Gold Coast | Must Do’s & Guide to Sightseeing

Hiii,

As first timers visiting Australia’s Gold Coast, we definitely learnt a lot… If you’ve read my blogs before, I’m a holiday planner. I like to know what I’m doing, where I’m doing it and how long we’ll be out. I done this to the best of my abilities for this trip but there was a gap in information I could find online. Here’s my experience & 5 experiences I highly recommend doing on your Gold Coast travels!

Day 1:

We flew Perth to Brisbane with Virgin Australia. There are no direct flights from Perth to Gold Coast at this time, so we opted to rent a car from Bargain Cars & drive to our destination! I’ll keep this brief but we didn’t have a great experience with this car rental company & wouldn’t recommend to use them. We prepaid for a Pickup/ Ute, waited 2 hours after our designated collection time, after all the waiting the car we prepaid for wasn’t available. None the less, we eventually got a SUV instead and got on our travels.

Australia Zoo. ABSOLUTELY A MUST DO!!! We had the best experience here from the minute we walked in. All the animals were out and living their best lives. The Crocoseum live show was incredible! Live music as part of the pre show & Rob Irwin himself preforming with a crocodile! Honestly I’ve never experienced anything like it & in my opinion the best Zoo I’ve ever been to. After spending 4 hours leisurely exploring Australia Zoo, we made our way to our Surfers Paradise in Gold Coast. This was a 2.5 hour drive and paid two toll fees which were $1.55 each. It was around 6pm when we arrived at our chosen hotel- Hilton Surfers Paradise. We had a beautiful experience while staying with Hilton & you can read all about it *here*.

Day 2

Pancakes on the Rocks. A delicious but a little spenny breakfast. Having a huge selection on the menu definitely didn’t make the selection process any easier but this is something I can appreciate, there is something available for everyone! I went for a sweeter option which was the apple crumble pancakes, whereas Jordan went for the savoury full breakfast! Originally we had order a fountain soft drink each, however they were very small glasses & ordered another 2. With this being considered the bill was $71 for two people… yeah I know. We enjoyed it, however we wouldn’t be willing to spend that again here.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Day 2 weather was very rainy and cold, naturally we opted for an indoor activity! Honestly, we had some of the biggest laughs in here! Essentially, it’s an interactive museum with crazy facts and plenty of fun attractions for all ages! After 2 hours of laughing and being big kids, we finished the Ripley’s Believe It or Not experience with their 4D game room. For $36 each, we were very impressed with the value for money & would absolutely do it again in another city! Highly recommend this for a rainy day in Surfers Paradise.

Byron Bay. This was a 90 minute road trip and in my opinion absolutely worth it! Arriving at 4:30pm, we didn’t have a lot of time to explore before getting dark. We spent some time by the beach, soaking up the beautiful views of the turquoise water and white sand! Our friend seen we were in Byron Bay & suggested we visit the Lighthouse. It is was an incredible experience going to the Lighthouse as it was getting dark and not being able to see the ocean but hear it! We realised on our way back to Surfers Paradise that Byron Bay is really where we would have preferred to stay & do our travelling from there. Byron Bay is a must visit!

Day 3

Fresh Pantry. Kicking off our day the right way with some brekkie. This was our favourite meal of the entire trip, it was exactly what it says… Fresh! I of course had avo, egg, halloumi and toast & Jordan opted for eggs, beans and toast. Basic but so fresh! It was also Jordan’s first time having sourdough toast and he was loving it! Highly recommend eating here, especially if your spending the day at WB Movie World.

WB Movie World. I want to start this by saying, our experience was down to our lack of research before going… During our visit there was 4 rides/attractions open for adults. Honestly, we were disappointed by this because we love theme parks. However, after speaking to customer service about our experience, they kindly showed us an area of their website which displays all the closures of the season. PLEASE DO THIS BEFORE VISITING! Now that I’ve cleared that up, I want to talk about the positives of our visit! On our visit 2 rollercoasters we’re open including: Green Lantern Coaster & Superman Escape. We really enjoyed both coasters, big thrill rides are our favourite and they didn’t disappoint us! What I will note is, we were absolutely spoiled in Orlando with both Disney & Universal parks with theming & on our visit to WB Movie World we felt there was a lack of theming in the queues. Two attractions were open for all ages including SCOOB! 4D Experience and HOLLYWOOD STUNT DRIVER 2. SCOOB! 4D Experience is a fun Scooby Doo short film accompanied by moving chairs, air bursts and water sprays. Hollywood Stunt Driver 2 is an outdoor stunt show with cars, quads and buggy’s. All in all we enjoyed everything we done, unfortunately we just didn’t have the best possible experience as majority of the park was shut for winter. Was it worth the $99 day pass, for this time of the year we didn’t feel like it was. However, I would definitely recommend spending a day in WB Movie World during the summer months & it would worth the money then!

Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk is thee biggest recommendation I can give when it comes to your visit to Gold Coast, Australia. A short 35 minute drive from Surfers Paradise to an incredible destination. Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk is a 1.5k walk around the rainforest floor, 300m bridges taking you through the highest points of the upper canopy and the view at these heights are unbelievable. Admission is $19.50 per adult and personally I do feel like this is a reasonable price for the views you get to see! An absolute MUST DO!

Top Golf. Thee most fun activity we done on our holiday! Top Golf was Jordan’s pick and frankly I didn’t know what it was. I went in blindly & followed Jordan’s lead, going when it’s dark outside was by far the best advice. A very American experience is how I could describe it. Each group gets allocated to a screen to display your scores and a high table to enjoy some food & drink while you play (kind of like what you get when you go bowling). We shared a pizza flatbread with chips, nothing fancy but also nothing bad to say about it! The game itself is so fun, basically your at a driving range with glow in the dark targets and each ball you hit is microchipped, collecting a score for each ball hit! It’s worth noting the targets are massive in size, which makes it enjoyable for beginners! The Top Golf experience was $70 for the hour, we didn’t feel this was unreasonable considering both the quality of services available and the quantity of games we played in this time!

Day 4

Brisbane. Flying from Brisbane to Perth, we made our last road trip from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane to spend the day exploring the city. Before leaving we had a beautiful breakfast and coffee in Bumbles Cafe. Highly recommend this spot, looking out onto the lake, a fantastic smooth coffee and lovely staff. It has a local, cosy atmosphere which I loved.

On our way to Brisbane, we couldn’t find much information online of sights to see in the city. We ended up having a nice walk along the river and through the city to The Wheel of Brisbane. A 60m ferris wheel, known as Brisbane’s icon cost $19.95 per adult for a 10 minute ride. We made our way back through the city having a browse around the luxury shops (browse being the key word here hahaha) and found a Pandora store. Jordan treated me to a very cute little octopus charm to add to my bracelet, as a memento of our first holiday in Australia! After our walk around the shops, it was time to get checked in at the airport. Concluding our 4 day trip to Queensland, Australia.

Here’s a round up of 5 Must Do’s while in Brisbane/Gold Coast Australia:

• Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk
• Australia Zoo
• Top Golf
• WB Movie World (during summer)
• Byron Bay (I know this is New South Wales but still worth visiting when your a short road trip away!)

If you found this helpful to plan your trip or enjoyed reading what we got up to on ours, please make sure to like & subscribe! It lets me know you enjoy this type of content and I can make more!

CYA xx