Surfers Paradise onto Brisbane

Wednesday 27th January

I got up early and went to watch the Kardashians feeling very hungry as Lisa and I had failed to get any food in the day before. Thankfully one of the guys - James I think it was from the UK who'd been chatting to us the night before offered me one of his fried eggs while I was waiting for nick to call. When Lisa woke up, we went for breakfast at nice cafe where we were left confused over salt in a pepper shaker, then I had an episode where I thought I'd left my beach towel in the campervan so we did the 10 minute walk there for me to then realise as I opened the van up that I'd actually seen my towel back in the hostel room. We had to laugh it off or we'd have cried and walked in the heat all the way back to the hostel where mission towel was located to go to the beach with.

We'd been in surfers paradise nearly a week and still hadn't seen these amazing waves, so finally went to beach where the sea was like a wave pool. We must have been in there for 2 hours after I initially went down on my own and had to walk back up onto the beach to get Lisa after I realised how much fun it was and that we'd be in there for a while. There were loads of people and it was just huge waves pulling in and out it was very therapeutic to dive around being cooled down. After enough wave diving we went and got an iced drink and walked back to the hostel. There was a restaurant around the corner where we went for curry which despite the service being rubbish was really nice. There was no one else in our dorm which was nice so we got an early night ready to move on to drive to Brisbane tomorrow.

Thursday 28th January

We had to check out early, collect the campervan and got a toasty on way from really nice lady who kept referring to us as 'gorgeous' when we clearly didn't look it! Lisa drove us to Australia/Steve irwins zoo where we got excited to finally hold a Koala.

We arrived around 11am and the first holding opportunity was half past so we got in the que ready. The koalas name was Diesel and was a male. I'm not going to lie I was pretty scared of him, as she handed him to me he was a lot heavier than I thought he would be and had a dazed suspicious look in his eye. He gave me a cuddle for the photo and then I swiftly handed him back left smelling of sweaty koala (apparently this scent attracts the females). We went and watched the main arena show at 12 which involved an impressive bird show but then the rest wasn't much different to the zoo we'd seen in port Macquarie. We collected our pictures which we'd paid $22 for, mine was fine but Lisa didn't like hers so it was a good job I'd taken pics on her mobile and done a video.

Next up we decided to go on the park train to get an idea of how big it was and what areas there were. We got on the train and had two guys from our hostel we'd met Australia Day, Jack and Jonny, get in the seats in front of us. They joined us for the afternoon wandering around, we saw Jonnys fave animal the giraffe and Jack was taking lots of selfies with kangaroos and koalas. It was at this point we realised kangaroos were bigger than we thought as these were bigger than the ones we saw in port Macquarie making us wonder if they were wallabies we'd seen there! Jack had had a koala encounter instead of just one picture he had about 15. We laughed at him as he collected all these and paid for them to be put on a CD - in one picture he was even gazing into the little fur balls eyes! We called it a day at that and gave Jonny and Jack a lift back to Brisbane as they were trying to get public transport back and didn't have a clue about the buses as well as it now beginning to rain.

Lisa and I then checked into our hostel the YHA, I felt strangely sick so instead of meeting back up with the guys we decided to have a quiet night and just drove to get a dominoes (although I did go the wrong way up one way street). When we got back we ate on the rooftop after bumping into Ryan and Pierre again from our down under hostel on Australia Day, we chatted for a bit to them and a Dutch girl and we then got early night

xxx