The Gold Coast in Australia - Surf's up, dude!

We decided to move north on the first of January, not too late so we'd avoid traffic. But we didn't avoid traffic. At least the first hour when we left Sydney.

Our first night was couchsurfing in Port Macquarie. It's a great place near the beach, with a big garden and a swimming pool and an Austrian family who was couch surfing there too :)

Our host, Chris, was great: He prepared dinner for us, we had great Australian wine to drink, and we had a wonderful evening chatting and hearing stories from each other. Chris has traveled all around the world for almost his entire life and we heard about great places to be for our next big trip. Whenever it will be. :-) He's never been in our region and after meeting us, he might just come around one day :)

We didn't have time to stay very long, but we were going back there on our way back down to Sydney before we leave for Hong Kong. Chris gave us some excellent advice on where to go on the Gold Coast - and what to avoid.

We left Chris at 10:30 the next day to drive to Burleigh Heads, a small town on the border of Queensland. It's supposed to be a 5 hours drive.

It took us the double that!

The holiday traffic was insane! We were driving 15 kph on the highway, and Rony was doing all the driving, because Talia can not drive a manual car.

We finally arrived at our host's home, but Rony was exhausted and soer and went almost directly to bed. Talia stayed with our host and the other couch surfers who were there and played a game called B***S***. And of course she won and everybody else got drunk :) Mwahahahaha. It's a shame she didn't play for money...

The next day we were supposed to go surfing, but Rony was still tired and the place we stayed in was so awesome that we decided to stay "home" and just talk to people, have a late breakfast with everyone and watch "Max", the local music channel.

Our host, Hinu, was married to a French guy and lived in France for a while. She has beautiful kids who just hung out with us and were happy to have people at their place.

We finally decided to go to the beach with the other couch surfers, Sarah the German and Sheldon the Canadian. We had a real good connection with them and we decided to go together to the surf lesson the next day in Surfer's Paradise (that's what it's actually called).

We tried to book a lesson for the 4 of us, but the lesson was too late for us (we had to go back to Chris's house) and we ended up taking the early lesson and decided we would meet them on the beach.

The lesson was great: We were something like 15 people, all teenagers but us and one other guy, and huge waves like they haven't seen in the area for a long time. They said those were the biggest waves they've had all year, and that anyone who learned to surf that day should be applauded (you can applaud now. We'll wait.)

We learned a lot in the 2 hours we had. Rony could stand on the board for 3 seconds and Talia could almost stand. We both caught great waves as we body surfed, though (meaning we were lying on our bellies on the board). That was loads of fun, too. We were exhausted at the end of the lesson, but we had a lot of fun and will try it again at home. After all, we live near the beach! Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of us surfing (we were both busy), but Sarah, our German couchsurfing friend, arrived while Talia was bodysurfing and took a few pics, which she'll hopefully send us when she's back home at the end of the month. In the meanwhile, here's the one we have (post surfing):

The last night on the Gold Coast was at Chris's house again where, again, Chris had prepared a great dinner. This time there were 2 Argentinians couch surfing there, and the Austrian family we met the first night.

We stayed up really late again and Chris appears to be a very warm and sensitive guy who embraces life and always see the best in each person.

In honor of the end of the summer portion of our trip, we would like to share with you the places that you should not get sunburned:

1) Your knees
2) The back of your knees
3) Your feet
4) Your butt

These, of course, are just wild guesses, not that we know this from experience or anything.

We finally left everybody the next morning (this morning, actually) and went back to Sydney, where we are spending our last night before our next stop: Hong Kong!