3 posts tagged “canberra”

Monday (couldn't resist, went back for pancakes). Today we went to register at the Belgian Embassy. It only took like 3 minutes, they didn't check our passport or anything. That was that then.

We drove out to Red Hill lookout, which... looks out over Canberra. On we went to the Deep Space Center a bit out of Canberra, a big dish which relays radio signals for NASA and their astronauts. The scenery we drove through was pretty barren. A few years back a bushfire destroyed lots of a forest here, including a koala sanctuary. But the dish center was imposing, although the little touristy space history museum was a bit small and disappointing (having visited the space center in Florida).  But I guess they don't want to spend too much on tourist infrastructure, keep it focused on what they are supposed to do there.
After a quick lunch, we were on our way back to Sydney. We read about this little ghost town, about 15 Km from the highway. We had some spare time so we decided to look for it. Hmmm. We got into a hidden valley for sure, but the village itself was closed and only accessible through a private tour. Our guidebook forgot to mention that. So we drove a 30Km roundtrip for nothing. Next was this other village Berrima, which is an old settlers vilage with the oldest running hotel in Australia. Well, just had a quick stop over, had enough of the driving.
Or at least I thought. We were getting close to Sydney, at around 4PM. So we thought we could pass by Ikea, before heading home. Bad idea. We were in the middle of the evening traffic, I hadn't driven to Ikea before, don't have a GPS,... In the end we got close, I'm pretty sure, but at 5:30  we still didn't arrive there, so decided to follow the Sydney skyline home. 
A nice weekend away from home.

Sunday. We didn't have breakfast in the hotel, but opted for a full-on pancake breakfast at The Pancake Parlour. Really nice (but not too healthy).

After pancakes, our first stop was the National Museum, walking through the city center, towards the university. Canberra is a purpose build town, which shows. It is probably practicle, but it lacks a soul. It has plenty of green, and some nice sculptures scattered throughout.

The National Museum is a must do (when in Canberra)! It has different sections on Australian life, art, culture and the likes, the building itself is interesting too, with lots of corners, curves and colours. Fab! It was noon soon. We wanted to do the botanical garden, but we were running out of time. We still needed to go to the Parliament House on the other side of the lake (Canberra has a man-made lake), which is quite a walk.

 

On the way down there we passed the embassy neighbourhood, which has some interesting buildings, like the polynesian embassy.
You can't miss the Parliament building, it's the icon of Canberra. I had imagined it differently though, especially the grass (I thought it would be bigger).

After a quick tour inside, we went down to the Old Parliament house and that neighbourhood there, with the National Library, Court etc. We notices two spidermen, people climbing the wall of the library (not really climbing...), first time I saw people do that as a sport (i guess they miss some facilities here?) ...

Canberra isn't really a touristy city, though it was Sunday. There isn't much to grab a bite, there weren't a lot of people around (I guess one influences the other). If you're on a tour around Australia, you can easily skip Canberra. If you live here, you should at least visit once, to know your capitol. In the evening we had dinner in the Banana Leaf Restaurant, first time we ate Indonesian/Malay, pretty good actually.

We went down to Canberra this weekend. As we needed to register at the Belgian consulate there, we decided to make it a weekend trip, because it is the capital of Australia.
It's about 300 Km to Canberra, but on the way down we decided to take the scenic route. Unfortunately the weather wasn't too dandy, but that didn't stop us. We passed Mt Gibraltar which supposed to have a nice view , drove to Morton National Park for the waterfalls. So we drove on to the Hindmarsh lookout (same there), and then we passed this cool (because of the misty, rainy weather) little graveyard.

                            We then headed towards the Fitzroy Reservoir, kinda got lost, but ended up on the other side of the reservoir anyway. The reservoir looked really pretty because of the weather though. So, although we did miss some lookouts and waterfalls, we did get some nice misty shots. We then went to the Fitzroy Falls, and hanged out a couple of minutes there. The scenery changed constantly with the clouds passing through, really nice actually.

Next was a small detour through Coulburn to see the Big Merino ram... and then continue straight on to Canberra. The rain turned into sunshine. We passed Rowes Lagoon and Lake George and here the drought was really noticeable. Both the lagoon and (pretty big) lake were bone dry. We got to Canberra in the early evening.

When we checked into the hotel, we learned we got a room upgrade, courtesy of Radzsters boss. Nice surprise. Before it went dark we decided to go for a short walk to get our baring and our first glimpses of the Parliament house. Warning though, in spring you might encounter swooping birds, like we did, probably defending their nests, hidden in the grass. We looked for something to eat but in the end decided to do room-service (a too expensive, small tagliatelle pesto).

This was Satruday.