The hostel bed was really not worth it. We woke up after a long sticky night, showered (even if here it makes no difference since you’re sticky immediately after), packed up, ate breakfast and left the Gold Coast. Yup, we did it, we ended up on the Gold Coast, after saying we wanted to skip it. This area is made of the super commercial beaches of New South Wales: it’s an ugly strip of ultra-built up shoreline that looks like it inherited the worse genes from both Vegas and Daytona. There are very few words that could described it (none of them too flattering) and we have no idea why people flock here. We ended up here because it was on the way to our destination and it was just another spot to sleep at, but we really didn’t waste any energy in looking around.
By 8 we were on the road since we were eager to get to the next spot, the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary just outside of Brisbane. This sanctuary has other animals too, but they are known for the koala population (they have over 100 that have been rescued and live there); this is the place where you get to hold one and get your picture taken. So of course we did. We got there shortly after they opened, got our picture done and then started walking around the grounds. Beside the fact that iguanas where everywhere (seriously, ew) we had a blast there. We got to pet Kangaroos and Wallabies, see a Platypus make barrel rolls in his tank and take another million pictures of animals.
It was so hot that most of the animals where either sleeping or hiding in their burrows…even the birds were panting, and that was a first for me. We got properly dehydrated as usual, melted around until noon when we left after watching a presentation on koalas. So much fun…but we were so glad to be in the car again in the air conditioning. Today we reached the top temp we’ve seen so far: 38 C - 100 F).
We drove to another koala area, a local park where koala made their habitat: this is not a sanctuary or a zoo, it’s just a public park where they live. Of course we couldn’t see any (first it was early afternoon, second it’s extremely hard to see them in the wild, even to the trained eyes of the park rangers. After a “very short” walk in the heat, we left to go passed Brisbane up to Bribe Island to spend the night. It’s a peninsula just north of Brisbane and since it was threatening rain again we opted to stay in a motel.
We were seriously debating whether we should have stayed in the campground but once we got in the room, we both looked at each other and thought: 
this is going to feel sooo nice: a real bed with crispy clean sheets, and air conditioning. The motel looks brand new and, for once, it looks a lot better than what you would get in the States for the same amount of money: a first for this trip.
We enjoyed dinner on the porch (nothing was going to stop me from cooking on that porch with our camping stove) and then relaxed outside watching the storm and lightening approaching.
