The Book of Sifty

Tie me kangeroo down.. 8:55AM

So the Aussie trip?

Well I won't try to give you a blow by blow, minute by minute breakdown, but instead a few interesting things. In chronological order, but by no means a complete event.
(This will almost undoubtedly stretch to a few pages which will be more than most people will read at any rate). So anyway..

Wandered out of the train station clutching my map, carefully printed out from their webpage, the backpackers looked like it was about a block away, but from previous experience I knew that might be a stylized map.. and it would really be blocks away... step out of the station and there it is. Straight across the road. Didn't even need a map.

Found Jacqui in the bar with some girl she'd met on her conference. Had a mental first night. Some how we ended up at the salsa club that Farmgirl goes to. I was texting farmgirl and we ended up about 5 minutes from her place. But it was late on a Sunday so thought better of gate crashing her place.

Next couple of days we spent wandering around Brisbane.

Checked out the infamous valley.
Almost missed it though. We were looking for some decent clothes shops. Farmgirl had said get off the train at the station and its just there. Well we wandered around and around the station, in ever increasing circles, and couldn't find the street where every shop sold clothes. Dang. Ended up asking somebody that pointed it out. I think at that phase of the wandering we must have been looking for some where to but things to eat rather than some where to buy things to wear.

Had a nice dinner with Farmgirl, even if my credit card got exercised at the end of it! Jacqui got bitten by an ant that was kinda of interesting.

There seemed to be this informal dress code for blokes. Sleeveless top, Board shots and jandals. That and a bronzed tan. I felt white, pasty and fat. Farmgirl kindly reinforced that by saying 'geez you're white and pasty Tom'.

Everybody looked like they walked straight out of a Billabong catalogue. Sure enough there are whole multi floor shops the size of small towns filled with sleeveless shirts and board shorts in every imaginable colour.

Was well impressed the backpacker had a bouncer on the left luggage room. Normally this is a one of those backpacker experiences .. you just leave all your luggage in a room.. the staff don't give a shit and anybody can just wander in pick up some bags and leave. Hell in Italy we even used left luggage rooms of backpackers we hadn't stayed at.

We'd booked three nights in a random hotel off the web in Surfers. It was a little south of surfers itself. All totally unplanned, which turned out to be cool. It had an all you can eat buffet breakfast and a nice room. There was also a bottle shop next door, and a swimming pool .

What surprised me the most was how the entire place seemed so geared up to avoid the beach. Everything seemed to revolve around not being at the beach. There was a pool at our hotel where you had a nice view of the hotel, and the back of the bottle shop. There were malls the size of airports, with air-conditioning and everything you needed without leaving the building. There were also theme parks.

The beach seemed secondary to everything else. Infact sometimes you wondered if anybody really cared about the 30 plus km of golden sand and bath temperature water that was flopping up on to it. Every 500 m of so they had a life guard and it was sunny and hot. Still I suppose that wears thin after a while.

Overheard a couple of people at a cafe discussing how they were hoping to get away to their holiday home. What don't you live at a beach resort? Isn't that where people come to get away from it all? I imagined them driving off into town to some inner city apartment. Then it occurred to me the probably lived in some dross multistory apartments there anyway.

With fluffy hand cuffs.. 9:04AM

Still I suppose when we were working at the resort we used to 'go on vacation' to other resorts. Which makes even less sense really.

Anyway back to the theme parks. Managed to get to one, and had my first roller coaster ride ever. The big drop thingee was very cool, and really did scare me. The whole science of getting you hyped before the ride was interesting to observe, you'd queue up out of sight of the ride, where you couldn't hear it. Then eventually you'd get to a sliding door. The entire time seeing no staff or people other than the one you were queuing up with. The door opens your hyped, on the other side are some seats, you get in. The brace comes down. And your off. About a minute later your standing outside, finished. The whole thing must be brilliant way to make money. The throughput of people on these machines must be massive. More interesting was it was very hard to actually get close to the base of the rides. I was gagging to see how the 'Tower of terror' worked. There was sled thing that accelerated along the flat. Then curved up and ended up going vertically up a tower to about 20/30 storeys high. Then gradually slowed and then rolled backwards. There was no cable to accelerate it, so I figure it was either electro-magnetically powered up there (unlikely but it would be very cool) or there was some sling shot system like they use on aircraft carriers. Most likely.

Still I always find all this stuff fascinating cos after working at the ski resort I know there are a million safety devcices and fail safe things to stop there even being the remotest change of anything happening. The staff may look like stoned morons. But really there was probably an exam they had to pass to run that machine. (Although that doesn't stop them being stoned morons of course)

Watched telly properly for the first in a few months. When I say properly normally it's a movie, or something vaguely quality at my mums when I got up there for dinner. But I was on holiday so I did some full on channel surfing of total mind rotting un mitigated crap. Stumbled across a very disturbing 'reality' program called 'Extreme Makeover'. Basically they get somebody, and give them a serious makeover. Not just a new wardrobe and a hair cut. But we are talking cosmetic surgery, tucks, lifts and liposuction. Then came the whole extreme diet and then all the usual things you'd expect from a makeover show, haircut clothes etc.

They hid them away from their partners and family then have this freakshow of welcome back party! Nuts. As far as I'm concerned its hard pressed calling this 'reality TV', since it as very far from what I'd describe as any sort of reality!

One other cool thing surfers was the mobile animal petting zoo in some mega-plex mall we wandered through. There was this little fenced off area, with the ground covered in straw.. little kids entered through this airlock arrangement of gates and could pat small sheep, goats, ducks and piglets. All these very tame and very bored looking animals, with very well patted backs were cruising around between all these tiny kids who were in heaven. Must have been like real live story book for them.

It was so random in the middle of this mall. There were even little 'chill-out' areas for the animals if all the petting got too much for them.

Was sifting around yet another surf wear shop when I got yarning to one of the attendants. He was from BC (as in British Columbia, Canada) and had the same sort of bike as me. I asked him what there was to do in Surfers. ""What other than drink and shop? Well not much really, I suppose you could go surfing if you really wanted""

Back to Brisbane and stayed on kates floor. Met up with Carly (who I used to work the ski resort with!) Very cool. Made it out to Family, which was so like Fabric in London it was weird.

Anyway thanks for hosting us farmgirl!