The last night before Sydney we stayed in what was touted as a “4-star resort & spa” in a place called Port Stephens-something (warning: memory failing, town name may be inaccurate).  From the front, it actually looked quite nice!  From the front…

Hey, we’re in the hotel driveway, why are we pulling out? And turning down this street? And driving for 2 minutes? And pulling up to a motel-looking building?  Oh, its the same hotel?  What do you mean, we have to cross a concrete multi-level parking garage to get to reception?  Oh, and there’s 4 security doors to pass through just to get to the main area? Fantastic.

In other words, we were right smack in the center of things.

I take one star off the rating for the parking garage “Path”.  I take another for the cot in the room that one of the 4-share people is supposed to sleep on.  And I take one more because the name of our “wing” was Zenith, or peak, tip, end of the line.  Woo! One-star spa!

At least they have one, right?  Hang on to your britches.  Or hot pants.

Its not really a happening place.  The only place to really drink is the hotel bars, so most of us head there for the night.  Its actually quite cheap drinking for once, and a decent enough bar.  Unfortunately they close at midnight… and that’s when the trouble began…

At quarter to twelve I’m wondering when they are going to announce last call, but it doesn’t come until 10 minutes later.  So with very little time left until closing they want people to buy their last round of drinks, drink them, and leave.  Never mind the official closing time itself, just this is pretty absurd.  In any case, midnight rolls around and they want people to leave.  Its quite obvious these guys get their power trips of the day during this time because they start getting verbally aggressive and abusive about it.  Our tour manager has about 5 cm worth of a drink left in his glass a little after midnight and there was no concession, he had to leave.  They ended up grabbing him by his shirt and pushing him through the door.  At least his glass emptied - but it was on his shirt.  Not only that, but a few other girls were finishing up a game of pool and one of the bouncers swore at them to get the f*** out.  Classy.

So, it was with heavy hearts that we had to leave the hotel whateveritwas.  The next morning, however, more than made up for it!

Or, how I learned not to try to surf ever again!

But before we get to that, a detour to the Carrumbin wildlife sanctuary!  Where you can “Get Closer” to a bunch of Aussie animals.  But don’t fucking feed the Dingoes!  Sorry, ongoing joke there. 

After spending 3 hours sleeping, what’s the best way to spend some time?  Why, walking around a gigantic compound full of animals!  Actually the first part was kind of cool – they started to feed these birds whose name I didn’t catch and there were probably about a hundred of them screeching and fighting with each other over… spilt milk.  Or that’s my best guess at what they were feeding them anyways.  I got a sick picture of one using my head as a perch.

Nothing too much else of interest there…  there was a giagantic saltwater crocodile in a very tiny pool though.  He had an electric fence.

On the way to surf camp we stopped at Byron, another surf town like Noosa, but this one seems to have kept its village-y feel much more.  Apparently there’s not one traffic light in the city, all roundabouts.  Maybe the secret to friendliness is not to make anyone ever have to stop in their car?  Anyhoo.  On to surf camp.

Arrawarra or something is a camp dedicated to surfing… and surfers run it.  So it has a bit of a stoner thing going on.  After a night by the campfire we got up with the morning dew and a little bit of sun for some surfing.  Oh boy! If I like it I can quit my job and go live in California and surf all day and rob banks like Patrick Swayze!

Looks like I won’t be quitting my job anytime soon…

I mean, it doesn’t look hard.  But holy fuck.  I could not stand up on the board.  I got everything else down pretty much, but my center of gravity feels abnormally high – I think its in my nose.  So getting out  from the crouch just put me overboard every time.  Not to mention how exhausting it is to be constantly under a barrage of waves – just so you know, they never stop coming.  SO even if you want to take a little rest you’re not really resting until you get tossed onto the beach.  Which, by the way, hurts too.

I didn’t like it very much, but almost everyone else did.  No big deal though… now I know another sport that I will never spend anymore time on.  Another example is cricket.  Fucking boring ass game.

So Danny ain’t a surfer.  Awww.  I don’t think I like the sea very much in general either.  That sailing trip was cool but I don’t think I’d go back anytime soon.  And lots of things in the water here can kill you… very severely.  Like a jellyfish can enter your mouth and choke you to death as it stings your esophagus.  Just use your imagination and it can probably happen.

Next! The very last full day of the Contiki trip (awwwwww!)

I think I need an entire post just to describe this place.  But its a little out of chronological order from the surrounding posts, so you’ll just have to take it as it is.  OK herewego.

Draculas is a cabaret restaurant in the GC that we had the option of signing up for – and it was superb.  The theme of course is vampires and goth and etc etc etc that even remotely looks like it might have to do with anything like that.

We enter with a small group at a time and we’re greeted right away by a cryptmaster-type guy who looks like an intelligent Igor, and then you get to the common area that has one of the coolest bars I’ve ever seen…  the walls have these animatronic half-torsos chained up and they jerk and look around at you while you drink.

But the next part is probably unique in the world – a ghost train ride is what actually takes you to the the ampitheatre eating area!  Stuff pops out at you, air blows at your face (ahhh my hair!) and someone comes out of the shadows to slap your cart while you’re looking the other way.  The best part is that they film it all and then show it to the crowd during intermission so everyone can watch you scream like a little girl.

The food was really great – my veggie dish was served in a ceramic human skull floating in green “brains” (blended peas).  And they make a whole bunch of different cocktails with scary names and taste pretty good, even if they are $14 or more each… you just gotta try one :).

The play itself was fun, but it didn’t really have a overall story like they promised (“Vampirates”).  It was also opening night so there were a lot of bugs that they have to work out – for instance the floating singing mermaid had her crotch zipper get stuck open, so she was hanging there with a fairly large hole in front of her crotch while she was singing.  All I have to say about that is how impressed I was with her ability to go on with her performance with that… what a trooper.

There were some really cool special effect, including a swimming pool and a giant screen of lights flashing a light show while they sang, danced and insulted the audience with jokes.  It was a lot of fun.  Meanwhile the “Vampirettes” or waitresses went around the theatre yelling insults at the customers and at each other from across the room, staying in character the whole time.  Really cool place :).

Legend has it – students graduating all over Australia go through a rite of passage for a week at the Gold Coast, paying twice the normal price on everything and trashing everything in sight, including their bodies.  This phenomenon is so well known and so overwhelming that the actual school years for the different provinces in Australia have been conspicuously staggered to end at different times to compensate.  Good on ‘em!

We hit the GC at full steam after going through Brisbane for a couple of hours.  Interesting story (ok maybe not) – my terrible Radialpoint “watch” that I’ve been using as a timekeeper for most of the trip, and has also been a delightful source of mockery from my peers,  took a nosedive on a Brisbane major motorway and disintegrated right on the road.  I managed to get most of the pieces before the light changed back to green but I’m afraid that the battery cover is lost forever.  Consequently in addition to the random time resetting when I drop it, the battery now falls out too!  I mean its not like time is important or anything.  End of side story.

So back to the GC… this was actually the first and only day “of rest” that I’ve gotten on the trip so far… In fact, I managed to sleep in and get up at 9:30 am!  Victory trumpets were going off in my mind when I looked out the window and realized that the sun was already up.  Mind blowing.

Spent a lazy day on the beach and eating some Indian food for lunch saving my strength… for the night.  Which was probably the best party night of the trip so far.  We went to this stupidly overpriced club called Melbas ($9 beers hooray!).  Just to give you an idea – they stamp your wrist when you enter the bar.  I had to get restamped 3 times because my dance sweat kept dissolving it.  The students in that bar had never seen the likes of my “unique” Montreal stylings, and consequently, I owned the place.  I got throngs… throngs of dance floor people copying my moves.  They had these little elevated platforms – I felt like a dance aerobics instructor.

As amazing as that night was, the next morning we had to get up at 6 and we left at 3… suffice it to say the next day was zombie bus central.  We left the Gold Coast all feeling like shit… and loved it.

Sand.  SAND!  SAAAAND!

Its everywhere!  In everywhere! Around everywhere!

Its an island made of SAND!  Rocks need not apply.  The only rocks you’ll find here are “Coffee Rocks” which are a mixture of reallllly old plant crap and SAND.

Fraser Island is a “unique” place and the largest SAND island in the world.  And it has a crapload of life on it too (Look! Trees!). 

We got to the island via a ferry and saw our eco-lodges – literally lodges.  Which was actually kind of cool because it felt a little like a frat house.  The drinking was like a frat house too, keeping with the theme.

The first night we partied down under at the Dingo Bar (“Don’t feed the fucking dingoes!”), and the next day I went on a whole day tour of the island.  For an island made of sand, there’s quite a lot to see… and quite a significant lack of anything resembling a proper road.

Thing about SAND is that roads made entirely out of it tend to suck. Hard.  The tour was called 4WD for a reason – although they should have warned us about the constant horizontal whiplash to come beforehand.  Picture someone grabbing your shoulders and then violently shaking you back and forth contantly for 45 minutes at a time.  Then picture yourself sleeping though that.  Well, that’s what I did…  The AC was broken so the bus became as hot as a womb (or the nearest that I can guess…) and the violent rocking actually ceased to be a problem after a while, due to some retarded human ability to sleep in situations like hurricanes and tornadoes.

We went to Lake Mackenzie first, which is a natural pool of freshwater that is lying on some of that Coffee Rock that just so happens to be impermeable.  The water is slightly acidic so there’s almost none of that pesky life in the lake, just pure, soft silica sand and the clearest blue water you’ve ever seen.  Taking a dip in there is reputed to take off 10 years from your life… which means I’m a fucking teenager again.  It was bad enough the first time, thank you very much.

Another highlight was the fact that there is actually a national highway on the island – but you can forget any street signs.  Because the highway is a beach.  Only accessible at low tide, and with a smattering of coffee rocks in the middle.  Oh, and planes regularly land and take off in between the cars.

There was a shipwreck on the highway too.  The Maheno if I recall… which I might not.  To be honest, like I said I was sleeping pretty soundly between the stops, somehow.

We also saw Eli Creek, the main island waterway.  Which is saying something because it starts inside the island where all the water is leaking through the sand and flows out to sea.  It moves a significant amount of water, and you can actually walk up it for a fair bit while eels bite your ankles.

We saw a few other things on the island like some SAND and some coloured SAND with rust in it… not bad, not bad… got some sick sunset shots… again…and turned in for an early night for a change.  Must catch up on sleep.  Its a tour not a vacation its a tour not a vacation its a tour not a vacation its a tour not a vacation its a tour not a vacation…