Canberra

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Canberra


The capital city of Australia. The city is still expanding - they are putting in a tram service at the moment, when they drew up the plans for this city, the planned for the future as well. The changes they are making now to the city still use the original plans. Because of this the city is very circular. The main point of the city is Parliament House. This stands in the middle and the city moves out around it. Driving around Canberra isn’t too bad. There are a lot of big roundabouts, you just have to know which exit is yours else you could start to get dizzy.


We hadn’t really heard much about Canberra, most other backpackers/travellers we had met had not been or planning to go. We thought as it was the capital we had to go, and we were pleasantly surprised.


We arrived Thursday afternoon and spend time at the Information centre then the evening planning out our days in Canberra, we worked out what we were going to do and when we were going to do it. We would be leaving roughly lunch time Tuesday, five days’ time. We aren’t really art people so knew we didn’t want to go to art museums. With our plan sorted we headed to a free camping spot close to the city.


Out first full day in the city started by going to the Film and Sound Archive. It wasn’t what we thought it would be. We watched a German movie made in 1926 made from Chinese Shadow Puppets about a Prince and Aladdin. It was an interesting film, but it is definitely somewhere I would not recommend, and we were both very glad entrance was free. We then spent the afternoon at the library. We had planned to go to a local night market however once we got there we found out it had been cancelled due to poor attendance in recent weeks. We found an Ikea and ended the night with Swedish meat balls.

Australia can be very hot, and we wanted to know if we could bake cookies using just the sun. We had bought a cookie mix and made it that morning leaving the cookies in the van on a plate wrapped in tin foil to reflect the sun. The plan was to leave them in the window, so the sun would be on them while we went on with our day. However, when we got to Questacon we found the carpark was shut and we had to use the one next door which was underground. Questacon was amazing. It is Canberra’s interactive science museum. There are seven rooms all with different interactive aspects of science. We arrived at around 11am and didn’t leave until they kicked us out at 5pm, we also did not complete the whole place. We watched two science shows and managed to do four rooms. Luckily, we had bought a ticket that allowed us to go to three local attractions and then go to one again. The room’s we managed to do were about light and colour, space, earth and one was a place with games in and a 6-foot free fall slide. The Earth room had an earthquake stimulator where using building bricks you could make a tower then see if it would survive the earthquake – ours did not. After leaving we head to the top of Mount Ainslie a hill just outside Canberra that has amazing views of the city. We stay up there and have an amazing view of the fighter jets air display. We tried a cookie, but they weren’t very cooked.
The next day is where our plan went wrong. We planned to go to a local market then to a crazy golf we had tickets for. That all worked out and we did both of those things. However, at the market we entered an art gallery opening where we met a lovely older couple who invited us to stay with them for a while, so we could shower, clean clothes and spend some time in a house. We agreed and spent the next three days alone in their house, relaxing, showering, washing clothes etc. Recharging out batteries was great, but we had planned to leave Tuesday but on Thursday we decided to carry on with our plans for Canberra. We headed to the

Sport Centre where we got out own personal guided tour. We started in an interactive room where we got to do a wheelchair race, play basketball, football, ski, cycle and win a gold medal. After playing in there we started the tour. We were shown the different area’s that the Australian Team practice in. We were lucky enough to see the Men’s Gymnastics’ team practicing their whole routine for the Commonwealth Games.


The next day was a very early start, we joined the couple for breakfast at a local café and then we went to Cockington. Cockington is an attraction with mini buildings. A lot of them were English which being British was nice to see. They had a replica of a local village near to where I am from – Lynton and Lynmouth Tram. After looking around we were heading back to Questacon by 10:45am. It was a really early start. When we arrived at Questacon we started where we had left off in the building room. We made domino’s, but both of our attempts failed, we made shadow puppets and played with them. We then head to the play room again. We play table hockey against a robot, see how fast we can throw a ball, play four people table hockey and do the slide again – twice. We head to the last room which is a water room. After playing with the attractions there, we head outside and play on a giant xylophone then talk to each other using giant dishes. The couple we are staying with pick us up and we head back to their house. We spend the afternoon chilling.
Four days after we planned to leave we say goodbye to the couple and Canberra and head on our way.
We then head towards Jervis Bay and spend the night in a campsite/layby close by.

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