Surfers Paradise internet down

What to you do if you have a city with a huge and famous coastline stretching thousands of miles in each direction, covered with sand and quiet as can be? Answer appears to be to build a fake beach in the middle of the city as my picture today shows.

Brisbane city beach, just after sunset

So I decided to check out the famous Gold Coast and in particular Surfers Paradise on my last day in Australia. The names alone set off alarm bells, before setting off I had visions of cheap loud foreigners making a lot of noise and pretending to be surfers, but enough about the Brits.

Surfers Paradise is the antipathy of what you would expect. It is only a paradise if you like high-rise apartment blocks, cheap restaurants offering all day breakfasts, and I did not see one internet cafe, so surfing the net was quite difficult unless you took your own laptop. The only attraction as far as I could see was a curious pastime of swimming out into the sea with what looked like bits of old door and attempting to stand on them whilst the waves knocked you off.

It was so boring I fell asleep on the beach after a nice lunch and several glasses of very acceptable Australian wine and a couple of pints of Guinness. I am afraid to say that the only place where you could get a drink with a view of the sea was O’ Malleys Irish Bar in the centre of Surfers Paradise.  Regular readers will be aware that I abhor establishments of this nature, I never visit the Queens Legs in Valbonne more than four times a week, such is my distaste, but when in Rome, drink in an Irish pub.

Perhaps that is why the Australian wine tasted acceptable or maybe reading about it sent me to sleep . I saw a piece in The Australian, a national newspaper today. It was about Grange and Penfold two of the er…best Australian wine producers, competing to produce the most expensive red Australian wine. Clearly it must have been a typo because it quoted figures of over $500, so one too many noughts obviously, otherwise there is the laughable prospect of an Australian wine retailing at over £300 a bottle at today’s exchange rate! which would clearly be a good joke.

So, back to Brisbane for a last supper. Every major town seems to have a chinese quarter and I found Brisbane’s in Fortune Valley. Sadly I was not as fortunate as I had hoped and the areas name might suggest. Indeed I shall be writing to the Brisbane authorities to point out they had missed the unmarried female prefix from the name, Missfortune Valley should have been the correct moniker. I tried three different chinese restaurants and not one of them had a beer they could sell me, it looks like the Barmy Army had cleared them out, and they had not had time to restock.  Thus I was forced into the tender arms of the Kaliber Lounge nearby where I failed to enjoy the most cremated spare ribs I have ever encountered. Perhaps there has been a very fierce forest fire nearby and my ribs were somehow in the middle of it, in any event there was more ash than meat.

Chris France

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