Surfers Paradise and Beyond

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We moved on from Byron Bay on the 20th to try to travel a bit further on towards Brisbane. Along the way is a town that someone rather cleverly named Surfers Paradise - from what we'd heard and read it not actually much of a paradise so we didn't want to stay there but did drive by for a bit of a look. It's very built up with what look like quite expensive hotels and it had miles of sand. It's where the Aussies come on holiday - very nice! Around the area are several theme parks and we thought we'd treat ourselves to a day at Movie World. We decided to camp in the nearby Mount Tamborine National Park so that we could be close for the following day.
We have found that the people who run campsites are generally a bit odd and standoffish so it was lovely when we found a campsite in Mt Tamborine where the lady was kind and helpful and chatty. We liked her very much. The campsite was situated beside a creek which we walked along and we also took a look at the local waterfalls. From the other side of the mountain we got some very good views back over to the coast - we could see the sea and all the highrises of Surfers.

That evening, excitingly, we had our very own campfire and toasted marshmallows. To make the most of our fire we sat around and made up stories about Kookaburras!

MovieWorld was pretty cool the following day (21st). It was a bit smaller than Alton Towers but with around a 10th of the people. We hardly had to queue to go on the rides or to get into any of the shows. Chris had fun on the Batman space shot, and luckily Superman rescued him from a subway a couple of times. We saw a funny Shrek 4D show where the seats move you around a bit and Donkey sneezed on us!
Continuing our hectic shedule we drove onto Brisbane late that afternoon. We visited a not too helpful Tourist Information place in the city centre who told us there were no campsites near Brisbane. We knew this wasn't true as we'd found one on the internet which we'd forgotten to write down the directions for, but with some greatly inspired bus following by Chris we found it!