It’s 21:00. I’m lying down on the fresh linen I just made for my new bed. The room smells like fading hair gel, stale cleaning fluid, the salty tang of sea air, and the unmistakable dusty perfume that can only mean I’m spending the night with more than four others. Sure enough two more freshly-showered ladies amble in, chatting to one another as they pat dry their skin with middle-aged hands and profess their wrinkles with voices of teenagers.

I vaguely notice I’m the only one to claim a top bunk bed. It doesn’t matter. It took me four hours sitting next to the saddest example of parenting I could imagine, three train transfers in the pitch black, two sandwiches that were a bit on the soggy side, and one casualty of a stubbed toe to get me here, and even that was a blessing I wouldn’t have the opportunity to be grateful for if the Tweeds Head bus driver hadn’t been so generous. After that, top bunk is fine. I was about fifteen minutes away from sleeping in a bus shelter.

It’s a friday, too, but that doesn’t mean much anymore since I don’t have any classes left to attend. Right now I don’t even care that I’m dozing off before anyone in the building has decided which bar they’ll fall apart in tonight. It’s been a long week, and the only thing that registers in my brain, flickering from exhaustion, is that tomorrow I don’t have to do a damn thing. For the first time in months I’ve got a real weekend on my hands.

The sounds of the ocean roll through my dreams, and I wake up suspiciously early, at about 5:30. The owners aren’t even awake, so I can’t ask them how far the walk to the beach is. I make myself some tea and read instead. After fifty pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez I realise the ocean noise wasn’t just a tidal soundtrack to my desperation for sunshine and sea breeze. It’s a real noise. It’s a real beach. And a pretty one at that.

I don’t know what made me give up one of my last weekends to something that by all accounts promised to be a tourist trap. Almost anything involving an extended stay at the Gold Coast is an automatic recipe for disappointment, but something tugged at my curiosity, my escapist desires, my determination to keep from withering under the suffocation of exam revision. I put my name down on the list, with some trouble, and mark the end of my last frantic paper-writing evening with a weekend getaway.

Of course I’ve been to the beach before. My family does so often, and who can live in Los Angeles and escape the many beachfronts of southern California? But this was different. These were paradise beaches. White sand, decent surf, warm weather and warmer water, beachcomber luxuries I am not used to. I thought it would be a different world with different rules. But no. The moment that first wave breaks over my shoulders I feel myself fully exhale. I am home.

It’s summer in Australia, but that glorious period where spring has ended and school isn’t out yet, and only those of us in the upper echelons of higher education have the luxury of starting vacation early. I catch the 765 up to Coolangatta beach where I know I’m bound to run into a classmate or two after breakfast. I laugh when I see the water, so bright it’s blinding, knowing that all of my friends back home are about to be blinded by the season’s first snowfall.

A cup of coffee beverage and sure enough I meet up with some German exchange students passing the morning idly with fistfuls of donuts. We exchange a few words and walk back to the beach together, admiring the sunshine and discussing how much sunscreen we’ll need. There’s a big red truck with “Walking On Water Surf” emblazoned on the side in the tackiest font, and a churlish man with braces jumps off the back and deals with the specifics. Twenty minutes later I am on the beach in a rash shirt carrying a longboard into the foaming surf. It isn’t the best day but luckily there are fewer surfers there than I could have hoped for.

I’m far on the beginner scale, but I have decent balance and even better timing, and on a lightweight board I can consistently catch a wave and stand up for at least half of the ride. Unfortunately two hours is about all that I can pursue with weak upper body strength. However, they are two immensely fun, tiring, sometimes glorious sometimes crushing hours. Any longer and I’ll be immoboilised by soreness tomorrow. I try my hand a few more times. I will be sore before afternoon even hits. It will be worth it.

When I can’t bear to paddle anymore I retire to the warm sand bars and tide pools to watch the children play and their mothers plodge after them. I close my eyes and let my face be warmed to the sun, forming salt crystals on my eyelashes that crack audibly when I open my eyes again after a quarter hour to find the Germans are also exhausted, but triumphant. A quick rinse or two follows and after I return my board they ask if I want to go to lunch with them and bikini shopping on the strip opposite the beach to pass the time. Sure. I could use another swimsuit.

Lunch is typical, but I’m hungry enough to eat a wetsuit so as long as my food remains on my plate long enough for me to put it onto my fork, I will be a happy diner. We eat, I learn more about these friendly folk, and then we browse our way back to the city’s downtown area. Corinne spends another few hours in the increasingly gnarly surf, while Adrienne, Christoff, and I sunbake ourselves into a stupor. At about 14:30 the sun disappears for the remainder of the day and all of us call it quits.

I had another day of board rental put down. I would have gladly forsaken another Saturday night to boredom if it meant a fruitful Sunday of surfing. But the weather turned dark and the day grew long, and one by one the room, so full the day before, emptied out. The regular surfers switched to skating, and I knew that no one would be willing to battle the current if tomorrow was more of the same. So I was among the throng to pack up and move out. Sure I could have benefited from another day spent wrestling with waves instead of checking my email, but when I checked out I had only one thing in mind.

I’m back in the city, exactly twenty-four hours after I left it. It feels good to come full circle. It feels even better to have the mad rush of people around me, zooming in and out of shops and restaurants, trying to catch the last buses, waiters laughing loudly during their smoke breaks. It put me in the mood for people watching. So I pass by my favourite ramen shop, don’t look twice after the Chinese inn I frequent, and head straight to the centre strip of the Queen Street mall where a plate piled high with spaghetti and a pint of lager waits for me. I watch the butterfly swimmer from Australia break the world record for 50m while I’m waiting for my food. I chat with the Japanese tourists next to me and make small talk with the Irish waitress, both of whom are bored because Sunday nights are rarely this slow. I polish off dinner about the same time as all the other lonely diners do, and we all tip and leave at the same time, a perfectly timed orchestra of scraping chairs and shuffling change. No one looks up. We all know that if the four of us stop to grin sheepishly, our exactingly calculated walk to the bus will be off, and we’ll have to run to catch it before it pulls away. So we leave. I leave. As I turn my back to the emptying restaurant I feel the last throes of my weekend getaway slipping away as well. I sigh. It seems I have more to catch than just the bus.