Gold Coast - Day 2 (Monday)

Here's the sunrise view from our 2 bedroom apartment on the 27th floor of Condor Apartments, which cost about AUD160 per night for the 5 of us.The sun rises at about 6am here. It's seriously hard not to wake up when your room is so brightly lit and there's no "off" switch. Our first morning on holiday and we were already up at 4am M'sian time!

Spent the morning hunting for a supermarket so that we could get some groceries for the apartment. Unfortunately, as it was Labor Day, all the supermarkets were closed. We had to settle for temporary supplies from 7-11. Very expensive!

This is the Clock Hotel in town.We also took the opportunity to run about and get a feel of the place. As Gold Coast's economy is built mainly on tourism, there were many tourist information outlets scattered throughout Surfers Paradise. An easy way to identify one is to notice the racks and racks of brochures of sights and things to do. They run as a tour agent and can give you pretty good rates.

We stumbled on one at Chevron Renaissance which offered us the theme park Escape Pass for AUD100 instead of the published AUD105 price. That gave us entry to two theme parks (normally AUD66 per park). I highly recommend getting your theme park tickets this way. Can save a lot! We also arranged for a day tour of some of the sights around Gold Coast through the same tour agent.
This little bin (slightly bigger than a soda can) for cigarette butts can be found attached to the street curbs. It's obvious that they're particular about cleanliness.

On a public holiday like this, I was not surprised to see the huge crowds at the beach. I like that they have surf rescue patrolling the beaches and life guard towers every few hundred meters. Looked like something out of Baywatch. They also have designated areas for swimming away from the surfers set up by the life guard on duty. These areas are marked by little flags sticking out of the sand, as seen in the above picture.

Having taken my rescue diver course recently, I know for a fact that surf rescue is a huge job indeed.

The afternoon was spent catching up on sleep. Sunset came around a quarter past 5pm. And after that, the place gets really quiet. It was a far cry from the crowded streets the night before.