Daniel85

Probably the thing I was most excited about on this trip was seeing the Big Banana. It’s the king of Australia’s ‘big’ tourist attractions, and so a must-see for any low culture aficionado.

My experience with other ‘big’ things is limited to my many childhood road trips between Geelong and Adelaide, which is a decidedly less touristy route than the NSW coast. Still, South Australia has its share of oversized attractions, including the Big Rocking Horse (which is fucking huge, or at least was when I was 10), and the Big Lobster. I think the Big Lobster is my favourite, simply because of the ridiculousness of erecting a giant red crustacean in some nowhere town.

Anyway, we’re not hear to talk about lobsters and rocking horses. The Big Banana is our game.

There she is. The angle of the picture is not some kind of artistic device. You can’t get a front-on shot without standing out in the road, which is a busy highway. Three thousand Japanese tourists are lost each year…  

God, I love mascots. This little guy is all over the Big Banana compound (yes, compound- I like to think of it as a military facility). 

Told ya he was all over the place. I like that banana split one. Such an inviting look.

A shot of the underbelly of the Big Banana. There were information displays inside the thing, but I couldn’t read ‘em cos it was too dark. I wasn’t keen on hanging around inside there for very long either.

Ah, the gift shop. There was so much crap in there I could’ve been taking photos all day, but I settled for taking just one because the staff were starting to look at me weird.

Apart from having every conceivable banana-shaped object for sale, they also had a lot of clownfish stuff. Cashing in on Finding Nemo, I guess, but now they’re stuck with a bajillion squishy clownfish stressballs that probably aren’t gonna move anytime soon. 

Any large tourists attraction is bound to have a whole system of hangers-on crop up around it, and the Big Banana is no exception. You can’t go wrong with old-timey candy makers. I like how apparently this candy maker is ‘famous’. Yeah, a fucking rock star.

Noooow we’re getting somewhere. These are all the peripheral banana-related things at ‘the compound’. A nut house and a farmer’s market. I choose to believe that the nut house is just that: an insane asylum, presumably for people who have been so awed by the Big Banana that they’ve gone stark raving.

I just had to call bullshit on this. World’s Largest Puzzle? Surely in all the years of human endeavour we’ve managed to make a bigger puzzle than this. Surely.

Yeah, probably should have put this at the start of the article, but I am not scrolling up now, no way, no how. I kinda wish I’d gone on that little vehicle thing up there. Looks kinda like a Federation Runabout, probably the funniest vehicle in all of Star Trek. I like to say it. Runabout. Runabout.

I like how they’re touting ’a whole new Big Banana experience’. I’d be interested to see how this differs from the old Big Banana experience, but yeaaaahhh…. I’m not going back there. Ever.

Wish I’d had time to go on this ‘Skywalk’, cos I love lookouts. They sort of make you feel like you’ve achieved some kind of mastery over the natural world.

I would really like to think that they built this part of the Big Banana experience in the late 70s/early 80s, and called it the ‘Skywalk’ to get in on some of that Star Wars action. I would like to live in a world where that is the case. 

If the Big Banana compound is a solar system, this Trike Ride thing is Pluto. No, it’s fucking Planet X. They put it way over the other side of the carpark, and down a massive hill, so you’d really have to like motor-trikes to head over there.

And if you’ll kindly direct your attention to the sign to the right of the Trike Rides building, you’ll come to our next attraction:

The Snow Slope! This thing looks cool, but I didn’t really have the time/energy to go check it out. They also have an ice rink (somewhere- couldn’t find it!). I wonder why they decided to branch out into winter sports. It can only be because they wanted to get into the lucrative frozen banana business. I wish they’d had a picture of that banana guy over on the snow slope, but wearing Hoth gear. That’d be awesome. 

There was an orchid store on site, which probably takes the prize for ‘Most Unrelated Business Operating At The Big Banana’. My grandad is a bit of a green thumb, so we had to go check that out. It wasn’t as big a waste of time as I thought, because it turned up that awesome sign you see above. It got me to expecting some really crazy ass, Little Shop of Horrors style plants, but nah- just regular orchids.

I’m done now.