As we got on the bus, the driver kindly asked why on earth we were leaving Byron when it's awful weather in Surfers Paradise, our next destination...brilliant. Well when we got here he wasn't wrong. Literal gale force winds, rain like pellets and a sky full of grey clouds. Even with our backpacks, the wind still managed to almost blow us straight over. Soaking wet and confused by the awful weather, we got into the van that picked us up from the coach depot to take us to the hostel, and the guys greeted us with 'welcome to the sunshine coast!' - yeah, lovely thanks.

So the weather in Byron followed us, and got worse. We're staying right by the beach, a great location, if it wasn't raining all the time. And it's not just your bog standard rain, it's heavy, vicious and relentless. The wind doesn't help, makes it impossible to keep your hood or umbrella up. There's not much to do or see here as we were counting on catching a few rays and going for walks around the town and coast, but the weather has kind of blown those plans. We decided to battle through on our first day here and venture into town. We had a coffee, something to eat and then made our way to Coles, the supermarket to get ourselves some food to cook in the hostel kitchen for our meals in order to save money. Australia is so expensive, we knew it would be, but it's made us worry quite a lot about our money lasting. We booked and pre-paid for about 60% of our trip before we left, which helped because at least we know the last 8 weeks of our trip we have accomodation sorted, so we'll have a roof over our heads at least. If we had longer in Oz, we would have definately got jobs to help us a bit. We met a Scottish girl who worked in a sports shop for $23 an hour, which is about £15. We were saying we found it really expensive, but she said once you were earning, it wasn't bad.

We came back with our groccery goodies and cooked ourselves dinner, which was rather good even if we do say so ourselves. As the weather was still really miserable, a lot of us at the hostel stayed in and watched a few dvds.

The next day the weather was the same. We spotted a break in the rain and made a run for the beach, we'd been there for literally 1 minute and it started chucking it down. all the flags were up warning of unsuitable and dangerous swimming conditions, so we didn't spot any surfers in Surfers Paradise. We're sure when it's sunny it's lovely, but in this weather, it's hardly 'paradise'.

It's a weird place in terms of there are a few high rise buildings, but they're dotted around, like they're trying to break through, so it looks like it's trying to be a city, but not quite there.

We're off to Brisbane now, let's see what the weather brings there.