After one too many beers rocking out to AC/DC in the Hard Rock Cafe last night I awoke this morning to a throbbing hangover... well, you've gotta take the rough with the smooth I guess!
After breakfast we headed north, slowly working our way through the beautiful suburbs of Surfers Paradise and over the many bridges that connect this watery landscape, until we hit the highway. Our destination was only around 30 minutes away, the theme park "Dreamworld", very well known in these parts for its excellent rides and attractions, and despite the rough head (which was slowly improving!) we had a fantastic day behaving like kids again on the various rollercoasters and so on.
A highlight / lowlight (depending on your perspective) was the Giant Drop, literally "The World's Tallest Vertical Drop Ride". The ride is basically a vertical drop roller coaster - so it goes straight up a huge pole, sits at the top to build the tension, then drops down vertically (fed by gravity) to earth at eye-watering speeds immediaterly accelerating from zero to 84mph and achieving 3.5 G-force. Definitely not what you want with a hangover. Lucy sat this one out, so me and Junni both egged each other (if I'm honest I think neither of us wanted to do it, but neither of us wanted to be the first person to chicken out either!) so we queued up, slowly nursing our hangovers, working ouy way through the queue until we were at the front and getting strapped in... and before we knew it we were past the point of no return. After getting strapped in you slowly start climbing up the pole, higher, and higher, and higher, until you think you have reached the top then it keeps going - honestly this was so high (119m) it difficult to describe. On the positive side, the view from the top was incredible. However that's about it... the ride is absolutely horrible! If you have a hangover - avoid like the plague! Although I think we were both secretly proud we had managed to endure it without being sick.
After that we needed to chill out a bit so we headed down to the animal section to watch the tigers (both normal and albino) more for Lucy so she had something to enjoy after making her wait while we endured the Giant Drop (and as a precursor to our visit to the Australia Zoo, which we'll hopefully do in the next few days and which Lucy is VERY excited about!), then afterwards we headed down to the water zone, named the "Whitewater World". After the Wet'N'Wild park yesterday I wasn't expecting to spend another day in a water park (and I don't think I've ever been to two water parks two days in a row ever before) but this one was totally different and very much worth it. While this park lacked the fast-paced kamikazi vertical flumes that we'd enjoyed yesterday what there was here was 4-seater rings that flowed down flumes and bounced down cones, so the three of us strapped into those for some great fun! However the highlight was the "Pipeline Plunge" - basically it is a giant bucket that slowly fills up with water until it's full, and when it is full the bucket tips forward and splashes a huge amount of water on to the people standing underneath. Simple as that. But sometimes the simple things are the best, and we spent ages here laughing and fighting our way past the kids to be able to stand underneath it - just great fun. One English bloke who was with his family turned to me and Junni as he could see the joy on our faces and he said: "this is the best thing in the whole of the park", better than all the animals, all the rollercoasters etc - and he was right! Just an excellent day, and the hangover by this point was long ago forgotten.
After our adventure at Dreamland we headed north towards our ultimate destination: the Australia Zoo! However to break up the journey we had booked a hotel in Brisbane for tonight and will conclude the journey in the morning.