Out at the Spit

I thought it might be interesting to show you this...because you can clearly see how much of the city is 'on' the water. In fact, this is only part of Gold Coast City, it spreads quite a way further north and south, but this is where I am - pretty much bang in-between where it says 'Gold Coast' and 'Broadbeach Waters'. Officially, the address is Surfers, but it feels more like Broadbeach, which is to say less commercial, more residential, and generally rather 'nice'.

Living on the waterways which can see go quite a way in-land, is of course highly desirable - and it does look nice..but apparently bull shark attacks are becoming more and more common in the waterways. Seems that sharks can adapt fairly well from salt to freshwater. Go figure.

Anyway - Georgie and I took a little trip up to the Spit (No...I'm not losing it...it just so happens that Nelson's gorgeous girl is also called Georgie...but before you go getting all Freudian on me, she is elegant, slim, blonde and entirely gorgeous in every way..see the Moreton posts...not to say that I'm not gorgeous, but different strokes right?)

Anyway. The Spit is that bit with Sea World on it. Sea World would probably have been fun, but not $80 worth of fun.

We took a little looky at all the swanky boats in the Marina instead.

And as it happens, we found some real sea life bobbling around in the harbour, which we could look at for free...

...and take very arty photos of them, even if I do say so myself.

These are blue blubber jellies, like the one we found on the beach near Surfers.

Then we took a stroll along to the even swankier Versace hotel. Aussies seem to like their swank, and I think I'm right in saying that Gold Coast is the capital of Australian over-the-top swankiness (or maybe the antipodean version of Essex...).

Here's the outside.

It wasn't exactly heaving, but there was a doorman, who very swankily opened the door for us.

Inside the foyer was like a FRIDGE. It was a very hot day, granted, but this place went for overkill on the AC. Positively icy.

And opulent.

And oddly empty. I expect everyone was out messing about on their yachts or something. But I'm starting to sound churlish...they were classy enough to not seem to mind that we wandered in, took few pics and wandered out again. We didn't check out the prices or anything. Some things are best left unsaid.

Then we drove to the end of the Spit and took a stroll all the way to the end of the sea-wall.

I've no idea what's on top of this little white tower...a light probably.

Here's the view to the right, looking south towards Surfers. That rather industrial looking structure is actually sucking up sand and pumping it back to around South Stradbroke Island...

...which is right here, a stone's throw to the north across the sea-way.

You can just see the tip of the opposite sea-wall, which juts off the end of the island. Here's an aerial view which gives a better idea of how close it is to the mainland, bottom right is where we are.

Gold Coast basically has a string of tropical islands just - swimmable just at this particular point - off shore. Bonkers.

If you are a keen and confident surfer, then you can either paddle across the seaway or there's a chap who'll give you a bit of tow/ride over and does a very nice trade thank you.

We didn't swim across to Straddie. I expect you already guessed that. But we did see a turtle, doing what turtles do, which is doodling charmingly about in the water.

There's a large turtle in there somewhere, honest. Who needs Sea World huh?

And there were lots of surfers. It may not look too fab, but actually the water was clear as glass, and the sea wall creates a great point-break which makes for very surf-able waves apparently.

I think these guys may have got a close up turtle encounter too - I hope so.

We did go in the water (...even though I didn't have my swimmers with me, or rather I did have my swimmers, but they were in the car and you can see it was a fair old schlep back...so it was crazy middle-aged lady in her undies time...nobody blinked. Not a one...not even Georgie. Lovely lovely day out with a lovely lovely girl).

By the way: they suck up the sand to stop the sea-way getting all choked up, so that the marine traffic can get in and out. It basically just gets circulated round and round.

There is currently a strong community movement to prevent the building of large cruise ship terminal on the spit and, having been there and experienced the natural glory of it... I wish them the very best of luck.