Hello Australia: Gold Coast and Brisbane

Welcome to the Gold Coast

 

After an overnight flight from Taiwan via Singapore with Scoot, we finally saw a beautiful view of the Gold Coast looking outside of our plane window. We stayed in an airbnb for 3 nights in Tweed Heads South which was near the airport but about an hour away from the Gold Coast by public transport. We found a really good deal on airbnb as it was a new listing, we even had a shared swimming pool and a private house to ourselves.

 

What did we do?

 

Tweed Heads South

The first day we did a nice a walk to the woods as we were staying near a river with mangroves. This was our first glimpse of new wildlife with many interesting birds flying around one of which that caught our attention was the Australian White Ibis.

Coolangatta

It took us half an hour to get to the Coolangatta beach and we walked to the Snapper Rocks. We saw many wonderful wildlife such as birds and huge lizards roaming around near us. We weren’t prepared with suncream as it was our first day being in the sun after a month of cold weather in Taiwan so we thought we would just rest in the shade. Sassi caught the sun pretty bad and had a really bad sunburn, she even needed to put a filter on her laptop camera to teach later on. Would have been nice to know that the Australian sun is very strong which our friend told us afterwards.

When we arrived to Coolangatta beach we felt like we just stepped into a stereotypical Australian beach life and we thought every Australian must have a surf board and must be on the beach all the time, the beach was full of surfers. We had a beautiful view of the Gold Coast in the distance from Coolangatta as well.

We went to the Gold Coast by bus and a tram and went up to the Skypoint Observation Deck, we found a voucher online which made our ticket a little cheaper. If you like a good view, this activity is a must when visiting Gold Coast. One of the best city views in our travels so far, on a clear day like what we had you are able to see out over the city of Gold Coast, with mountains in the background, and the wide ocean. As it was Chinese new year coming up there was a lot of Chinese decorations and activities coming up which we could see in the building.

After leaving the Skypoint Observation Deck we went back on the tram to visit the beach, the area is called Surfers Paradise which is the perfect name as there are surfers all over the beach enjoying the amazing waves this area has to offer. After this we headed back on the bus to Tweed Heads.

Brisbane

 

As Gold Coast was preparing for the Commonwealth games, there were only bus replacements to Brisbane so it took us a lot longer to get there. With our Go Card, travelling around Brisbane was convenient and easy. It’s awesome that ferries are part of public transport in Australia and you don’t have to pay much more for them.

This time we were staying in an Airbnb where we booked a private room. Fortunately we only stayed for two nights as it was very hot and our room didn’t have aircon or good blinds.

We saw the city centre on foot, took a ferry to the South bank, loved the men made beach by the river, the South bank in Brisbane is pretty awesome.

On our last day we wanted to have a nice view of Brisbane so took a ferry to the Gateway Bridge but once we got there in the heat it was too far to walk to. We saw a street market in the distance so decided to go there, we then found out that it was the biggest street market place in Brisbane called Eat Street. We had to pay 5 Australian dollars each to enter but it was worth it as the food was amazing with a wide variety of international cuisine, it was a busy place with bands playing music live as well. So we spent quite a bit of money and time there before heading back to our accommodation.