So Long Southport!

We had one last day left in Southport before we needed to get the bus down to Sydney, and there didn’t seem much left for us to do. Once we had packed up all our stuff and left the big bags with the guy in reception we decided to walk down to Surfer’s Paradise. It seemed reasonably far on the map, but we had little else to do and a while day to do it in.

Ummmmm...really?

It was cracking weather (again) and it didn’t take long for us to be leaving Southport and entering Surfer’s Paradise. Neither of us being surfers we had decided not to stay there, and when we arrived it seemed like a good call. We had managed to get a great deal at the Arrival Accommodation Centre and it looked like we would have had to pay through the nose to stay at Surfer’s Paradise. The place was full of high-rise apartment blocks all looking out over the beach. The beach itself was beautiful, with a decent amount of surf from the waves but not enough to warrant the tag of “surfer’s paradise”. Once there we walked along the sea front and admired the view and then headed inland to go to some of the bay/island/harbour areas that lie away from the front. There wasn’t a huge amount to look at and Paradise Island didn’t look like it at all. It was mainly areas of housing and hotels, with the occasional area for boats to be moored along the waters edge. Once we had seen all we needed to we began the long walk back to Southport, pretty much doing the exact same route in reverse as that is all we could do.

"Paradise Island"

On returning to the hostel we collected our luggage and settled into the comfy chairs to wait a while before setting off to the terminal. As we had walked a fair few miles we both began to drift off to sleep in the lounge but forcibly stopped ourselves as we would need to keep that tiredness for sleeping on the coach. We arrived at the bus terminal with plenty of time to spare and so passed the time playing cards, having dinner and watching the random Southportians wandering in and out to use the toilet. We started to worry slightly when the bus didn’t show at 20:25, but it turned up 10 minutes later and we jumped on and secured some seats. For some reason the seats that we had got on the right side of the coach had hardly any leg-room so James nabbed the last one on the left side while I had to wait until two stops down the line to get the seat in front of him. Apparently the girl who had been sitting there smelled a little sweaty, but I didn’t mind, I had my big seats and settled in for the long haul.