Yesterday we drove down the coast to a funny little hippy café offering great grilled Turkish bread sammies alongside head massage and psychic readings. They had chairs made of fishing nets and driftwood and lanterns and flags everywhere and a gallery with some of the world’s most ugly artwork.
Pride of place was a bronzed statue of a man that had a genitalia made up from your regular bathroom tap surrounded by bunches of grapes. Pete was horrified as he hauled me over to look at it, hand to his mouth. The grapes looked like some sort of swollen fungal std. gross.
Above, pete enjoying the cafe before being scarred for life by bronze statue…
Weather in the Gold Coast has been crazy hot 28-31 degrees during the day and 20 degrees at night. It’s like being back in Bali. We have a ranch slider in our bedroom that we throw open at night to let the air in. Unfortunately we also have some CRAZY ozzy birds that sleep in the branches just outside our bedroom balcony and at 6am they start their incantations, crark crark crark CRARK CRARK CRARK!
Everything seems prehistoric here. There are white bodied black headed birds that wander about, could easily be mistaken for a toddler from the size of them and they all seem to have a set of lungs like Tarzan. The trees grow tall and thick trunked like they’re used to dino’s scratching their backs on them. There’s bourgonvillia everywhere, hot hot pink, red, orange. What should be shrubs tower over your head like the earth is full of steroids. There is one incredible plant down our road that has long thin branches with clusters of leaves on the end in green and yellow that look like they’ve been tied in bows. It’s very beautiful.
View from our balcony….
A couple of weekends ago we had our 2nd brush with DEADLY OZZIE WILDLIFE!!! The first wasn’t really a brush, more a flutter, as we watched an episode of ‘Surf life rescue’ on telly filming a 3 metre long hammer head shark cruising the waters of the very stretch of coast line we’d swum in that day. Aussies are such hard nuts, when I recounted this story at work they mostly shrugged their shoulders and said it’s very unlikely a hammerhead would attack a human. Pah! Would you choose to go swimming with one!? I said, incredulous that my story had so little impact. Bloody Aussies.
The second brush, well, I can tell you I certainly felt the tentacles of GRAVE danger! I’d taken Pete up to the National Park in Mt Tambourine, a stretch of mountainous rainforest that runs along the coast. We did the rainforest trek which only took about 15 minutes and so wandered off down another track to some waterfalls an hour away. On our way back we were approaching a group of Aussie walkers and they casually waved at us to stop.
What’s up? Pete said.
Theare’s a rid bellee blick snayke on the parth, said our fellow Aussie.
A red belly black snake, I said, they dangerous?
Nort the most poisnis, he said, but it’ll kell ya.
I looked at pete in terror as it slithered and undulated off into the bush. JESUS H CHRIST. WHERE WERE THE WARNING SIGNS!!! I distinctly saw, the ‘look at our fabulous rainforest flora and fauna, you might even spot some native birds’ sign. I’m nz bush smart, rocks leapt in a single bound, gorse pushed aside with my bare hands, bumble bees – got me antihistamines!
We could have died I said dramatically to pete as we scampered out of the bush. Yup, he said.
The following weekend we drove up to Lamington Park and stopped at an Alpacca Farm café for a coffee and as we walked through the gallery to the café out the back it stunned us into silence with this view. .. the Alpaccas were pretty cool too.
It was so quiet we could hear the Aplacca’s ripping up the grass with their teeth below us and we barely said a single word to each other, just sat there and gazed.
Today have our first real day of rain here. It’s lovely and cool and overcast. Funny how you miss changes in weather. Up till now it’s been hot and sunny, every day, hot and sunny. Still, hot and sunnies pretty good too!
enjoying the hot and sunny….
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