Gold Coast

Here is a quick recap of the first couple of stops on our recent trip to Australia. We decided to fly into the Gold Coast, because we had heard that it has beautiful beaches (and, you know, New Zealand has hardly any of those).

The Gold Coast is located about 100km south of Brisbane, and is not to be confused with the Sunshine Coast, which is approximately100km north of Brisbane. As their names might suggest, both places get ample sunshine  (>300 days of it per year). We didn't make it to the Sunshine Coast on this trip, but we both thoroughly enjoyed our time in the lovely Gold Coast.

We arrived late on a Friday night and spent most of the following Saturday morning exploring Surfer's Paradise and the surrounding area. "Surfer's" (as the locals call it), or "Paradise" (as Justin calls it) is the major city on the Gold Coast. Emma woke up early for a waterfront jog, and now ranks Gold Coast as her #1 favourite place to run in the world (so far). Not only was the scenery beautiful, and the weather warm, there were people out doing early morning yoga in a beachside park, people doing Tai Chi on the beach, people doing resistance training on the exercise apparatuses that lined the pathway (the Gold Coast equivalent of Miami's Muscle Beach), and lots of other runners to wave to. Instead of parents bringing their kids to soccer or rugby on Saturday morning, all of the kids were getting dropped off at the beach for their Surf Lifesaving lessons.

We then spent a bit of time exploring the beach around central Surfer' Paradise:

That's when we made our first Australian wildlife sighting - a jelly. We had previously discussed the idea that it would be fun to go swimming at night (Emma once did this with her family in New Zealand and thought it was great fun)...but this persuaded is that we probably shouldn't swim at all in Australia! Although we're not sure if it's actually poisonous.

Justin has a couple of friends in the Brisbane and Gold Coast area, and we spent our first afternoon hanging out with them and their young children. They took us to the local Surf Club (the equivalent of a country club in North America, but much more welcoming and less exclusive) for an afternoon meal, and we really started to feel like locals.

The next day, we decided to go back to being tourists and took a tour bus up to Tambourine mountain, which is about an hour's drive inland from Gold Coast. A fairly small artisanal community inhabits Tambourine mountain (it's similar to Salt Spring Island in Canada), and we really fell in love with the little settlement, nestled into the Australian rainforest, which the Aussies call 'the Hinterlands'. The mountain is known for its lush vegetation, several wineries, a brewery, a cheese factory, an artisan market, and a Dutch clog factory. Our day at Tambourine went by extremely quickly, but we managed to get in a walk in the rainforest, a quick loop around the market, a visit to the brewery, and a wine tasting.

Our first look at the Hinterlands:

Our tour guide showed us how to locate 'Trap Door' spiders, who create little burrows with a flap door on them. They then sit behind the trap door, wait for some unsuspecting prey to come by, and jump out at them.

Naturally, Justin had to find his own. It was an exceptional use of our time.

We were pretty excited to get a second glimpse of Australian wildlife: a turkey!

We were thrilled to see two more turkeys in quick succession. When we returned to our tour bus, we crowed to the guide about how many turkeys we'd seen. He started laughing and informed us that turkeys are everywhere in Australia. He wasn't exaggerating. We didn't take any more turkey photos after that.

After our Hinterland hike, we headed over to the artisanal market, where the highlight was the baby goats. If Justin hadn't been chaperoning, Emma would probably have brought at least two of them home with her.

We then headed to the mountain brewery, Fortitude. They had some good beers on offer, and a lovely outdoor beer garden with live music. We were able to walk next door to the cheese factory and buy a cheese and cracker platter to have for lunch while we drank our beer.

After our beer and cheese tasting platters, we were hearded back to the bus by our tour guide and driven back to Surfer's Paradise. We noticed a lawn bowling club just down the road from our hotel and decided that it would be good to learn how to lawn bowl for our return to Calgary (Inglewood has a lawn bowling club that is popular with the octogenerians). And so began our evening at the BBC (Broadbeach Bowls Club).

We had a great time and even met a group of kids in their early twenties who showed us how bowling is done. We think we're ready to challenge the Inglewood crew to a game now.

Emma perfecting her form.

We said goodbye to Gold Coast the following morning, and made for Brisbane. Of course we had to take one last spin over the to beach before we left.