The word home is a rather difficult word to qualify. I’ve moved around alot over my short, yet colourful, life and I’ve had many houses, and only a few homes. But, now that a sufficient gap of time has passed since my expedition to Brisbane, I can easily put it within the home category. So, when I saw that our itinerary included 4 days in Surfer’s Paradise, yet no stop in Brisbane (and in inimitable Australia Zoo), I knew I was due a break from my travelling comrades and a stop in at Dads. Despite the fact that it had only been 2-3 weeks at this point, it felt very good to be back and there was even a small creeping sensation of nostalgia creeping around at the back of my mind. After an evening of laundry, English Premiership catch-up, beer and dinner, we had an early night for our expedition to Australia zoo in the morning.
Although this was my second visit to Australia zoo, I don’t recall having written about it at all in any of the earlier blogs. And so now, it feels truly justified to put down in black and white that it is the single finest zoo I have ever visited, and I would struggle to name a zoo that I believe could rival it in the world. It is a healthy advocate of the Steve Irwin legacy, and still, through his family, survives the Irwin name and continues his philosophy of taking care of the environment and the wildlife inherently incorporated within it. Aside from the globally famous crocodile shows, there is a fantastic snake exhibit, an open kangaroo enclosure, koalas and the wide array of animals that we’ve come to expect out of all of the big zoos. The best bit for me and Dad was the tiger exhibit with the resident nutters/trainers inside the cage. The dozen or so tigers at Australia zoo are cycled to avoid overexposure and to ensure that the tigers aren’t distressed by the crowds at any point. This is even more essential at Australia Zoo above all other zoos, because the trainers themselves are permanent fixtures within the glass exhibit. The show consisted of these three people, who have trained the tigers from birth, playing fetch, wrestling, petting and generally teasing the tigers to expunge from them all aspects of excess energy (least they are tempted to use it for devious means!). The show itself was fantastic, but all throughout the show you can’t help but consider the mental state of three normal human beings who read the job description as “antagonise a 400 pound tiger, whilst within swiping, clawing and biting distance at all times” and decided that this was the job for them.
Once we’d finished with the zoo, we headed back home and settled in with some beers and a classic gourmet meal of tuna, beans, cheese and bacon on toast (because there is such a thing as taking TOO good a care of yourself) and relapsed back into the good old times, as if I would be waking up for work the next day and hanging around the house for the next month once again. However, Brisbane sensed that this occasion was a little bit more special than the multitude of other similar evenings and conjured up a multi-pronged lightning storm that crept up upon us from all sides, including directly over the city. In England, I’d seen thunderstorms a few times, but it appears I’d never seen a real thunderstorm. The night seems to get darker than it ever has been, yet the lightning has the power to turn everything back to day for a portion of a second. The thunder shakes the windows and truly hurts the ears, whilst the rain prevents you from seeing anymore than a few feet ahead of you and comes down in barrages that’d knock you down if you got caught anywhere near it. It was the rather perfect send off from Brisbane, and a rather good memory to have as my last.
The tail end of the thunderstorm also saw us into the early hours of Halloween, which formed the day of my reunion with the other three in Surfer’s Paradise. For all those who are unaware and are picturing the white sandy beached, palmed tree’d and bikini saturated sort of surfer’s paradise that I myself pictured to begin with, I can assure you it exists, just not in this particular city. Surfer’s is a giant metropolis which only Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney can truly compete with in terms of cityscape. It was therefore with great relief that I was only there for Halloween, when the only thing on offer in the evening is dressing up like a fool and having a damn good evening. And this is exactly what we did. We utilised the full power of our student-based backpacking stingyness and found some cheap football shirts to allow us to dress us as, none other than, zombie footballers. Therefore, renamed with the finest in footballing puns N’Zombia (me/N’Zogbia), Stabbi (Sim/Xavi), RI Persie (Whisken/Robin Van Persie) and Killieni (Ben/Chiellini) headed out into the streets of Surfer’s for some undead fun. We even managed to bump into a makeup artist who redesigned our wounds and necrosis for free. It was the next morning when we woke up and felt three different kinds of death that we couldn’t be happier to leave. In fact, even if we had a hand designed, financially unlimited and un-time restricted itinerary, it wouldn’t have changed the next stop. The only place in the world for bringing the dead back to life was beckoning. We knew it was time, for a little trip to Byron!
R
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