When Sunday came around I was thankful that our Fraser Island trip had been postponed. The Bond University Photography Society was organizing their first trip of the semester down to a weekly fire show at Burleigh Heads (a beach to the south of us).
We met up with the rest of the club on campus at 6 and boarded a bus down to Burleigh. It was literally the longest bus ride I’ve been on since arriving on the Gold Coast. But the beach itself wasn’t far from campus, we just happened to have the misfortune of boarding the slowest bus in the history of slow buses. I’m pretty sure the bus driver was trying to coast the entire way despite a lack of hills. It got to the point that everyone on the bus was looking around trying to figure out what the deal was. After an hour of moseying along we finally arrived, having traveled a total of 7.8 kilometers or roughly 5 miles (yes, I believe if you did the math you would find that we could’ve walked faster).
As the bus pulled up to our stop one of the guys in the club looked out the window with a wild-eyed expression and began frothing at the mouth. He had spotted Big Chief, a hole-in-the-wall looking burger establishment that he claimed was to die for. We followed him across the street, explaining how much this burger had to live up to given that we had In-N-Out and Five Guys back in the States. After getting our burgers we sat down along the counter and our friend, Kyle, pulled from his backpack the largest bottle of Heinz ketchup I’ve ever seen. He must have had the clown car of backpacks because I literally have no idea how it fit with all the camera equipment he also had in there. Once he had sufficiently doused his burger in ketchup, we began to eat. Our burgers were indeed delicious. I hesitate to say they were better than Five Guys of In-N-Out mostly because they aren’t fair points of comparison. This burger was more along the lines of an enormous restaurant burger cooked to perfection. We wolfed them down as Kyle paused before each bite to add more ketchup to his burger.
From there we headed back to the beach to see what this fire show was all about. It definitely wasn’t what we expected. We walked up to find a large group of people sitting in a circle around about twenty teenagers painted like demons who were juggling various forms of fire as the sound of beating drums played over speakers in the back of a hippie van. We walked over to the side of the circle with the fewest people, set up our tripods and started shooting. The kids juggling were ridiculous. There were two girls who had fire hula-hoops that they spun up and down their entire bodies. But the boys were the coolest to watch. They had sticks with balls of fire on either end that they threw and twirled every which way. The show was really cool to watch and especially fun to photograph so we stayed quite awhile before heading back on a (much faster) bus home.
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