Part 2 - Canberra
March 9 - 10, 2005
Wednesday, March 9th: Sydney to Canberra
We checked out of the hotel in Sydney bright and early to begin a leisurely drive to Canberra, the Australian capital city. We naturally didn't make it out of Sydney quite the way we'd planned, because we missed a turn or a split in the road or something, but we eventually found our way onto the road we wanted without too much trouble. We made our way south until we came to the Royal National Park, where we stopped to have a look around. We walked on a short nature trail to a scenic vista overlooking the Hacking River. Then we went back to the car and continued to drive the twisty road through the forests of Royal National Park, eventually emerging onto a coastal highway. We continued along the coast until road construction forced us inland, but the change in route ended up being pretty rewarding. We saw some of the most gorgeous scenery of the entire trip (which, of course, I didn't take pictures of because there was no good place to stop), with lush, thick, green grass growing in pastures at the foothills of green mountains, shrouded with a light fog, with very ominous looking clouds blowing off the ocean overhead. Those fields were one of my favorite parts of the country that we saw.
We eventually made our way up and through a mountain pass, and the flora changed rather quickly from lush rainforest to dryer grassland populated mostly by sheep. We stopped for a snack at a freeway rest area and watched a bunch of sheep in an adjacent pasture go about their business for a while, then headed on toward Canberra. Along the way, we passed one of the more intriguing sites of the drive, a large, flat grassland that we eventually identified as Lake George. Apparently the lake is usually full, and active with sailboats, but since the area has been in a severe drought, the lake has been bone dry for a few years and farmers have started using it as pasture. Apparently there are lot of urban legends surrounding the lake, as well, but information is a little bit sparse on the web.
We arrived in Canberra and located our hotel, a Best Western that was the hotel we were least confident about when we were booking rooms for the trip. It turned out to be one of the nicer, cooler places we stayed. It was sort of like a campground with fully furnished cabin-like apartments. Our room had a reasonable kitchen, a large bedroom and bathroom, and a fairly comfortable kitchen table and chairs. The only real annoyance (one that would recur at various hotels on the trip) was the power saving system in place - you had to stick the key ring into a special slot on the wall to activate the power in the room. That means that you couldn't leave the air conditioning on while you were out of the room. Luckily, the weather was generally pretty comfortable, so it wasn't a problem. In the mornings, it was nice to open the sliding glass door and leave the screen closed, and open the curtains, though my efforts were often thwarted by Julie's near-fanatical obsession with keeping things closed and locked. Most of the other guests seemed to be part of some sort of youth camp, so there were a lot of kids running around, but they were generally not a nuisance. The back part of the property was some sort of permanent community with a lot of little houses belonging to older people. There were a lot of bird feeders and fruit trees, so the grounds were nicely populated with various types of tropical birds, peacocks, and some crazy-sounding kookaburras (their calls sound like they're laughing).
Canberra (at least the parts we spent our time in, mostly around the government buildings) was absolutely DESERTED, which was a little odd, but a welcome change from the crowds in Sydney. I assume that Parliament was not in session - that would explain the lack of activity in the area. We drove to Capital Hill and walked around the Parliament lawn, where we saw the New Parliament House and the Old Parliament House, Lake Burley Griffin, and the Telstra Tower, a telecommunications tower and observation deck. We also saw a gorgeous sunset.
To end the evening, we drove up to the Telstra Tower and went up to the observation deck for some nice (if incredibly windy) views of Canberra and the starry night sky, and then we returned to the hotel for the night.
Thursday, March 10th: Canberra
This was our one full day in Canberra, and we wanted to try to hit as many things as we could, so we rose bright and early and got to the National Zoo and Aquarium about the time they opened. The zoo was maybe a little bit disappointing after seeing, like, the San Diego Zoo and the Bronx Zoo and some other really good ones - it was a little bit on the small side. But it was nice, and we saw some cool stuff. When we first got there, one of their bears was standing up on his rear legs with his paws up on the viewing glass. It would have made a great picture, but he wandered off before either of us got our cameras out to take the picture. I did get a nice picture of a tiger (which was one of the best photos I took on the whole trip, I think) and some lions. I like the photo of wallabies, who look like they were up to something and we caught them. The wombat was adorable, if somewhat uncooperative photographically. The zoo had a pretty cool area where you were in a fence with emus and kangaroos wandering free - I guess they don't mess with people. The emus were more sociable than the kangaroos, apparently. There wasn't much to the aquarium, but I think this giant blue fish (his head was like a foot or more from top to bottom) had a crush on me.
Next we headed over to the National Botanic Gardens. These gardens were a bit more structured than the ones in Sydney, but were still pretty informal - just a bunch of plants you could wander through. There was a nice view of the Telstra Tower from the gardens. They had a small greenhouse with some pretty orchids and stuff. And like most parks we went to, there was a wedding rehearsal going on, and we walked through the middle of it. (It was pretty informal, just some people with a boom box timing their walk through the gardens.)
Next up, the Australian War Memorial. This was one of the best museum-type things I've ever been into. They had lots (I mean LOTS - the place was huge inside) of cool stuff. Unfortunately, my attention span is pretty short, especially when I'm tired of standing and strolling, so I didn't get as much out of it as I might have, but it was very cool. I particularly liked the warehouse-like area where they had full size planes and tanks and stuff. I also liked the really super hot elementary school teacher we saw with a group of students. None of my elementary school teachers were hot 22 year olds. It was blisteringly hot outside, but we braved the heat and walked down the mall area and back to look at the various memorial statues, most of which really weren't all that interesting.
By the time we returned, we were hot and tired and most all of the museums and things had closed, so we stopped by a kind of shopping mall on the way home. We went into a few of these kinds of malls - they're kind of odd. They aren't like our malls, they're more like enclosed strip malls, usually with a Wal-Mart (Big W or something like that), a smallish Target, a Woolworth's (it's a grocery chain over there), and random smaller stores ranging from book stores to butcher shops to dollar stores and the like. They're hard to explain, but I've never seen anything quite like them over here. We then returned to the hotel and, I think, did our laundry for the first time.
It's not really feasible to pack enough clothes for 3 weeks, especially when you have to pack a wide variety of clothes for really hot, somewhat cool, somewhat dressy, and other conditions. So, we had to do laundry a few times, and nearly every time it was a fiasco. In Canberra, the facilities were good but the dryer wouldn't dry even after two cycles. In Melbourne, there was a washer and dryer in the room, but the washer was "modern" and took like 2 hours to do a load, so we were up washing until like 2 AM to do TWO LOADS. In Perth, the hotel had a free guest laundry, but the dryer wasn't vented, so you had to empty the water yourself, and it took HOURS to dry the clothes. (Actually, I crashed - I think Julie finished up the last load, though I may have woken up to fold when they were done.) Finally, in Alice Springs, it all came together - nice facilities in the hotel that weren't terribly expensive, and the washers and the dryers were both quick and effective.