The Mighty Mighty Canberra

Another country and another capital city. This time, it was Australia, and the capital city was Canberra. We knew that we would be visiting the Parliament Buildings and……that was all we knew. Apparently there was a huge flower show in town, hence why Simon had been unable to get a room at the YHA with us. With not much else on the agenda we started walking down towards the river, across which lay the Parliament Buildings.

As we neared the river we fell in with a crowd that seemed to be heading towards a bonsai garden. With nothing much else to do we followed them, and ended up in the flower show enclosure. It was free to get in (always good) and we even got a free Canberra Times newspaper, which I never got round to reading. There was the usual stuff that you would expect from a flower show, with lots of families and push-chairs, etc. We didn’t spend long in there – I was on the verge of a raging cold, and the pollen from the flowers was only going to exacerbate things with my hayfever.

We continued our walk down and across the river, stopping a while to investigate a Captain Cook Memorial. The weather had cleared up nicely and we were treated to a lovely bit of sunshine as we walked through the park areas. We were also treated to the sight of a kangaroo jumping out of the bushes to the left of us and bounding across the path right in front of us. We tried to find it in the bushes but it had skipped on out the other side. It really hit home that we were touring Australia and that iconic image was just fantastic. Soon after that we arrived at the Old Parliamentary building, and decided to see the new one before exploring the other area behind the old one. We made our way up to the New Parliamentary building and poked our heads inside. We had to go through security checks to get in and once inside we spent our time wandering through the plush surroundings and reading all about Australian democracy . We even got inside the central chamber where they were debating some kind of amendment to a dentistry bill or something. I would post a picture but we weren’t allowed cameras inside.

The New Parliamentary Building

 After lunch we wandered down to the Old Parliamentary building again and had a look around. The outside. We would have had to pay $2 to get inside, so we went elsewhere. We walked down to the river and through the sculpture park and across the river again. The next thing we hit was the American-Australian Memorial; a thank you from the Australians for the help that the US gave in the Pacific conflict. After that there was one more item to see, which was the Australian War Memorial. It seemed just down the road but took an age to get there. And when we did it was much more than we expected. It was essentially a museum for the World Wars and there was room after room after room of pieces of history and art. It took us a long time to go through everything and we didn’t even get to the end as they shut at 5pm and we were ushered out to the Reflecting Pool for the closing ceremony. By the time it had all finished it was getting late and we got back to the hostel, grabbed a bite to eat and settled in upstairs to wait for the bus.

Angel of the North/Canberra

We endured a couple of hours of kids going crazy on the floors below, thankfully they weren’t on the third floor too! Once they had gone to bed we were free to carry on relaxing and waiting for half 10 before we set off for the bus station. The short trek to the station shouldn’t have taken long but as we missed the turning for it, as it was dark and pouring with rain, we were there later than expected. Not a problem though, for we were still there early and got onto the unusually busy bus and took our seats. For only the second time in Australia me and James were having to have one seat each, but at least we had got two together, and went through our usual routines before trying to get off to sleep.