Bit of a fun-filled extravaganza over the past week or so - water sports (and a lot of dubious pirate lingo) aplenty. First up was a trip down south to the Gold Coast, a bit of a surfer's mecca startlingly resembling Miami as portrayed in GTA: Vice City. Interesting when video games get to the point when they can be used as a point of reference, isn't it? No? Fair enough.
Anyway, the Gold Coast is this town/city whose appearance coincides exactly with Miami Vice and Cocktail; luxury yachts and high-rise blocks of million dollar flats all over the place. Someone had mentioned hiring jetskis the day before, so Leyla drove Doug (another of Chris' itinerant Scot accomplices) and I up there. Leyla dropped Doug and I off at the beach on the Broadwater (basically the mouth of the river running through the Gold Coast) and a couple of semi-mullet'd blokes picked us and ferried us across to their floating jetski houseboat/boat house affair anchored in the river.
They gave us lifejackets and waterproof anoraks and plonked a couple of jetskis in the water. I was simulataneously raring to go and slightly apprehensive at the fact that they were going to dump us on these aquatic motorbikes with absolutely no instruction, but they did anyway. I think my assigned mulletee said this to me: "Right, plug this in. Hit the start button. If you fall off, let go. Off you go then." So I did. They turned out to be incredibly easy to drive; turning the handlebars caused the thing to lean into the turn of its own accord, and the hardest thing to do was just hang on - I don't know how fast they went, but it must have been 30 mph at least, and flicking it into a turn at that speed challenged the old arm muscles a bit. We hooned1 about for our allotted half-hour and then wandered around the town for a while. I can almost imagine living there; it had an odd ski-resort feel about it, as I suppose any town purpose-built for spending holidays does. I suspect the 40° C heat in the summer might be my downfall...
Anyway, the next day we headed up the coast instead, so that Doug and I could go whale watching. This sort of thing always struck me as being a vaguely superfluous new-agey points-scoring exercise, but it was actually geniunely enjoyable. The tour company ran a boat called the MV2 Eye Spy that was eminently capable of hooning (main discussion on outward journey: could a jetski keep up, and where would it run out of fuel?). Once we got to the far side of Moreton Island, the boat slowed down and we started seeing the whales - first just the mist of water as they spouted (thar she blows) and then their backs and dorsal fins as they went under. I think I was slightly underwhelmed by the size of the whales - the boat was reasonably big and the decks high enough above the water so that it was hard to really get a sense of how big the whales were, but it was still a pretty impressive sight.
On Saturday, we took Doug back to the airport. He'd been on a four month trip more or less around the world and was heading back to the UK. Note to self: do something similarly irresponsible. Saturday night was a birthday party for the brother of Chris and Leyla's next door neighbour, in a cavernous (all pubs in Brisbane are cavernous, by the way. Cavernous taverns) sports bar. It seems that everyone in Oz has a better half, whether husband/wife, boy/girlfriend or whatever. Being single is usually great; absence of financial/behavioural responsibility will do that, but I felt unnervingly weird amongst the happily almost-married crowd. Ah well, we got drunk and someone threw up, so otherwise pretty standard issue boozing.
The next day, we hired a two-man kayak and headed for a nearby river. I drove Chris + Leyla's 80s Mazda 626 for a while - it felt like a tank compared to the Capp and I had to restrain myself from jumping on the brake with both feet when we came to traffic lights, but apart from that it was reasonably straightforward. Chris and I kayaked up the river for an hour or so. It was a warm, calm day and it felt like a pretty damn fine way to travel. Not sure how it would translate to Scotland (cold + midges) but I reckon I might give it a try.
That's probably everything up to date. More on my triumphant return to Edinburgh.
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