Sunburn Windchill

I got back from Australia a couple days ago, and have a great deal to write; fortunately for everybody I brought a notebook along, and filled it up every day with an account of expenditure (mostly for the parents' benefit, so they know how the money went) and activities, and so you're about to be told about five days' and four nights' worth of strenuous activity! ...well, not quite strenuous. But the benefit of having a notebook to record things in is that I'm going to be able to go into a fair bit of detail, and that means you have a lovely big wall of text to look at!

But first the...

Record of Expenditure (all figures in AUD; these items not listed in chronological order)

26th May

Return ticket (Brisbane Int'l-Nerang): 57

Go card: 40

Lunch (rump steak) 9.95

Dinner (pizzas) 5.60

Observation tower ticket 21

Running total ≈114.55

27th May

Theme park and farm tour tickets 157

Breakfast ("big breaky") 7.95

Tiger/human pendant 6.90

Krispy Kreme donuts 4.50

Dinner (lamb kebab) 9.90

Bread, margarine, and plastic knives 6.45

Theme park locker (DreamWorld) 3

Running total ≈331.45

28th May

MovieWorld clapboard 10

Dinner (doner kebab) 9.90

Theme park locker (MovieWorld) 1

Bread, margarine 6.50

Running total ≈358.50

29th May

Lunch (BLT) 10

Dinner (rump steak) 10

Big Mac 4.60

Adipose stress toy 20

Maltesers (580g bucket) 10

Wax Museum entry 22

Go card top-up 5

Running total ≈440.20

30th May

Late check-out fine 4

Bread, margarine (refund) -8

Lunch (steak) 10

Dinner (Red Rooster) 12

Total expenditure AUD456 (≈ SGD600)

...And I owe, I owe... though, fortunately, I only owe it to one person; combined with the SGD900 for the return flights and SGD200 for the accommodation, I've spent a total of SGD1700 on this trip, which is very nearly double the amount I had originally thought to spend; it seems to be my fate that when I don't spend I hoard like Scrooge and then when I do, the money flows like water. Though I'd like to think that I was one of the more cautious spenders on the trip; the others probably spent a good deal more, since they actually bought souvenirs for other people. (All I have is a bunch of five-cent coins--small change from the various spendings!)

And now we proceed to our feature presentation.

The Day of Fall

I and the only other person on the trip also going from the University arrived at around 6.30pm at Terminal 3, Changi; he had made arrangements to meet up with people from his Gen12ii trip last year, and we had planned for dinner before checking in. Our flight time was around 9pm and so we were supposed to begin checking in around 7.15, so you'll see our time was really quite tightly budgeted. We met the people up--from what I heard, miscommunication had occurred and they all thought he was going on a student exchange trip--and various latenesses occurred (the last two of the travelers to arrive turned up at around 7.30pm!) and we had dinner while discussing job-hunting methods, and we eventually checked in our baggage at around 8.30pm or so, minutes before the check-in counter for our flight closed. It was quite stressful for me; I'm not very much one for sitting around and then making a mad dash to beat the deadline, so it wasn't perhaps the best start to the trip. But it was a start.

The plane trip was, as the pilot announced at the start of the flight, expected to last 6 hours and 45 minutes. I more or less spaced out during the safety announcements but perked up when they handed out the menus; apparently on swanky flights, alcohol is more or less free-flow, so I looked at all the cocktails and wines and spirits and briefly pondered the appropriateness of landing in Australia with my first-ever raging hangover; but I'm a massive coward with next to no tolerance for pain, so I drank nothing but orange juice all the way. At this point I'll note that one reason I didn't watch the safety announcement was that it was being broadcast on the little screens built into the seats, and the woman in front of me had thoughtlessly thrown her jacket over the back of the seat, and so my screen was a shower of fur and fabric; the man beside me, who was a lot less worried about disturbing other people than I, tapped her on the shoulder and got her to let my screen see the light of the cabin, and so I watched Alice in Wonderland while dinner was being served--it was an okay film, not one of Depp's greatest performances, and not at all whimsical the way I thought it might be--and then I fell asleep, stayed that way until 2.45am, and then stayed awake the rest of the way. At about 4am Singaporean time I changed my watch to Australian time--they're two hours ahead, +10GMT--and the plane touched down on Australian soil at roughly 6.17am, and from now on all times are given in Australian.

A fair bit went on during our first hour in Australia; first off we never breathed any atmospheric air, being sealed-in the whole way until we got past the immigrations, which were somewhat interrogatory--apparently hair wax shows up as suspicious on their scanners; their aggression may have been explained by the airport apparently being the set for some sort of police drama being filmed there that day, though. We eventually made it out after having been quizzed on where we came from and how we knew each other and what we were doing and so on, and it was 7-odd before we got to the part of the airport with doors and taxis waiting outside; we had another half hour before the train from the airport to the city arrived, so we spent that time running around taking photographs in the air; the sharp sting of the cold was a nice change from Singaporean mugginess, but kept reminding me of China (which is the only other place I've ever experienced winter in, so yeah). Eventually the train came and we took it from the platform--in fact we took a bit too much time on the photography and the platform was unexpectedly far from the airport, so we really only made it just in time.

Australian trains are interesting; they have plush seats, not very many hand rails at all, and the travel is extremely smooth; there's also none of the irritating "Eating and drinking are not allowed in stations and trains" announcements that you get in Singaporean trains, and plenty of graffiti was visible in the landscapes we passed--quite good too, not terribly obscene and actually quite decorative--it reminded me of the graffiti wall in KL. And there were little kids going to school, too; the uniforms there apparently include blazers, which are worn together with rather short pants, so I suppose the net effect is to keep them really sweaty in the torso and really chilly in the legs. The train ride took about an hour, and then we arrived at Nerang station.

We got the Australian equivalent of the Singaporean ezlink, called the go card, and took the bus out; we arrived at the apartment we'd rented at about 10.40am, and were very pleased with it--it was just across the road from the beach, our allotted room was 15 storeys up, and contained 2 bedrooms, a kitchen (fully stocked, it had everything except food in it), a laundry room--dryer and washing machine--and a very comfortable living room, sofas all over the place. And a wraparound balcony. Of course we couldn't check in at once; the arrangement had been that we would only get the place after 12, so we left our heavier bags with the concierge--shining example of chirpiness that woman was--and went out to explore the surroundings and get lunch. We found a place that had ten-dollar lunch specials, and I ordered steak, and promptly had an interesting new experience.

Now the thing is that steak is served with sauce in Singapore--red wine or mushroom or black pepper and so on--and it isn't, in Australia. The other thing is that it is bound to get you complaints if you serve food in Singapore and blood drips off your meat... Well, in Australia the steaks are sauceless and are bloody. I ordered medium rare steak, and it filled my mouth with a taste of copper and iron and gave me halitosis. Which is not to say I didn't like it--the taste took some getting used to, but once I got used to it--which is to say, once I found the salt and pepper and started seasoning the meat--I decided I liked this steak very much; the other trippers didn't like it quite as much, for whatever reason. After the lunch we went for a walk around--there was a large shopping district near us so we never lacked for food or opportunities to spend money--and came across lots and lots of souvenir shops with quite interesting things. One of the things about that area was also the proliferation of large seagulls everywhere; gulls and sparrows fight for food on every corner, and seem to be doing marvellously well at it from their fat sleek bodies. I kept having the urge to set up one of those box-stick-and-string traps for a gull and see if they'd taste good.

There were those packs of koala keychains, 12 keychains for a little over two dollars, which seem to be why everybody I know who's gone to Australia comes back and gives me keychains; and those rulers that have a surface of various layered images so if you tilt the ruler back and forth you get a sort of animation, which were really quite cool and if I'd had the money I'd have gotten the one with jumping kangaroos. We didn't buy anything, though; it was all window shopping until we decided that 12.30pm is quite enough time and headed back and moved into the apartment, and after a bit of setting things up and calling dibs on rooms, we all fell asleep and had a bit of a nap.

When we woke it was already dark; night falls around 6pm at this time of the year in Australia, it seems. So we went out for dinner, and got pizzas that would have cost at least SGD30 each for about AUD10; they were the really thin-crusted ones with cheese just falling off, and we only got two pizzas between the five of us--about three slices each, I think--the ones we got were a Meat Lover and a Fresh Summer, which was chosen by me because its list of ingredients included "rocket", which turned out to be slightly bitter herbs; both were absolutely delicious though. After the pizza we headed over to the Observation Deck, which is the highest point in the locality, and with a pretty fast elevator, too--ground level to 77th storey in 43 seconds--; it's high enough that you can see up to 60km out, and the deck is wraparound and completely indoors (possibly because at that height it's chilly, the wind speeds are high, and people might go up there for suicide) so you can walk around and around and stare out. We arrived at around 8.10pm, five minutes before they closed down--the attendant seemed amused when I commented on it being early--and bought our tickets and went up. It was night-time, so it was a stretch of bright lights out as far as we could see and very pretty. They closed around 10pm, at which time we went back down and then bought bread and margarine and, because we hadn't thought to check for cutlery yet, plastic knives for breakfast; we also saw another souvenir shop, and while they were browsing I got a nosebleed, possibly due to the relative dryness of the air; we got back, had supper, lounged around a bit, and eventually fell asleep.

The Day of Screams

I woke at around 6am the next day, which is shockingly early for me; the sun was already up, which was just as shocking because I hadn't yet got quite used to the different timezone. We went out for breakfast, and took it at the same place where we'd had steak the day before; apparently breakfast is called "breaky" there, and we had the large version--2 eggs with the yolks up and half-cooked and the whites intermingled; a small glass of iced orange juice; 2 large pieces of toast, unbuttered; and a small pile of bacon, fried to delicious crunchiness. It was a quite pleasing breakfast.

After that we went to a sort of Chinese tourist agency; there are lots of these little booths dotted around the Gold Coast, offering people package tours so they can get into theme parks or other local attractions more cheaply than if you bought the tickets individually for each. We found this particular place through a brochure we picked up somewhere along the line--in the airport, I think?--and then we sat there and discussed plans for awhile and our budget eventually, it turned out, only allowed for a couple of theme parks and a farm tour, so that was what we took. By the time we finished there we had just enough time to drop by the apartment for toilet breaks and to retrieve forgotten things, and then we headed out to get the bus at 11.46am from the nearest bus stop; there is a bus service that shuttles people between places and theme parks, and we took the nearest one; after about an hour of riding (during which we all dozed off--the scenery was beautiful but not particularly memorable) we arrived at DreamWorld, around 12.40pm, and in we went.

DreamWorld is a theme park of rides, so ride we did; we stowed most of the bulkier things in lockers and took enough rides to leave our heads spinning and legs wobbling, and there was even a wildlife exhibit where we got to see koalas and kangaroos and crocodiles and touch them (the kangaroos mostly, not the crocodiles, and the koalas were only touchable for a fee)--these were apparently a very small species of kanaroo, since the adult females (I presume they were adult females, because they were carrying joeys in their pouches) weren't anywhere near shoulder height; they were also very tame. And the food for the kangaroos was amazingly trustful in its provision--it was just a table of food with a little box saying "drop in a dollar, help yourself to a packet!" which would never have worked in Singapore or Malaysia; it was really good, and quite educational too with all the exhibits and performances. And the last thing we saw there was the tiger exhibit, where they had a couple tigers--one regular, one albino--and they got them to do tricks. I bought a pendant at the gift shop there; we hadn't had lunch, so we were quite famished by closing-time--around 5pm--and we bought a box of 20 Krispy Kreme doughnuts which was very nice. I quite liked the glazing on those doughtnuts, clear and flaky and most importantly very, very sweet.

And then we went back, arriving at the bus-stop around 7pm and getting kebabs for dinner. I took my first bath that day, in the hot tub--very wasteful of water but such a luxury! Though I think tubs should be larger, it was impossible to fit my entire self in and so it was really a matter of rotating body parts in and out so nothing ever got cold from exposure to ambient air. We went down to look at the apartment's heated indoor pools that night, and then it was off to bed--this was, I think, around 8pm or 9pm; it had been quite an exhausting day.

The Day of Fur

The next day was slated to be even more exhausting than the previous day, but it was a good day... but I'm getting ahead of myself here. (Ye gads, this typing is tiring; my fingers are going to scream at me all night, I just know it.)

But let's start off in the morning of the 28th of May... we woke and had breakfast--toast and margarine, during which we found out that I like my toast almost-burnt and other people like them all fair and pale but still somehow crunchy; and we left for the farms somewhere between 7am to 8am, taking the same bus as we had yesterday. The farm that we were going to tour is located slightly behind a theme park and so we had decided to kill two birds with one stone and visit both nearby locations that day, starting with the farm. So we alighted at the theme park and took the walk in, which last about 15 minutes and got us there just in time to see the ticket booth attendant turn up to work and ask us to wait a little bit until the ticket booth officially opened at 9.30am. So we waited, played Monopoly Deal while waiting--I lost horribly, as I always do--and eventually we went in.

The farm tour at first looked horribly boring to me (my thoughts when I saw the map was "they're charging us money to walk around and stare at sheep?") but as it turned out the people had cleverly arranged entertaining and educational demonstrations and shows that took up the entire morning--and would have taken up the entire afternoon too if we had decided to have an all-day visit instead of a half-day visit. So it was awesome--sheep and sheepdogs and whip-cracking and all the explanations were peppered with good jokes and threats of maiming. It all looked very spontaneous, too, which I thought was either a sign of very great skill or a sign of very careful planning--in the case of the sheep-shearing demonstration it was almost certainly the latter, in the case of the boomerangs almost certainly the former. And there was a horse-riding demonstration, too, along with damper and billy tea--I decided that I quite like damper, it's really very good given its apparent simplicity of making. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have made it into souvenir stores as an example of local traditional food, though cans of billy tea leaves are on sale at some places. I'd've liked to take some damper back. So we hung around until about 12pm when we collected the photos they took of us--they photograph practically everything you do on the tour in case you want them framed--and we'd taken some photos with the koalas earlier so we collected those--and off we went to MovieWorld, another twenty minutes' walk or so; it was a bit of a fractious walk since we couldn't really decide on the route out, but we eventually made it to MovieWorld intact.

MovieWorld is affiliated with the Warner Brothers, but unlike Disneyland the place isn't full of costumed characters strolling the streets to be photographed and shaken hands with; instead it's got rides and souvenir shops and some other shows, and so our time there was a mixture of everything--we arrived around 1pm and started off with watching stunt car driving, which was a lot more interesting than I'd thought it would be; the smell of burnt rubber I could've done without, though, since it was only interesting for the first few seconds and thereafter was just chokingly thick. After that we went on a roller coaster ride that was notable for being completely indoors; it was quite good, since they used the darkness and laser shows and sudden bursts of light to keep us disoriented and unable to see the track; given that the track consisted of lots of hairpin turns and one occasion of falling backwards, this was amazingly effective. We had had energy bars while queueing and so the lack of lunch didn't really bother us too much. After that we saw the Main Street Parade, which was the first we saw of costumed characters coming down the street in cars and things and waving to people--Bugs and Lola (LOLA?!) and Daffy and Sylvester and Tweety and the Justice League and the Joker (squee!) and Catwoman (with a whip! and gymnastics!!) and so on... all the way I kept thinking it'd be great if the Joker had his gun that shoots Bang! flags, but he didn't. After the Parade we saw a 4D show, and then split up because some of us wanted to go on one ride and some wanted another and there wasn't time for all of us to go on both, it being rather nearly closing-time; I was in the group that ended up on the Lethal Weapon ride, which consisted of us sitting in harnesses suspended from a railing, out feet dangling while the attendants instructed anybody with loose shoes to remove them. And then the rest of the ride was pretty much flying in midair and corkscrewing quite a fair bit--I know we went upside-down at least four times--and the nature of the restraints was such that the spinning action bruised the ears. And so we got off of the ride quite appropriately terrified.

We didn't get Krispy Kremes that day, but did have kebabs for dinner--I had a doner kebab with hommus sauce, which apparently is made from chickpeas (an inherently funny word, that) and was really quite tasty. We also dropped by the Wax Museum on the way back to inquire about entrance fees and found that we, being a group of five or more, qualified for cheaper rates; and when the guide found that we were visiting from Singapore, he got quite animated indeed. As it turns out he used to live in Singapore, forty-odd years ago, and fell in love with a girl and then ran away to Tehran when she started talking marriage; she tracked him down for a few years because she had a job with British Air, but then she stopped and they lost contact and he's been trying to find her again for a few years. And so we promised to drop by the next day for a tour through the museum and went back to the apartment to sleep, all agog at the strange coincidences of life.

The Day of Chafing

It was at around 7am on Sunday that we woke up (ye gads, is it already nearly a week since then?); we had planned to go to church--we had found one nearby and one of the fellow travellers had a childhood friend who had suggested a church in Brisbane's town area--but by the time we had all had breakfast we were all languorous and decided the travelling time to the town area would take far too long and we'd arrive just in time to see the parishioners thanking the pastor and leaving--so instead we sat around the apartment until about eight, then went down to the beach.

The beach was, as aforementioned, just across the road from the apartment, and so we got there quite quickly; I was quite enthusiastic about it, since I'd been wanting to go down to the beach since seeing it--having the view of it every morning and night probably contributed to that--and so I went down and immediately began splashing a little in the shallower areas, though the waves that came in were of unpredictable strengths. I started off wading at ankle-height, but the waves were such that I was soon splashed up to mid-waist--it probably didn't help that as I got splashed I went in deeper, the reasoning being that if I was already wet up to the knees then I might as well wade at knee-depth, and so on until I was wading at hip-depth and the waves were coming in almost up to my chest. The others refused to even enter the water, and were content with photographing each other on the beach; I joined them for a couple of photos, and then we all went back up to the apartment. As it was I was quite curious about the beach, as the sand on the upper parts of the beach was all fine sand, the kind I associate with ground-up stone; it was so fine and so dry that it squeaked as it was walked on; on the other hand the sand covered by the sea, which I had been walking on for the most part, was full of broken pieces of shell and coral, neither of which were in any evidence nearby (and I was told that the nearest reef was a good distance away); I still don't know why it is so. We left the beach at around 8.30am, then cleaned up a bit--I had to change and put my clothes in the dryer--and set out for the city to meet the fellow traveller's friend.

We arrived at Brisbane town at around 11.30am, and walked a short distance to a garage where we met the friend; as it turned out he was also the cousin of one of the Campus Crusade people in NTU, though the family resemblance wasn't strong. We had lunch--a rather unsatisfyingly small BLT for me, which put paid to the idea that white people eat giant portions--or at least they don't in Australia--and then we went off and started walking around town.

We started off by walking through something of a public park, where families and their kids were basking in the sun; we came across a street performance where a guy was putting his body through the seat of a toilet bowl along with much patter and juggling, which contained plenty of adult humour but managed to stay kids-friendly, though I don't know how much of his talk about piercings was true--probably all of it--and we tipped him about five bucks at the end of the performance. Why not? It was entertaining. And then the friend left us, as he had exams to be studied for, and we were left to our own devices; so we strolled some more, and we found a museum of random stuff--Aboriginal history and wildlife and Australian national history and so on--I found it massively entertaining, the others fell asleep. And then we went on, and found a whole lot of shops; I bought at the first shop a 580g tub of Maltesers and at the second (after much wringing of hands and calculation of budget) a medium-size Adipose stress doll, and after that I had no money to spend and no energy to go on shopping at any rate--I never have much enthusiasm for shopping--and so I was more or less dragging my feet after the others all the rest of the time that we were in town as they went hopping between stores and buying random things that I didn't keep track of.

We left at around 5.30pm and took a train ride back to the Gold Coast that cost around AUD7 (apparently it was peak hours) and so had to top up the amount in the go cards; then we got dinner, which was a 300g rump steak and not too bloody so it required less salt and pepper, but was still quite delicious (and I was quite famished at that point); it also had bits of fat attached to the meat by stringy fibrous bits, which took a little effort to cut; but it was delicious. By that time it was more or less eight o'clock and so we went to the Wax Museum, where we found the friendly old man from the day before and went on a tour--it is apparently the largest wax museum in the area, though that may be an overly narrow superlative, and it was full of torture devices and famous people--not the same exhibits!--and was quite interesting to look at. It's even got a wax statue of Mdm. Tussaud, made by Mdm. Tussaud herself (said the tour guide), so that's one thing special about it; we also got the old man's email, and apparently he's moving to Malaysia for a long time. I suppose it'll make his search for his childhood sweetheart that much easier.

We dropped by McDonalds' to take advantage of some buy-1-get-1-free vouchers that we'd gotten after the tour, too, and that's how I know how large the Big Macs in Australia are (the same size as in Singapore or Malaysia) and their cost (AUD4.60); we arrived at the apartment at around 10.30pm, and I bathed and then fell asleep.

The Day of Loss

It being the last day we were going to spend in Australia, we'd done most of the souvenir shopping and packing already, and I woke at around 7.15am; as before we had toast and hot water for breakfast, and finished all the bread but not all the margarine, because I was the only health-unconscious person amongst the five and so heaped the margarine on while everybody else could still see their toast under the margarine. At any rate we had to throw away the excess margarine, and we watched an episode of Mythbusters while people pottered around packing and talking about how sad it was that the time was nearly over and so on; and finally I got people to decide on going to the beach, and down we went at around 8.30am.

The weather was slightly inclement, being overcast, and so the beach was devoid of the usual bevy of people trying to get a tan or a lie-down in the warmth; the sea was also pretty cold, but I waded in nonetheless and without any of the previous day's gradualness, either--I went in full hog and got tossed around a bit by the waves before the other two joined in (the remaining two people were old women and didn't want to get wet). The sand remained graded from smooth to rough, though turned unexpectedly smooth again a little distance into the sea, so it was more like a band of shells and coral fragments through an otherwise smooth sand surface--which I still can't explain... I basically stood there, water up to waist or so, and let the waves carry me up or down or inward; every now and then a really good wave would come along and then it'd be head-over-heels and a bit of disorientation before I found the sand and my footing, though in the intervening I'd be scratched all over while being dragged along the sand by the force of the wave; that was how I lost my glasses to the sea--a wave came up from behind and before I knew it I was spinning and tumbling and when I stood up I realised I was seeing everything in blurry double--I have both myopia and astigmatism and without my glasses that makes for interesting sights, or lack of sights as it were. And so I decided there wasn't anything to lose anymore and was a lot less cautious about getting tumbled about, though I also thought that if life had any sense of drama then I would get tumbled right onto my glasses and find them in a statistics-defying turn of events. Of course, that didn't happen.

We left the sea at around 9.30am, when we went up and showered and rinsed the sand off of our clothes--the tumbling got sand into the seams and pockets and everything--and put the things into the dryer for an hour, during which we finished packing up everything (during this time I went around photographing the apartment and then found that due to some glitching, I had lost all the photos up to mid-day the day before, which was a bit of a blow to me as I had taken some photos I rather liked) and cleaned up the apartment so we could leave with a minimum of fuss; unfortunately checkout time was supposed to be 10am and we only actually arrived at the checkout counter at 11.30am and so had to pay a bit of money as a fine for lateness, though they did let us stow our largest bags with the concierge until later. After that we went around the nearby shops a bit more, and the other guys found this place that has racing car simulators and they played around for nearly half an hour despite only having paid for 15 minutes--the owner was a very nice man that way--and then we had lunch--steak--and bought more souvenirs; at around 2.30pm we went back to the concierge and retrieved our baggage, then went to Pacific Fair which apparently has lots of shops.

The next few hours mostly consisted of me sitting around while everybody else went trotting off to buy things and marvel at sales, and then we finally regrouped and sat around some more until we rushed off to catch the bus so we could catch the last train to the airport; I'd've liked to have caught the second-last bus, not being a fan of sitting around and then making a mad dash for deadlines, but the rest of the group didn't seem to mind, and so I came off looking like a worrywart. Which isn't always a bad thing, I suppose, but still...

...we arrived at the airport at around 8pm and then there was more sitting around (we had also been sitting on the bus and the train); the party split up in short order to find the toilets, dinner, and duty-free shops (more or less simultaneously) and we eventually had an unsatisfying dinner at Red Rooster--the portions were tiny and the prices high, and the food wasn't even well-prepared--and then we walked around some more looking for places to shop at, checked our bags in, and then waited until it was the last call before boarding the flight.

About six and a half hours later we landed in Singapore--I had a Singapore Sling mid-flight and found it somewhat interesting--, and after far too much walking around looking at duty-free shops (really, what is it about shopping that mazes people so?) we parted ways and I returned to the hostel.

And what came after that--I have been very very busy indeed!--is a story for another day.