Surfers Paradise Day 5

The beaches are very well lit.

A statue of the late Lord Mayor Sir Bruce Small. Whatever you think of him, the Gold Coast would not be what it is today if not for him.

A place for $12 steaks. It is not an old building. Virtually nothing in Surfers Paradise is old.

This amphibian bus goes out into the open Pacific Ocean. I first came across such a vehicle in Budapest, but it only travelled on the Danube.

A Tiki thing. Google is your friend if you don't what it is.

We had chosen to take a lunch time river cruise on Nerang River, in behind Surfers Paradise, for which we had bought tickets the day before. Haha, I got the Seniors price of $25 instead of $29. I started to book online the day before using the tablet, but then realised that I could not print out the tickets. A few left over bread rolls were tossed to the fish at the completion of the morning cruise.

Essentially the cruise showed us houses of the rich and famous but there were some nice views.

Nice boat man, with good views behind your mooring.

Southport School is a very expensive private boys school, far more expensive than our own Scotch or Grammar. A friend had a workmate who after his divorce and when his son came to live with him, concluded he was a wayward bad  lad, and so sent him to this school to straighten him out, with some success.

I hope this is the right photo, a very expensive and luxurious boat with a dark brown hull. What an odd colour for a hull.

It is expensive to marry in this small old chapel.

The Gold Cost Highway crossing the Nerang River, the location of a number of incidents on the tram tracks.

I forgot my cap. As it turned out, I did not really spend a lot of time in the sun on the cruise, but I must think of head protection from the sun and so bought this hat. Once at work a bird crapped on me, which fell straight into my work bag and made a terrible mess. In New York, a bird crapped on my hair when we were walking to our river cruise. That was messy. Just two weeks later in one of our chosen breakfast venues in town, a sparrow on a ledge above me got me. My hat purchase was a good idea as you can see what happened.

A Surfers Segway.

His mate was on an Oxboard.

A few clouds to the north during this afternoons beach stroll.

But to the south, a massive storm. I like a good storm but sadly it stayed to the south.

I'll show you a close up of the sign in another post.

Cavill Avenue Mall. This evening we ate at the Kitty O'sheas pub in the mall. It was quite ok and a good place to people watch on our last night in Surfers.

I think this is at the top end of Elkhorn Street.

Fillum Friday

Here are a few very short clips taken in Surfers Paradise.

What are these tree bands? They are decorative at night. Can't say I thought much of them.

I wish I had recorded this a little longer to identify the song, but I recall it was quite good.



Creepy little fellow and he could do with some meat on his bones.



The clock hotel, where I had a $12 steak, has a......what do you call it, an animated mechanical clock amusement thingie. I never heard the same tune twice from the clock. You may not able to see it but the bells do get struck. Of course any age that appears to the hotel is fake. There is very little that is old in Surfers Paradise, yours truly excluded. Sorry about leaning against the traffic light pole and the consequential crossing warning signals. I have to keep my hands steady some way.

Surfers Paradise Day 4 Part 2

Now this is a serious ride, a very tall take them up and drop them machine. It caused much screaming and the girls screamed too.

Batman car?

Absolutely no idea what this is about.

Ohhh, more than a ninety degree angle. Now we will see who had what for lunch.

The Joker, but I don't know what Arkham Asylum is.

We were near where this ride began. There would be a hydraulic movement sound as something activated and then from out of a tin structure the carriage shot out.

We were up the top end of the park now where it was quiet and honestly, a bit spooky.

This ride was the absolutely the worst to watch, with riders being upside down and at many different angles while suffering a lot of gravity force.

Back to near the entrance. Hello Officer.

I do at least know Batman.

If I was tempted by any ride, it would be this one. A boat like carriage disappears into the mountain for a few minutes.

The carriage emerges at speed and whee, down it comes.

And then disappears in a blast of water.

The water falls away to expose the thrillseekers.

Some victims would be grinning and laughing, some with a shocked look on their faces and some with the jaws clenched and face muscles tight.

A rather thin Marilyn impersonator.

Stunt cars R? Must we? While we waited in the stands, much fun was had with the screen and a camera. One man lifted his phone to take a snap of himself on the screen and immediately he disappeared from the screen. A second later he reappeared and again raised his phone to snap himself and again he disappeared. This was repeated a few times and the crowd was laughing heartily.

The show was very good. It was not just cars burning rubber. We were part of making a movie. Some from the crowd were hauled out as participants and their parts filmed. The crowd in the stands was just that. With some swift editing, by the end of the show we had a movie about a young car race driver who travels to the city to compete in a major car race for the prize money to save his father's farm from a mortgage foreclosure. His principal competitor is of course a bad guy.

One of the last scenes is a car hitting a petrol bowser, causing an explosion and a fire. It gave me a bit of a fright when it happened and I was too slow to catch the explosion with the camera. The show was really good fun and not just for car hoons.

A bus back to Surfers was due at 2.35 and after a short wait it arrived. While not packed, there were people standing. I knew the bus stopped along the way near a tram station, but the route had been altered because of the erection of grandstands and fencing for a forthcoming car race in the streets. I did spot a tram station and by changing to the tram, we would not have to walk so far back to the hotel. We jumped off the bus and a tram was just arriving. We sprinted and made it onto the tram and then realised we had not touched our Go Cards on before we boarded. At home the practice is to touch on once on the tram, not before you board. In spite of us having seen a lot of ticket checkers, we got away with it for just one stop to Cypress Avenue, which turned out to be closer to our hotel that the one in Surfers proper that we had been using. 

We had a late lunch at the hotel cafe and then a rest before taking our daily beach stroll. After a pre dinner drink in our room and we wandered the streets looking for a restaurant that appealed to us. I would have liked some Thai food but such places in the centre of Surfers seemed in short supply. The couple of Chinese places did not appeal and we ended up at an Italian place where we had a terrific pizza served on what looked like a cake stand. The bottle of wine was expensive but excellent and rounded off a good day.

Oh yes, remember the lad with blue hair who was at the same hotel where we dined the previous evening? We saw him twice today, once in a Surfers shop and then again at Movie World, still with his phone glued to his ear.