After spending a few days in the city, we were so relieved to be heading back towards the seaside! As we approached Surfers Paradise, we started looking for campsites nearby for the next few nights. To our dismay, we discovered we had now entered the peak season as the schools had broken up for the Christmas holidays so all the prices had rocketed!! We realised our only option was to stay a little further out from the beach, closer to the freeway, and drive in each day. This definitely worked out cheaper especially as Matt turned on the charm and haggled an extra discount! Dropping it from $95 a night to $30. We drove over to our pitch and set up the tent, it was at this point we discovered why the lady had been so keen to secure our booking, we were basically the only booking!! There was a huge area full of static caravans and chalets but in terms of short term guests, there was only us and one other van! Thinking this would be good as it would mean the kitchen wouldn't be busy or messy, Matt went off to investigate. He returned moments later shaking his head and suggested I probably shouldn't go and have a look myself as it was disgusting and might put me off staying here entirely! Luckily we had our own gas cookers so we set about cooking ourselves some lunch at a picnic area which was delicious!
 
That afternoon, we drove into the town centre to have a look at Surfers Paradise . The first thing that struck us was how close the skyscrapers and buildings were to the beach! It was mad! We spent a little bit of time at the beach then walked along to the main Esplanade where people were busy setting up for the night market. We spent a long time walking up and down looking at each stall, some were selling typical market items: puzzles, soaps, jewellery, while others were rather unusual: mini frames with tiny shells in, scented sacks made to look like koalas and kangaroos! I loved looking at all the items on sale and each of us secretly sneaked off to picked up a few bits for each other's Christmas presents!
 
We had arranged to meet up with Claire & Luke, who we had met on the Whitsundays, partly just to catch up with them but also because they had left some clothes on the line at Dingos hostel at Rainbow Beach and had asked us to pick them up and bring them with us. They had been for dinner and then came and met us at the market. We looked at a few more stalls with them before deciding to go and grab a few drinks at a bar on the main strip . It was really lovely to see them again and catch up on the events of the last week or so!
 
The next morning we were all up pretty early so we got ready and left the campsite as quickly as possible! We had planned to have another look around Surfers and I had heard of a cool maze type activity centre called Infinity. We had almost arrived in the city centre when Matt suddenly yelled out in a panic that he had left a pair of his shorts hanging on the back of the shower cubicle door! Not a huge problem except his phone and wallet, which contains both our driving licences and all our bank cards, were in the pocket!!! He quickly pulled a U turn while I looked up the number for the campsite and called ahead to see if anyone had handed them in! Thankfully when we got back, the shorts were still hanging on the hook and the phone and wallet were still in the pocket! A very lucky escape!!!
 
Now about an hour behind schedule, we made our way back into the city and found a parking space near the sea front. We had a little walk along the beach watching all the people playing in the water and a group of people having surfing lessons . This gave us quite a lot of amusement as they kept trying but falling off. We found a nice spot to lay on and relax, at which point Matt announced he now had the bug for a go in the water as the waves were rather big! Feeling confident, he went off in search of a surf board instead of a body board even though he hadn't even so much as held one let alone been on one before! He soon returned looking rather excited with a hired surf board and off he went. He was hoping that his snowboarding experience would help him out a bit and in fairness he nearly did it first go but the next couple of hours didn't quite go to plan for him. As much as he tried and tried, it was obviously harder than he first thought but he was having lots of fun trying and giving us lots of laughs at the same time. 
 
Once Matt was finished we had to move the van to a car park under the shopping centre that housed 'Infinity'. There was a short queue which gave us time to watch the videos of other people in the mazes and look at the photos of previous visitors! Then, once we had paid, we were given some white socks and gloves and told to go through the first corridor! Suddenly we were plunged into darkness with only our hands, feet and of course my hair glowing so you could see where to walk! The whole attraction was made up of about 25 different maze rooms, each with a different theme: space, mirrors, lights, computers, aliens, huge bouncy balls, bouncy castle style ... We had so much fun trying to find our way through, screaming as things touched or fell on us and giggling as we bounced about and fell over! I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for something fun to do while you are in the area!
 
When we had finished in Infinity and found our way out of the exit, we went for a little look around the shops, picking up a few souvenirs and a new pair of thongs and sunglasses for Matt before getting back in the van and making our way a little bit further down the coast to Miami where we had booked a much nicer campsite for the night! As it was still quite early, we went for a little walk down to the nearest beach: Nobby Beach. This seemed much quieter than Surfers and was in more of a residential area so there weren't as many sky scrapers and office blocks! We stayed here for a while before heading back to the campsite, cooking dinner and watching 'The Darwin Awards' on Gareth's laptop! Campsite luxury!! By now Matt seemed quite grumpy but actually it was just that he was very tired and achy all over from his time in the sea as it turns out it's a lot more effort than it looks especially when the waves are so big! He even said he felt like he'd actually been beaten up by the waves for 2 hours!!
 
The next morning, we decided to drive down to Burleigh Heads for a look as we'd heard it's a nice beach where the pro surfers go and because we needed to get a few more photos for our Christmas cards! There wasn't many surfers there but we got on with our pictures with passers by finding it very funny that we were trying to pose for photos in our Santa hats and reindeer antlers while getting battered by some of the biggest waves we have encountered so far! One lady kindly stopped to take a picture of the 3 of us and nearly had her car keys washed away when a sneaky wave washed up right up to her feet! By the time we finished, there were a few more surfers in the water and watching them really made us want to learn to surf so we decided today was the day to get some lessons booked!! We found a phone number in our Lonely Planet and Matt gave them a call! It turned out they had some instructors at Currumbin (about 30mins away) who were taking a group out in a couple of hours and they had space for us too! We quickly dried off, jumped back into the van and set off for Currumbin .
 
We made it to Currumbin in plenty of time so we soon found our surf instructor. It turned out we didn't have enough cash so Matt went off in search of a cash machine. He was told it wasn't very far away but when he returned he was very sweaty and out of breath as it was actually quite far so he had to run all the way down the beach to get back in time for our lesson. Luckily there was only us 3 and a man with his daughter in the lesson so it was a small group and we had 2 instructors. We were all given our boards which we had to wax and then carry to the beach. Once on the beach we had put our boards on the sand in a semi circle as we were shown how to lay on the board and practice the standing up technique, this was all in front of all the sunbathers on the beach which was a bit embarrassing but we soon forgot about them. The waves were much smaller here than at Surfers which is why this is a good spot to learn at. Once in the water we all had great fun trying to catch the waves and stand up. The boys and the other man were quite happy trying on their own as they were doing quite well which was great as this left me and the other girl with an instructor each which made it much easier as they would hold my board and push me off as a good wave came so I was catching lots and standing up quite well . When it came to paddling back to shore we were quite far out but it was still shallow enough to stand up. We had to paddle against the outgoing tide which was actually easier than I had thought but the boys and 1 of the instructors had gotten caught in a bit of a current so ended up on a completely different beach on the other side of the bay. This meant they had to climb over the rocks and then paddle back across to the right beach. We all felt very pleased with our progress and had such fun doing the lesson so we headed to the BBQs to cook some bacon sandwiches for lunch as a treat!
 
After we had recovered from our surf lesson, we decided to drive down to the Currumbin rock pools as we thought they might be quite pretty and may even be nice enough to have a swim in and relax there for a while. Unfortunately, when we got there, the water seemed very dirty, almost muddy, and not at all appealing, even the pictures we took didn't really disguise the fact it looked pretty gross, so we decided to skip that and continue our travels on to Brunswick Heads.
 
Arriving in Brunswick Heads meant we had finally crossed the border from Queensland to New South Wales, taking us into our 3rd state of the trip! This also meant we had to put our clocks forward an hour, with a disastrous consequence! It was now 6pm not 5pm so whereas we thought we still had an hour until the campsite we had chosen closed, they had in fact just shut up shop for the day!! Thankfully another, slightly more expensive, campsite was still open so we were able to get a pitch there! By now, I was beginning to appreciate why Matt had seemed grumpy the night before after his surfing attempt as I was beginning to feel very tired and achy from our lesson so he was pleased I actually believed him now!