Surfers Paradise – Philipp's TravelBlog

Sunday

I travelled from Byron Bay to Surfers Paradise. I checked out around 9.30am and waited in the hostel’s courtesy bus. At 10 an very chilled guy came by, apparently he had left his bed and went straight to the bus to drop me at the bus stop and collect newly arrived backpackers.

My Greyhound bus was already there, a few minutes later the driver started checking his passenger list and loading our baggage into the bus.
I then had a lovely bus trip to Byron Bay. The trip was about 3 hours, with half an hour break at a rest stop. I really enjoyed the trip because I could see the countryside and the bus was very comfortable.

At the transit centre I walked to the backpackers desk and asked for a pickup from my hostel. My driver was already waiting so I got into the courtesy bus and was taken to the hostel, along with a few other backpackers.

The hostel I booked (Surfers Paradise Backpackers Resort) is really awesome, the best one I’ve been in so far, and I thought the one in Byron Bay was great. There’s a tennis and basketball court, around are the reception building, the dorm building, kitchen, bar and outside seating areas. This is a really chillaxed hostel, way less rules than the other ones, no video surveillance, and lots of free services: free wifi (internet), free washing machine, free games, free sauna.
The dorms are 5-6 beds and everyone has its own bathroom: pure luxury! And it’s as cheap as all the other ones. I got a special: book two nights get one free. That was $52 for 3 nights. I extended my stay for another 3 nights for 25$ each one.

In the hostel I met Sabi and Nicole again. After having unloaded my baggage, Nicole and I went to the beach where I of course had a swim :).

In the evening we went to a nice Italian for dinner: I had cravings for good pizza and had not eaten out at a restaurant since I got to Australia. I felt I could afford it this one time. I had the “All Meat” pizza, and as the name suggests, there were no veggies on them, except for the tomatoes in the sauce 😉 That was my sunday.

Monday

After breakfast, Nicole and I went shopping for groceries at Woolworth’s. It took us a while, we bought cheap and well considered. Groceries for $35-40 should last for the whole week. When we were back we had lunch, then did a 2 km beach walk to the Pacific Fair mall.
Inside I ran into a Boost stand, and could not withstand the urge to buy one of their awesome juice drinks. Hadn’t had a Boost for 4 years!
We then continued to what we came for: the Telstra shop. With my mobile internet and the great cap+ value I had convinced Nicole to also switch from GlobalGossip to Telstra. When everything was set up we had another beach walk back. I then went for a swim before we made it back to the hostel for a self-cooked dinner. In the evening we used the vouchers vor our welcome drinks (wine) and played the huge Jenga game in the bar. At 10pm we went inside and played Rommé with our other german roommate Monique. Soon Joshua from London and Linda from Sweden joined us.

Tuesday

We had another 2k beachwalk into the heart of Surfers Paradise where we borrowed surfboards. The conditions were really hard, the waves were a complete mess. Nicole soon changed her surfboard for a boogie board and had the fun of her life. I was using a hard board for the first time. I managed to get up and have a few good runs althogh the waves made it really hard. After all it was good practice, and I have advanced again :).

We took the courtesy bus back to our hostel, where we bought tickets for “The Big Night Out”, a clubcrawl for the following night. Along with the ticket we got a free pizza from Domino’s that night and a nice beach towel.

Wednesday

The day before we got a new roommate, Katie from New Zealand who is a musician and had her guitar with her. While Nicole and I were having another really relaxed breakfast she came by and asked if it was okay for us that she tuned her guitar. We did not mind, and afterwards she started playing and singing. This was the best breakfast we ever had: Katie sang “Rolling in the Deep” from Adele. She was awesome and her singing was breathtakingly beautiful.

After that we took the bus to the city where we did some shopping and checked out a few travel agents. We spent the rest of the day at the beach, I of course went into the water and enjoyed the 1-2 meter high waves 😀

At 6pm we had a BBQ at the hostel that came with the tickets for “The Big Night Out”, and at 8:45 the bus picked us up. Suddenly we felt like in the middle of an american high school movie, the bus was full with young people (18-20) that were already partying and obviously not sober any more. That came to a sudden stop when we entered the first club, the “beergarden”, where a Salsa Cumbia Party was going on that night. No one of these kiddies could make any use of Salsa, Bachata, Merengue and ChaCha. I of course could, but was lacking my dancing partner. Nicole knew a little bit of bachata and merengue, so we danced a bit. In every one of the 4 clubs that night we had a free drink, in this case Vodka Energy. An hour later we left for the next one, the Vanity Night Club. This was much more to the liking of everyone, a typical night club with mainstream dance music.
An hour later we left for the 3rd club, the Shooters. They had a bikini contest going on, which happened exactly during the time we were there. In all the nightclubs was hardly any action unless our group of ~100 people was in the club.

12:30 midnight we left for the last club, the Sin City. Pretty much the same as all the night clubs, little difference in the styling. Nicole and I are certain that they’re all owned by the same people. The same photographer was there as well as part of the security. It makes sense – as soon as our group left the club they were useless there.

Anyway, around 1:30am we went back to the hostel for a short night, the next morning we had to get up at 7am for a trip to the Gold Coast Hinterland. You can read more about that in the next post.

Now here are the photos from Surfers Paradise, which has this name for a reason 🙂 :

From 2011-06-05+6 Surfers Paradise. Posted by Philipp Hübner on 6/07/2011 (73 items)