Four days on the Gold Coast: high rises on one side, rainforest on the other

Start with the view, because it explains the geography in five minutes. Q1 rises 323 metres above Surfers Paradise, which makes it the tallest building in Australia, and it held the record for the tallest all-residential tower in the world when it was finished in 2005. The observation deck is on level 77 and the lift takes about forty seconds. From up there the coast runs out of sight north and south as a single unbroken beach, the theme parks are visible as small clearings inland, and behind them the hinterland ranges rise in a curve that is the rim of an extinct volcano.

There is also a climb up the outside of the spire, on a harness, for people who want that.

Then go down to the beach directly below and swim between the flags. Surfers Paradise is not the best sand on this coast but it is the most convenient, and being in the water with a wall of apartment towers behind you is a genuinely odd and specific experience.

Eat in Broadbeach rather than on the Surfers Paradise esplanade, which is fifteen minutes south on the tram and considerably better.

There are five major parks here and between them they hold most of the rollercoasters in Australia. Do one, properly, and give it the whole day rather than trying to combine two.

The film studio park is the pick for adults and older children: it is built around Warner Brothers properties, it has the country's most serious collection of thrill rides, and there is a working studio backlot on the site. The other large one has about forty rides plus a wildlife section with tigers, and is the better choice with a mixed age group.

In summer, the water parks are the better call. One of them is attached to the film park and one to the ride park, and combined tickets across each pair are how most people buy them.

Get there for opening. Queues on a January weekend can be an hour a ride and by two in the afternoon the place is unbearable; on a Tuesday in June you will walk onto everything.

Whichever you choose, the shuttle from the hotels means you do not need a car and can have a beer at the end of it.

Today goes south, and it is the day people are surprised by.

Start at Burleigh Head, where a lump of ancient basalt interrupts the beach. It is a national park inside a city, which sounds like a technicality until you walk the circuit: rainforest, pandanus, a scramble of hexagonal basalt columns down to the water, and a platform above the wave where the surfers sit waiting. It takes about an hour and it is free.

Then twenty minutes further south to the wildlife sanctuary at Currumbin, which began in the 1940s when a beekeeper started feeding wild lorikeets to keep them off his flowers, and which now runs on a serious conservation and wildlife hospital operation. The lorikeet feeding still happens twice a day and it involves large numbers of very loud birds landing on your arms and head. There are also koalas, a house full of nocturnal animals and an Aboriginal cultural show.

Finish at Point Danger, the headland at the far southern end where Queensland becomes New South Wales. The border runs across the car park, the two states keep different time zones for half the year, and there is a lighthouse memorial to Cook on the point. You can stand with a foot in each and be an hour apart from yourself.

The last day goes uphill, and it is the one that makes the Gold Coast make sense. Thirty to forty minutes inland the coastal plain rises into the eroded rim of a volcano that last erupted about twenty three million years ago, and the ranges along it hold subtropical rainforest that UNESCO lists as a surviving fragment of the forests that once covered Gondwana.

The nearer of the two plateaus is the easier day. It became the state's earliest national park back in 1908, it is split into six separate sections with short walks in each, and none of them takes more than an hour. There is also a set of tunnels dug into the hillside and seeded with glowworms, with a presentation cave and formations, which is artificial and rather good.

The further plateau, another twenty minutes on, has the better single sight: a creek that fell through the roof of a cave and left a rock arch over a pool, with a walking track down to it. Go after dark with a torch off and the roof of the cavern is full of glowworms.

Then it is forty minutes back down to the airport, which is at the wrong end of the coast from most of the hotels, so leave time.