Canberra

March 15th/16th - Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT), Australia

The drive between Melbourne and Sydney was epic - ~ 2-3 day drive, so we decided to break it up by going via Canberra. We spent one night in a little town called Eden, which was pretty uneventful, then continued inland towards Canberra where we stayed just outside (in a town called Queanbeyan) with a lady we found on AirBnB. She had lived all over Australia and had loads of stories to tell us about the country.

We arrived around lunchtime and so had just the afternoon in Canberra, but soon discovered this was more than enough time!! It is a city that was built for the sole purpose of being the administrative capital so there are lots of government buildings and not a lot else. It was also designed from scratch for that purpose so lacks quite a bit of character. There are two islands - one with all the government buildings with the parliament building in the middle, and the other with shops and restaurants, etc and with the Anzac memorial in the middle, and these are joined by a bridge and mall; the roads are all designed in concentric circles around these two centres. In addition, we were there on a Sunday and it turns out that lots of government workers fly in for the working week and then fly out again at weekends, so it was pretty dead.

We parked the campervan and first checked out the parliament building:

The view from parliament looking back towards the other end of town with the Anzac memorial at the end

We then headed across the bridge to the other end of town and went a a museum about Canberra - it explained how the site was chosen and how the city grew. After this drove up to the Anzac war memorial and got there just before 5pm at which time (unknown to us) they had a ceremony and Last Post for the fallen Anzac soldiers. We weren't sure if this was a daily/weekly thing or if it was on because it was 2015 and there was a lot of Gallipoli 100th Anniversary things on in Australia while we were there, but it was very interesting to watch. A military official read some words, and then a soldier read a piece about one of the fallen soldiers at Gallipoli; people laid some wreaths and the Last Post was played.

Outside, around the monument, there were various memorials to different battalions and wars as well as some tanks and planes.

The view from the Anzac memorial looking back towards Parliament

The Anzac Memorial

The lady we were staying with had suggested we drive up a nearby hill that has good views of the whole city from the top. She said she went there quite often with a friend and really rated it. We drove all the way to the top of the hill but then found out that there was a tower there (a bit like the BT tower) but to go to the top you had to pay. Neither of us was particularly fussed but we couldn't get very good views from the base of the tower, so we headed down a bit to a lookout. There was a car park that was pretty deserted apart from about 5 cars dotted around it. As we got out we thought it was strange that all these cars had men sat in them on their own, but in our innocent minds we thought they were waiting for their wives or whoever they were with to take pictures before leaving. We got a couple of decent pics but the lookouts weren't very good. As we headed back to our campervan we kept thinking it was very strange these men were all there on their own just sitting; we couldn't see anyone else that might be with them. At this point Mike jokingly brought up the suggestion that it was a gay cruising area. We laughed about it but as we were nearly at our van, two men came out of the bushes and headed back to separate cars!!! It was then our suspicions were confirmed and we made a hasty getaway!!! When we got back we googled it and apparently it is a gay cruising zone. We chose not to let our host know about this and instead told her it was really good!!! It was very funny....

View from the hill of Canberra

You can see the bridge connecting the two ends of town

That night we had a lovely dinner with our host. We set off early the next day for Sydney.