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Sunday 27th January - Surfers Paradise
When we woke up this morning, Al noticed a note on her rucksack. It was from Chris and it asked for her Facebook. Ha. Al has pulled!! ;)
We checked out and Jack gave us a lift to the bus stop. It was still raining heavily in Byron and he told us about the tornados which had hit Bundaberg, explaining all of the rain and high speed winds. Great!!
We arrived in Surfers and the weather was tha same as in Byron, if not worse. Surfers Paradise seemed anything but that at the moment.
We arrived at our hostel 'Surf and Sun' and had to wait to check in to our room. We were really hungry, so decided to pop across the road to a cafe for some lunch. Chel and I put our rain macs on (so English), Al braved it, and off we went to face the horrendous weather. We got soaked!! Chel and I even got blown backwards down the street as our rain macs had ballooned up from the gail force wind. So scary!! Al found this hilairious and couldn't stop laughing. We eventually made it across the street to the cafe. What a mission!! We all looked like drowned rats and like we had been blown through a hedge backwards.. No joke!! We laughed at the fact that we all looked so awful. We ordered, ate (it was delicious) and had a milkshake (which was also amazing) We then risked it back to the hostel (without our macs on this time, as we didn't want to risk blowing away again)!!
We checked in and then had to walk up the spiral staircase outside to get to our 6 bed dorm, on the top floor (As if we were not soaked enough). We had different room mates over the 3 days of being here and most of them were really nice and friendly, 3 of them not so.
The weather was all over the news. Bundaberg had been hit the worst. The 6 tornados had hit there and caused major flooding. They said that it was worse than back in 2010/2011. Oh boy! A couple of people had died due to getting stuck in the floods and people were being told not to attempt to drive through them. It was sad to see people's homes destroyed and deaths caused by all of this. There were warnings for everyone down the East Coast to stay indoors and not to venture out.
We were pretty much restricted to our room/hostel for the next couple of days, which was gutting as we were hoping to have seen some of the town. But there wasn't anything that we could do, we just had to wait for it to pass. We were praying that this would not affect our travel plans as we had heard, on the news, that they had to evacuate back packers from Fraser Island and close it. Also the Greyhound buses, which we travelled on were not running passed Brisbane. Bloody mother nature!!
It was pretty boring being stuck inside but we were able to keep up to date with the news and any new information. The worst for us, down the Gold Coast, would be tonight (Monday 28th Jan). We ventured out quickly to the shop opposite to get some food etc. But made sure that we stayed in the rest of the time.
I have never seen weather like this in all of my life!! It was horrible and scary!! Trees had blown over, glass pannels had come out of fences, the sand was all over the roads and parts of the streets were flooded. Even the metal sign for the hostel had broken in half. It felt like this weather was going to continue forever! :(
Tuesday 29th January
Today we woke up to blue sky and sun!!! WOW!! I could not imagine seeing any sign of the sun after the weather we had just experienced.
We decided to make the most of it and check out the beach. There wasn't a great deal of beach to be seen, as the tide was so far in, and the sea was all foamy and didn't look very tempting at all to swim in! We stepped onto the beach anyway and took some photos. We then found a spot to sunbathe and we stayed there for most of the morning/afternoon. After that we decided to head back to our hostel and have a swim in the pool now that it had been cleaned of all the debris from the storm.
We were leaving for Brisbane in the morning and I was glad that we got to see a little bit of Surfers Paradise after all :)
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