Sydney in 2005, we checked in at a relatively peaceful Qantas counter kind of off to the side in one of the terminals. This time, we had to walk past that terminal and on to the second-class, under-construction international terminal. It was crowded, it was confusing, it was poorly laid out - everything you want in an airport terminal.
The Qantas agent had a hard time finding my Electronic Travel Authority (but I didn't get too worried, because I had a copy of the receipt for it in my bag, and I was also just too exhausted to care). Once we got checked in, we had to drag our bags to the screener ourselves, and the bag screening area was in total chaos with a huge line and bags everywhere. Luckily, they opened a new line right as we got there and we were able to skip that particular disaster area. But then the security line was also a fiasco - a mile long, and full of a bunch of people with no regard for personal space. We got jostled and hit by luggage for a while, but thankfully the line moved quickly, because by the time we got through security, the boarding process was beginning.
Boarding was really strange. There apparently weren't any "zones" or anything - it was just a free-for-all through the gate, and onto one of several big slinky-buses. We had to ride the bus a mile or two out across the tarmac to some weird concrete Jetway bunker, where we walked up some stadium-style concrete ramps and finally boarded the plane. Our seats were in the back of the plane, which we were hoping for (Qantas apparently doesn't allow you to pick your specific seats). On our previous flights to and from Australia, we'd been in two-seat rows (with an adjacent half-seat worth of empty space) by the window, which was fantastic. Unfortunately, we weren't so lucky this time. Instead, Julie was on the aisle and I was in the left-middle in the 4 seats in the middle of the plane. The only saving grace was that the right-middle seat was unoccupied - having that little bit of extra space for your stuff makes all the difference in the world. The flight would have been really miserable without it.
We had a moment of deja vu from the last trip, as we had to sit on the tarmac until they fixed a problem with the plane. Last time, it was something to do with the intercom; this time, it was a problem with one of the bathrooms. Once we got airborne, the flight wasn't too bad for me. I'm usually completely unable to sleep on planes, so for the first time in my life, I took sleeping pills to see if they would help. I didn't sleep soundly, but I faded in and out, and even when I was awake, I was pretty relaxed and out of it. Basically, the flight didn't go by any faster, but I really didn't care as much. The flight was "only" 12.5 hours (we were expecting more like 15), and for me, the flight to Brisbane was actually easier than the flight to LA. Julie wasn't so lucky - she didn't take sleeping pills and couldn't sleep because people were standing in the back of the plane and talking for hours. To make matters worse, her entertainment system was broken, so she couldn't watch TV. (I did offer to trade seats, though.)
I actually recall one thing that I watched on TV on the flight over - it was really interesting, and has stuck with me for years. It was a BBC show in 3 parts called "The Curious Tribe." I think there was an earlier show where a British anthropologist went to live with an isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea, and this was a sequel, where he brought a few members of the tribe to live with him in London for a while. It was fascinating seeing the tribespeople's first ever exposure to "modern civilization" - cars, the subway, snow, and the big city itself. Highly recommended if you can find it online somewhere.
Anyway, even with the late start, our flight arrived in Brisbane on time, 7:45 Sunday morning, and our adventure was off and running!
Sunday, March 9th: Brisbane
Things went smoothly at the airport - we were able to claim our bags and get through customs in less than an hour. We picked up our rental car (which is pretty terrifying in other countries, with all the damage charges and stuff that they tell you about), and headed into the city to find our hotel. Driving on the "wrong side of the road" (and the wrong side of the car) for the second time in my life didn't exactly feel normal, but nothing too scary happened. I did have trouble with the turn signal again. This is something they don't tell you about - not only is the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, but the controls for the turn signals are on the opposite side of the steering wheel, too. What this means is that I ended up turning on the windshield wipers to signal a turn about 50% of the time for the first few days.
Unlike the previous trip, where we relied on one of those A to Z map books to get around, I had a Garmin handheld GPS to guide us this time (in addition to the map book). Nevertheless, we had one heck of a time getting to the hotel. Oh, we could see it occasionally, but it was in an area with multiple levels and one way streets and we were able to get close to it but never quite next to it, until we finally figured out the magical sequence of turns to get us there. Then there was no place to park, so we had to just park in the street long enough to run inside, check in, and find out where we should actually park. The hotel itself was nice enough, with a big new room and a nice view out the window. But like many hotels we stayed in in Australia, you had to put the key fob in a slot by the door to turn on power to the room. It's a power saving measure that means that the A/C doesn't work when you're not in the room, and barely works when you are.
We spent the morning wandering around the city on foot and trying to stay awake. We stayed pretty close to the hotel, and basically did a walking tour from our Fodor's guide. It alternated rain and sun for most of the day, but we managed to dodge most of the rain. We saw the Old Windmill, which is apparently the oldest surviving building in Queensland, some other historic buildings that weren't in our guidebook, and some cool looking modern buildings, too. The Brisbane City Hall was interesting inside, and we rode an elevator up to the top of the clock tower through the inside of the clock. The view from the top wasn't anything special, though. The Museum of Brisbane was also a little underwhelming - one exhibit was closed for a change-out, and the other was about a local insane asylum.
Around lunch, we stopped into a CD store to try to complete a mission I'd been given by my friend Jeff Elbel. He was looking for a CD by the Persian Rugs, a side project of Australian band the Hoodoo Gurus. At this store, I failed, because I couldn't remember the name of the band, and neither could the dude who worked there. We had lunch at a Hungry Jack (Australian Burger King; I know, typical Americans...). It was pretty much the same as Burger King at home, except that the "bacon" on Julie's bacon cheeseburger was ham, which was both surprising and unfortunate on multiple levels. There was an odd mix of "Americana" in the dining room - rebel flags, Elvis, the Three Stooges, old cars, John Wayne, etc. It's interesting to see what random things represent American culture in other parts of the world.
As we wandered around downtown Brisbane, we came across some interesting public art, including some cool kangaroos made of mechanical parts. We also saw an amusing stick figure warning sign, this time "stick figure climbing on public art." The sign did not appear to be very effective. We also passed an unidentified cool old building - I like all the arches.
We visited the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, which were more interesting for the fauna (baby birds, giant iguanas, and an occasional horrifying spider) than the flora, although we did see some kind of tree with fruit in a weird place. We walked through a stand of mangrove trees (with lots of "knees" growing out of the mud) by the river, then crossed the Goodwill Bridge, a cool pedestrian bridge, to the south side of the river. We got a good view into the Maritime Museum (with an old boat in an old dry dock) from the bridge, but didn't go in.
Around 2 PM, we started crashing pretty hard, and couldn't believe it was that early in the day. We walked by a few other interesting things - a nice view of a marina on the river, a traffic island with an awesome tree growing in it, a pretty park called Anzac Square, and a really fancy drinking fountain. When we failed to find a church we were looking for and instead found our hotel by accident, we took that as a sign and took a nap that was more like a coma. Eventually we woke up and went back out to find dinner. We were too tired for a sit down meal, and the only quick and easy places that was open (besides McDonald's and Hungry Jack) was Subway, so Subway it was. (Don't judge - jet lag is a killer, and Julie had a migraine.) After snapping a couple of pictures of the City Hall illuminated at night, we went back to the hotel and called it an early night.
A few random impressions from the day:
- Brisbane seemed like a disproportionately young city, based on the people we saw during the day. There were students out sketching buildings all around the city, for some reason.
- There was a surprising amount of trash around the city, and some graffiti, which we really hadn't encountered in Australia before.
- Cricket scores on TV are utterly incomprehensible to the uninitiated. A snowstorm in the U.S. actually got some coverage on the news.
- I had a new cell phone for this trip, but no coverage - I guess it wasn't compatible with their network. That was a bummer - I enjoyed getting basketball scores from the NCAA tournament from my friend Joe at all hours of the night the last time we were in Australia.
- The hotel also didn't have free wireless internet, so we were good and cut off from home. I'm not really a slave to e-mail (especially work e-mail), but that's still actually kind of liberating.
Monday, March 10th: Gold Coast
I slept pretty well for my first night displaced by a lot of time zones - I woke up around 4 AM, but went back to sleep until about 7. We got up and went to a cafe near the hotel for breakfast, and then loaded up the car with all our bags. The elevator in the hotel was pretty old-school - the door was manually operated, and the whole thing was basically just in an open cage in the middle of an open central stairwell. It was a little intimidating, especially with a brain still fuzzy from jet lag, but we managed to operate the elevator to get our bags to the lobby without killing ourselves or any innocent bystanders. We drove south out of Brisbane in a Monday morning rush hour. Traffic was heavy, and there were lots of buses and jaywalking pedestrians, but the trip was thankfully uneventful. I think the drivers there were more polite and forgiving than people here in the U.S.
We were heading to an area called the Gold Coast, which is more or less a slightly upscale version of Florida's Gulf Coast beach areas. Lots of condos and hotels fronting the beach, lots of tourist-based businesses, but somehow not quite as gross as Florida. Our destination was Dreamworld, a combination amusement and water park. We did a lot of nature hikes and off-the-beaten-path stuff during our last trip, and had plenty planned for this trip, so we figured we'd switch things up for a day and see what an Australian amusement park was like. The answer was "pretty good."
The amusement park was fun. It didn't have a ton of rides, but it had enough, and the shops and other amenities were well-done and looked new. Thoughts on some of the rides:
- The Giant Drop was intense - it used to be the highest drop ride in the world. When it got to the top, it left me hanging there for what seemed like a minute to ponder my position, and the wind was howling, causing the whole tower to shake. Drop rides are about the only kind of amusement park rides that still scare me, and this one was no exception.
- Julie willingly rode the Moto GP ride with me - kind of like a midrange rollercoaster, but you sit on individual replica motorcycles.
- The Cyclone roller coaster had an interesting line layout, walking up a vertical spiral, but exiting riders had to cross through the line to exit, which was weird. It took forever to load and unload, so they only dispatched a train every 5 minutes or so. The line took forever even though it was short, and the ride was rough and not all that exciting.
- While riding the steam train around the park, we discovered that slack-jawed yokels are not just an American phenomenon. Said yokels were chasing goannas (giant Australian lizards) around the train tracks with little regard for their personal safety.
- Wipeout was unique. It wasn't a ton of fun, but it was a type of ride that I'd never seen before, kind of in between an amusement park ride and a fair ride. (That's me at the left end of the top row.)
- The Claw was pretty wild - it was one of those big pendulums that flips you upside down, except the seating was in a circle, and the pendulum spun around on its axis while also looping.
- The Tower of Terror was cool because it actually shared the same tower as the Giant Drop. It was really fast as it rocketed you out of the station and up the tower, but not quite as scary as the Giant Drop was.
- Of course we rode the old-timey cars, with Julie chauffeuring me around, as is our custom.
The park also had an animal section with a selection of Australian natives. We saw a wombat (kind of - they're shy) and some bilbies (also known as rabbit-eared bandicoots - a bilby is the Australian stand-in for the Easter Bunny, apparently). We got to pet a wallaby (or pretend to pet a wallaby), and saw a cute baby kangaroo hopping around on wobbly little legs. We saw some pelicans. An emu burped at us. And they had some super-cute koalas, one of which was hyperactive, climbing all over the place, much to the chagrin of the other, more chill koalas. We also thought we were going to see what happened when very small children (unsupervised by yokel parents) fell into the koala enclosure, but sadly it didn't happen.
Next, we headed across the parking lot to the water park, which was fun (although we didn't really have enough time to fully appreciate it) after we managed to find the changing room and rent a locker. (The sign for the bathrooms was awesome.) Julie rode one water slide, got freaked out, and wouldn't ride any more. I rode some other slides with random strangers, but didn't ride a couple of things I wanted to (including this kind of roller coaster waterslide that went both down and up hills with the aid of water jets) because it was just too awkward to ride with random strangers.
Julie went for a float in the wave pool, and it turns out that she's a terrible paddler - she got whistled at by a lifeguard for getting to close to the "no float zone" where the waves come out. I also nearly killed her by accidentally flipping her inner tube over - she scraped her elbow and shoulder on the bottom of the pool, and I felt really bad. And finally, I rubbed a nasty blister on the ball of my foot (more like a hole in my foot, really) from walking around on the rough concrete sidewalks and the bottom of the wave pool. Good thing I brought my foot care kit, because we had a lot of hiking planned over the next couple of weeks.
We left the park and drove down the coast through Surfer's Paradise, which looked like a cross between Miami Beach (big tall condos and hotels on the water) and Panama City (lots of little dumpy motels and sketchy restaurants). We tried to visit Pacific Fair, a giant outdoor mall that was recommended by Fodor's, but everything had closed at 5:30 or 6:00. We did stop by a Coles grocery store to get some breakfast food and road trip snacks (and probably some Tim Tams and Kit-Kats).
So, utterly exhausted from jet lag and a full day spent at an amusement park and water park, we arrived at our hotel in Burleigh Heads a bit before 7 PM. It seemed like a reasonable place (a Best Western), but we had to do "late check-in," which entailed standing outside the hotel and placing a call on a call box so the operator could give you the code to get your room key out of a nearby lockbox. That was smooth and easy, so we dragged ourselves and our 4 suitcases and 2 backpacks and assorted other things up to our room, only to open the door and find that it was completely unmade - bed a mess, etc. We dragged everything back down to the call box, and they told us to grab the keys to a different room. Back upstairs with all our stuff, only to find that room even more unmade than the last one - bed a mess, towels and room service remnants on the floor. Back downstairs to the phone, got another room, back upstairs expecting to find a corpse in the room, but instead found just another unmade room. Back downstairs again, and on the brink of collapse, they finally connected us to the manager, who was in her on-site apartment.
The manager came out and met us in the lobby while apologizing (apparently the maids had just not shown up that day), and then went behind the counter, which had an aluminum mesh security cage around it. As she passed another room key out of the cage to me, she bumped one wall of the cage and it actually started to tip over because it wasn't secured. I helped her get the "security" cage put back together, and then she walked with us to a room to verify that it was clean and ready to go, gave us breakfast tickets for our troubles, and left us to it. I had to do minor electrical surgery on the room to get the A/C and the alarm clock working (remember - jet lag, amusement park, and no dinner yet). I think that qualifies me as a certified electrician in Australia. (But I swear, despite all of this, it was a perfectly acceptable hotel, minus my bad karma.)
We tried to find a nearby pizza joint using the GPS, but when we got there, it was closed. In exhaustion and desperation, we went next door to a vegetarian hippie restaurant called the Magic Apple, where we had some lukewarm vegetarian food. (This was not a great trip for food, if I'm honest.)
Walking back to the hotel, I tried in vain to warn Julie off walking into a giant spider web across the sidewalk with a giant gnarly spider right at forehead height. She thought I was playing around and accelerated directly through the spider web. I thought she had the giant spider on her head, and she ran around in circles screaming "getitoffgetitoffgetitoff," ironically completely preventing me from being able to get it off. Luckily, the spider was still on the web so I didn't have to grab a stick from some sort of nearby poisonous stinging tree to knock it off her head with, because let's face it, I'm not about to touch a giant gnarly Australian spider.
Back at the hotel, we were pleasantly surprised to find our belongings still in the room, and turned in after a really, really long day.
Tuesday, March 11th: Gold Coast Hinterlands
Despite the fact that the shower head was at chest height and the shower only had one door (so, like, half of it was wide open, apparently on purpose), our hard-won hotel room turned out to be OK. Our comped breakfast buffet was also OK (not worth the $9.50 each we would have paid, but good enough).
We woke up early again, which I don't really mind - I like getting an early start when I'm on vacation. We had to wait for the reception desk to open before we could check out, so we strolled down to the beach that was a block away. It was really pretty, with white sand, clear water, and big surf, and also unbearably, indescribably bright. Back at the hotel, there was a group of middle-aged Korean tourists checking out at the same time as us (that's foreshadowing, I guess).
Our first stop was Springbrook National Park, which was about 30 miles away from the hotel, and also a world away. We drove away from the highly developed beachfront area and before we knew it, we were in wild, forested mountains driving across one lane wooden bridges. At the first scenic overlook we stopped at, you could see all the way back down to the ocean and all the big buildings by the beach. You could also see that same Korean family from the hotel lobby - they must have had the same tour book that we did.
Our next stop was Purling Brook Falls, in an area kind of like the Blue Mountains area outside Sydney that we visited on our first Australia trip. There are canyons eroded into the edge of a high plateau, with streams through the forest plunging hundreds of feet over the cliffs. It would have been cool to hike the trail down to the bottom of Purling Brook Falls (which you can see about 300 feet below the overlook in that last photo), but the trail was partially closed due to flood damage, and we had a long list of things to see. We did take time to check out a really big hollow tree before moving on.
As we drove through the rainforest, we saw lots of cows and horses and sheep - apparently a lot of the rainforest was cleared to create pastures back in the day. We stopped by the visitor centre to get a map of the area, and ran into that same Korean family again. We walked a little boardwalk trail at the visitor center, and saw a pademelon (or maybe a wallaby) hanging out beside the trail. It seemed completely unbothered by us watching it eat and scratch, so we eventually moved on, and saw a couple more of them as we travelled. It's weird - during our first 3 weeks in Australia, we saw exactly one-quarter of a kangaroo (the back part, just darting into the woods beside the road at twilight). This time, we saw a whole lot of different kangaroo-type creatures throughout the whole trip.
We drove to the Canyon Lookout, where we ran into the same Korean family yet again, and decided to postpone our hike on the Twin Falls Trail because the weather looked a little threatening. We drove around to a couple of other lookouts (and saw what was described as the "wettest picnic table in Australia"), then came back for the Twin Falls Trail, where that same Korean family was starting the trail as well. The trail was amazing, descending down the side of the cliff through rainforest. It passed through a natural tunnel, by several small waterfalls, and eventually took us behind Twin Falls itself (here's another view), and later behind another waterfall.
So, I'm walking through this amazing trail on the side of a mountain through a rainforest, and then I looked down at where I was about to step and screamed like a girl. Of all the things I'd expect to find in that environment, not particularly close to water, a little blue lobster scuttling across the trail was not even on the list. Apparently, as we found out later, there are things called "blue crays" that live in the area - we saw a couple more of them in a creek later.
We learned that in Australia even the trees are out to get you. We started seeing some big, fat, creepy-looking black lizards called skinks, each one larger than the one before, before climbing back up to the tops of the falls. The change in the appearance of the trail was remarkable from when we were down at the bottom of the cliffs to when we were up at the top of the cliffs. On the way back to the car, we saw a brush turkey walking around a picnic area. And finally, we got our last look at the Korean family we'd been following around all morning.
Despite the fact that we were starving, we went to the Best of All Lookout, which was merely pretty good, because it was kind of hazy, cold, and windy. We did see some 2000 year old Antarctic Beech trees along the trail, though, and another pademelon.
We had lunch at a local restaurant. The food was only OK, but the place was really entertaining nonetheless. We ate on the patio with birds around us and a guy walking around with a little snake (which he let Julie hold - she'll hold a snake, but won't pet a wallaby...), and fed semi-domesticated rainbow lorikeets out on the lawn. There were a ton of them around, and they'd come land on you if you held out little plates with food on them (but we did learn a valuable lesson - wear long sleeves, or their sharp little claws will leave a bunch of tiny bleeding scratches on your arms). That was really cool, and we'd already had a really great day and it was only early afternoon!
After lunch, we drove to Natural Bridge, passing some very wild looking mountains and lots of pastures with cows, horses, and sheep along the way. The trail took us past a remarkably huge strangler fig. The natural bridge from which the area takes its name is a waterfall flowing through a hole in the roof of a small cave. There are glow worms living in the cave, but they weren't glowing at the time of day we were there, and part of the trail was damaged and closed - I guess they must have had some bad storms in the fairly recent past, because a lot of the trails were damaged and restricted. (Oh, and although we didn't see them, there are apparently eels living in the creek. Eels! Weird.)
We were close to the state border with New South Wales, so we drove south into NSW and then turned around and drove north back into Queensland. We stopped to check our plan, and realized that we were just going to have to skip another awesome national park altogether. We instead started searching for the last thing on our list, Tamborine National Park. We had a hard time finding it, driving on ridiculously steep roads (11 to 16% grades for long distances), but eventually found the Cedar Creek Trail. It was OK, but kind of paled in comparison with the things we'd seen earlier in the day.
Then it was back to Brisbane, and the hard-to-get-to hotel we'd stayed in the first night. We found it with no problem this time, checked in, and started thinking about dinner. The blister on the bottom of my foot made me not want to do any more walking for the day, so we ordered a pizza. It was pretty much a failure - $35 for a medium pizza and some garlic bread that was passable at best. Good, cheap food was hard to come by. We also bought two Kit Kat bars for the princely sum of $5.20. (Still worth it.) Dead tired, but hopefully more from physical activity than jet lag, we called it a day before 10 PM.