Nick’s world tour

The first bus journey went well, though it wasn’t helped by being incredibly tired from a late night. I arrived late afternoon in Canberra and there was a hint of sunlight. Just a bit, though still a cold wind. I checked into a rather brand sparking new hostel in the centre and went for a wander.

First impressions are that it’s a very quiet, spread out and green capital city. Both Sydney and Melbourne wanted to be capital, so they built a new city in between them, set in the hills and designed by Burley Griffin. It’s a tidy if somewhat soulless city, and with a population of 300,000 it seems that someone forget to tell people to move in.

The city is laid out around a huge lake with the parliament zone on one side and the other 7 suburbs heading out to the other. I hired a bike and rode around the lake to see the sights, including both the old and new parliament houses, the latter looking like a spaceship has landed on the hill, most of it being underground linked by 1000s of metres of corridors. There’s the national museum which was very well done and aims to answer the question, “what does it mean to be Australian?” (After 5 hours of wandering round, I am still none the wiser!). There’s an art gallery which was considerably less impressive. Still it’s all free. The ride round the lake itself is about 40km and takes in the city and nature reserves.

After a couple of nights, I take the overnight bus down into Victoria, next stop being Melbourne…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.