So we picked Canberra as our first road trip destination - not the most exciting place, but how can we not visit Australia's capital!
Canberra is about 2.5 hours drive South of Sydney. It is a city and a state of its own. My first comment about this place: "Is this it?". Yes, this is it - small city, and potentially the smallest National capital we've seen.
Being the national capital, one can imagine it's got the most Government funding on city development. This is a "planned city", meaning all the developments are planned from its inception. This is unusual in Australia. It is not hard to tell just by comparing the city layout to Sydney, Canberra is obviously more organized. The City is clean and all the structures are contemporary in design and nicely maintained.
On our way to Sydney, guess what there are the most on the highway? Yes, it's Australia's most famous animals - KANGAROOS - dead ones! Glad that I didn't see any, I didn't want to see dead kangaroos before I saw any alive ones. Carlos said they are pretty gross! I can imagine that. Our landlord said to us that kangaroos tend
to run towards the light during night time, which explains the dead kangaroos along the highway. I was so scared the whole time that we would crash into one as we did not have sufficient loss and damage insurance on the rented car!! XD
Anyway, it's already late afternoon by the time we arrived at Canberra. We started out with all the usual tourist attractions - the Parliament House, Mt. Ainslie lookout. The City is surrounded by big, BIG grass fields full of cows, sheep and may be kangaroos too (can't see, too far away), so big that we cannot even see the end, beautiful!
The next day, we continued with the popular tourist attractions such as National Capital Exhibition, The Old Bus Depot Market. After lunch, we drove to the Black Mountain Reserve Park, approximately 45 minutes drive from the City. We saw kangaroos, koala (just one, after 1 hour of walk in the "Koala path"), and lots of colorful birds.
After one weekend of fun, gotta go back to the reality - job hunting!
Black Mtn Reserve Park Hard to tell from the picture, but these birds are huge - about three times my width when they open up their wings