Australia - Canberra

Canberra was established in 1911 to create a national capital for the newly federated country of Australia. The task was awarded to master designer Walter Burley Griffin a Chicago architect who won an international design competition. The city certainly has a very planned feel to it, everything is very well laid out and green. The city is arranged around Lake Burley Griffin an enormous man-made lake featuring the Captain Cook Memorial Water Jet. Canberra doesn't appear to feature too heavily on the backpacker route and we soon discovered this was because old Walt forgot to include any form of nightlife!

Captain Cook Memorial - Lake Griffin

The cool thing about Canberra is that there is plenty of stuff to see and what's even better is that it is all funded by the government so its free. We ended up staying in a pretty awful hostel so we figured it was best to spend as little time as possible there. On your first day we went to the National Museum of Australia on the north side of Lake Griffin which detailed how the city was planned and built. It featured a pretty cool model of the whole city complete with commentary and flashing lights.

Next we hit the National Gallery where we had an hour long guided tour by an art expert. I have never been much of an art lover but this guide was awesome. She explained in a very "arty" fashion all about various paintings and what the artist was trying to convey. I just thought a painting was a painting but soon we were all openly discussing each brushstroke - scary. Things got even scarier when I got told off for touching this well old painting from the 1800, I mean it's not as if I was going to smudge it!

National Gallery - Art anyone?

We were on a cultural role (well there is nothing else to do in Canberra) so we headed over to Parliament House. After another brief tour we were able to go in and watch a session in progress. It was abit disappointing actually, i'd heard Australian politics can get pretty fizzy a times but there wasn't so much as a brief scuffle. Having said that it was actually pretty interesting to see how it all worked and building itself was seriously impressive.

We hired bikes on our second day as you have to walk for miles to get anywhere in Canberra, even by our standards it was abit much. We spent the morning at the National War Memorial resisting the urge for a 2 hour tour this time. Then we cycled over to check out the Prime Ministers gaff but you couldn't see anything apart from a big set of gates. We loitered for a while hoping this might provoke some action but no such luck. After a brief trip looking at all the different embassies we retreated, a little exhausted to the park to chill.

National War Memorial

I'm glad we checked out Canberra, I did learn a fair bit about Aussie politics, Aussie War, Aussie architecture and Aussie art - this travelling lark isn't all about chilling on beaches drinking goon you know!

Now get me to the pub...

Our next stop - Melbourne