With another non-orienteering day, we decided to head south, aiming to get to Coolangatta, with some stops along the way.  I dropped Pete and Ilze at the Skydeck and they went up to see the view.  Afterwards we strolled along the Esplanade, up past Cavill Avenue.  There has certainly been a lot of work done to improve what was once a very tacky area.  The promenade is bustling.  There is lots of street art, murals depicting Surfers’ history, and plenty of places to admire the beach.  The high rises are more tastefully designed these days, but they still overpower their surroundings, create their own wind patterns, and cast shadows over the sand.

We returned via the beach, shedding our shoes and feeling the sand between our toes.  It was very soft and fine.  The water was unexpectedly cold though.  We splashed along for several hundred metres.

Back in the car, our first stop was the clifftop lookout at Mermaid Beach, where we could see what the beach is like without the towers.  We stopped here for a pub lunch of fish and chips. 

Suitably fortified, we pressed on southward, up and over the headland at Burleigh Heads, across the river and past Currumbin, and on to Kirra and Coolangatta.  You can almost feel everything take a breath down here – the beaches are wider, there is more greenery, the buildings are low rise and set back further – as Ilze said, a lot less “in your face”.  We watched would-be surfers at Rainbow Beach, from Greenmount – there seems to be an awful lot of standing around in the water, a bit pf paddling, and very little actual surfing.

Our turnaround point was Point Danger, where we saw much bigger waves smashing into Snapper Rocks. Southward, we could see the Tweed River emptying into the ocean.  We stood on the grassy slopes and tried to imagine what it looked like when the Qld-NSW border was closed for months, and the barricades were up to prevent disease-ridden southerners from penetrating The Wall.  How ludicrous it all seems now.  We stood defiantly with one foot either side of the line, but it was anticlimactic. Though I did wonder why the Captain Cook Monument, which the border runs through the middle of, depicts Queensland as bright and sunny with sandstone, and NSW as dull and grey. Maybe there was something to it – as we stood on the NSW side, we felt the first few spots of rain. It was time to retreat back to the Queensland sunshine.