Travel with Indigo

After exhausting the possibilities of Brisbane and in search of new adventure, I booked a room at the sumptuous, if excessively ornate, Hotel Palazzo Versace situated at the north end of a roughly twenty mile long stretch of chock-a-block beach towns known as the Gold Coast, population 600,000.

To reach the hotel from Brisbane, sited about thirty miles inland from the Pacific Coast, I drove east on a multi-lane expressway following the helpful road signs. Before going there I had formed a picture of the place in my mind that consisted of low shanties with peeling paint, sandy streets, greasy spoons, burger joints, and seedy pubs. Surfer dudes and beach bunnies lazed about. After all, the main town of the many that stretch along this coast carries the jaunty name Surfer’s Paradise.

It’s not possible to have got the picture more wrong!! Cresting over the last rise in the highway, I am greeted by a skyline of high-rise development reaching along the coast to the distant horizon. Near the center—in Surfer’s Paradise, my rustic beach village—is at 70 stories what is reputed to be the world’s second highest residential building surrounded by similar if less grand condos and hotels. At nearby Broad Beach, there is an Aston Martin dealership and Bulgari, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton shops, sleek outdoor cafes, several casinos, and a fine beachside pedestrian walk.

At first I thought the place was a twin of say Ft. Lauderdale or Miami Beach. Upon closer and over considerable time more intense inspection, I determined that it’s far nearer in most respects—like cultural sophistication and architectural refinement—to something on the order of Daytona Beach or Panama City, Florida.   Its beach, stretching along Australia’s east coast for many miles, is fine indeed and plenty of people congregate on it for sunning, surfing and idle walks. The seawater, at about 70 degrees, is a touch chilly for my taste but that doesn’t seem to bother the locals.

One day while lunching on Tedder Avenue in Main Beach, the GC’s most swank community, I met a group of guys (blokes) and girls (sheilas, though you have to be careful with this one as it can be taken as pejorative) who kindly invited me to join them next day for a swim at the beach. That seemed like a pleasant way to waste a few hours until, while at breakfast on the appointed morning, I read a front page story in the local tabloid about a great white shark over seven feet long that just the day before had been hauled up out of the surf on the very beach where we were to swim. The article remarked that this one was somewhat larger than the one dragged ashore a few days before. Well, that was all I needed to cancel my swimming plans for the day, thank you, or any other day for that matter. This country’s coastal waters are just teeming with sharks, its inland bays and lagoons too. And sharks are just one of the many lethal predators that lurk along Australia’s shores.

Surfer’s Paradise is filled with two legged predators, boisterous night life, gimcrack shops, crowded outdoor cafes and more than a few strip joints. It is, in short, a fun place though as with much in life a place that requires some self-restraint. Late at night on any weekend the sidewalks are littered with kids 18 to 25 years old lying about too drunk to move or doubled over heaving up whatever they had eaten before the partying began. If you’re over 25, and especially if you have gray hair, you’ll be out of place here. Still, on several occasions I braved Surfer’s only to be driven out by the industrial clamor of the techno music that permeates all the clubs. Though it was frequently offered, I declined to buy the popular stimulant Ecstasy, which, it is claimed, is necessary to fully appreciate the finer points of the music.

Heavy binge drinking, and not just among the youth, is a persistent problem as it is in the US. Just to give you an example of its scope, I read an article in the paper about an annual dirt track motor sport event held near a small town in the outback. Each year it seemed the spectators and even the participants were getting increasingly unruly, meaning drunk, and harder for the local cops to control. So this year the sheriff decided to crack down hard. He decreed that no person may have in their possession more than one slab of beer (that’s a case of 24) per person per day!  It was widely thought to be a needlessly Draconian measure.

Growing weary of the ersatz glitz of the Gold Coast, I drove two hours north to the quaint and charming village of Noosa, something like Naples, Florida was maybe thirty years ago. With a fine arc of beach, an adjoining national park, blocks of stylish shops and restaurants, it is the quiet refuge of choice for the cultured swells of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

On another day I drove an hour west into the low foothills of the Great Dividing Range, a spine of mountains separating the low coastal plains from the vast bush land, or woop woop as the Aussies call it. The several villages that dot the area are reminiscent of the twee towns of Western North Carolina, with rustic shops selling antiques and toffee and hooked rugs all too prevalent. There at Mount Tambourine, set deep within a rain forest, was a wonderful restaurant where I had lunch in the cool shade of massive eucalypts. There are more than 700 species of these trees in Australia, and they are by far the most common tree. As the pine is to the Deep South so the eucalyptus is to Australia.

As the refit work was by now well underway and there was not much for me to do, I flew back to Jacksonville for a long awaited reunion with wife and son and remained there for all of June. In early July, the three of us flew to Australia for a month long tour of the country—well at least the eastern half of it—by car and plane. We managed to cover nearly all the important places with the exceptions of Darwin, Perth and Tasmania.