Travelling with Loka - Surfers Paridise
Continuing my journy up the east coast of Australia, my next stop was Surfers Paridise - The Gold Coast.
This place is quite unique in it's own wierd way. On one hand you have tall office buildings towering over everything like some sort of mini new york but then on the other is a calm, quiet atmosphere with one of the longest beaches I've ever stepped foot on. Honestly when you see it for the first time, it doesn't make sense.
The Gold Coast is known for it's night life. During the day it's quiet and peaceful but at night the place comes alive with party goers and bar crawls. When I say bar crawl, I don't mean 6-10 people. No no. I think we had 15 just from our hostel and combined with all the other hostels we were well over 100 strong!
It's such a weird experience, one minute they'll be about 250 people in a bar, drinking dancing etc and then the next the majority leave to go to the next place. You can see the look on the faces of the people left over like "what just happened?" Rinse and repeat 2 times until the final bar/club.
When you stay in a hostel there, it's kind of hard not to drink when the hostel staff and others are having a great game of beer pong every other night. I mean, who doesn't like beer pong? Or in my case I had Little fat Lamb, a 10% cider which comes in 1.5 litre bottles and is dirt cheap. It's a tramps drink basically..
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Stay away from this flavour 🤢
>So what's the surfing there like?
Well erm...
I hate to break it to you but it's not a good place to surf. This mainly because of the underwater currents which are extremely strong. I'm a competent swimmer but there's no way I'd risk it. The flag (which your supposed to swim between) are very close together and the direction of the waves are all over the place. Combine that with the sharks lurking around and it kind of starts to feel less like paridise.
Head a bit further south towards Coolangatta however and the surf is great! Good enough to run surf competitions in fact.
The town of Coolangatta desreves a mention, not only does it have great surf beaches but it is also situated on the border of Queensland/New South Wales. The border is pretty much a roundabout.
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One epic fact about this place is that because Queenstown and Newsouth Wales don't share the same daylight savings, the town celebrates new years eve twice! You can literally run across the road and be an hour in the future!
Surfers Paridise is home to the Q1 building, one of the tallest buildings in the southern hemisphere. I remeber seeing this kind of image that someone had shared on Facebook.
It looked something like this
OMG Tag a mate who's crazy enough to do this!
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That wasn't the exact picture but that's the best I could find. You get the picture.
I had no idea this building was located in surfers paridise and yet there I was, staying in a hostel about a 10 minute walk away! Out of interest I asked how much it was to go up to the viewing area. It's something like $20, but it's $70 to climb it including entry to the sky tower anyway. So guess what I did...
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That's right, I climbed it! It's not scary at all. In fact it almost feels too safe! (Says the guy who jumped out a plane). You have to do a breathalizer test before you go up which I was very nervous about. Like I said, it's a nightlife town so I had been out the night before and didn't get back untill about 5:00 in the morning.
Luckily I was fine to continue and it's up there on my list as one of the best achievements of my life!
Remember I said that the climb includes entry to the sky tower, well I decided to hang around for the rest of the evening there and watch the city lights come on. I managed to take a few pics before my phone ran out of battery. 
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The room itself is an epic 360 degree view with the city and hills on one side and the seas on the other with a beach stretching as far as the eye can see. It's quite something!
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Overall It's worth stopping by for a few days, especially if you plan on going out at night. At first it kind of seems like a ghost town, its odd. But take a walk around and you'll soon see people out and about. Most of them will be on the beach and with a beach that big, and weather that nice, how can you blame them?
I have plenty of amazing pictures and adventures to share on my journy up to Cairns. The journy that changed my life.
Next up - Brisbane!
Thanks for reading
Great Entry! Surfer's Paradise is a bit paradoxical, isn't it? I don't know why a town is called surfer's paradise when you can't surf there. I've been to Queensland a few times, and I can say that it's great, beautiful destination, but not very good if you find warmer climates troublesome.
Great job, looking forward to seeing more entries :)
Looks like an amazing place for holiday, nice post.